Is milk an unrecognised source of climate change?

I was watching Veer Sanghvi in a programme on “Travel and Living” the programme is about different foods of India, today he was speaking about India’s fetish for milk.

He guided me through a variety of facts – India was the largest producer of milk and yawn and yawn and yawn. I woke up when he began to meander through varieties of milk products – the zillions of sweets, clarified butter, cottage cheese, cheese, yoghurt and so on.

And then it hit me – milk can also be a cause of Climate Change.

No I am not talking about cows farting (http://www.danamania.com/temp/cow-fire.jpg), or about grasslands and all that. It’s all about the processes that milk and its products go through. It begins from pasteurisation, to the boiling of milk to make sweets to finally the process that makes the sugar.

If one were to calculate the number of sweet shops, the variety of sweets, Indians love for sweets and India’s population one would come to a climate change inducing amount of fuel used.

So what can be done to reduce the impacts of Indian sweet making on the climate? The first step for this industry would be to use jargons such as ‘energy efficiency’, ‘alternative fuels’ which every suresh, ganesh, ramesh is using. Maybe another thing to do immediately would be to reduce our consumption of milk. If we don’t do something now then we will have to do something more drastic like cutting on our sweet intake – but that may lead to Indians doing what they like best – burning things (buses, flags, effigies, people etc) which may be the last straw on the camel’s (pronounced climate) back.

Maybe it would be more palatable if everyone switched from incandescent bulbs to CFLs in the interim while the government creates a committee to study the impacts of milk on our climate.