by Justice William W. Bedsworth

Here’s what it said in my newspaper: New Zealand to Tax Cow Burps to Fight Climate Change.

That’s what it said. Go back and read it again. I want you to enjoy it fully because . . . frankly . . . I’m gonna have a hard time topping that.

I’ve been trying to write humor to fill this space—and a few others—for over forty years. Every so often, they lower the bar to the point where it’s indistinguishable from a speed bump, and I win an award for my attempts. But I can’t match that.

I mean, you see that headline, you know the story’s gonna be a source of amusement. It’s a sure thing. I, on the other hand, am not.

And if you’ve been judging my efforts by my ability to amuse you, you’ve been using the wrong standard. As it says at the end of every column—quite accurately—I write this column to get it out of my system.

Whether you’ve been entertained or not, at least you haven’t had to deal with attempts at humor in my appellate opinions. You’ve never had to read, “Your eight-million-dollar judgment is reversed, but did you hear the one about the nun and the parrot and the sailor?” Cow burps have never shown up in one of my opinions, published or unpublished.

I mention this now because this seems like an appropriate time to whine about how difficult it is to do humor these days. Not only does every new joke show up on the internet before the laughter from the original telling dies out, not only can we all YouTube George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Sarah Silverman any time we want so why would we need anybody else . . . now the Associated Press and CNN are making us laugh. There’s just too much competition out there.

So what did my competition come up with this time? What did my newspaper mean when it said New Zealand was going to tax cow burps? It meant New Zealand is going to tax cow burps.

This is a big deal in New Zealand. New Zealand has five million people and ten million cows. These cows burp. They also poop. And they pee. New Zealand proposes to tax all three of those functions because all three of them contribute to the nation’s methane levels.

They estimate that the combination of these cow . . . er . . . emissions . . . represents 50% of the methane generated in New Zealand. And since they’re fully committed to reducing methane to fight climate change, they’re determined to do something about that.¹ They’re gonna start with cow burps.

I applaud their efforts. I’m a guy who has plastic buckets in his showers so as not to waste water while it’s heating up. We haven’t had a gasoline-powered car in our garage for decades. I’m pretty green. But I’m a little skeptical about New Zealand’s tax plan.

It’s not their first effort. They’ve tried other approaches. They have scientists working to create a . . . well, for lack of a better term, a fart vaccine. And they have other scientists working to come up with clover and bluegrass that are more easily digestible for the cows.

Good for them. Godspeed.

But burp-taxing? Burp-taxing just seems a little problematic to me.

The sine qua non of taxation is measurement. The State Franchise Board and the IRS and the State Bar and the California Judges Association and the Loyal Order of Raccoons and everybody else who wants to levy on my assets has to have some way to measure them. They have to establish a baseline upon which to impose the tax.

That’s fine where the baseline is money or property or years of practice. But it gets a little trickier when the baseline is how many times a cow burps.

Clearly they’ll need umpires for this task. This will be a godsend for the economy. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Kiwis will have to be hired and deputized as cow burp umpires.

It will be their job to go from field to field counting the number of burps. And maybe the duration.² Obviously, we can’t do this like Major League Baseball and assign a crew of four to every field. Too many cows, not enough time. We’ll need a TSA-level bureaucracy and labor force.

We’ll send these folks out, have them follow each cow around for awhile—let’s say an hour—and get a baseline.³ I envision busloads of burp umps driving up to the farm. Convoys of buses.

My vision is less clear about the umps’ uniforms; I’m going back and forth between the striped shirts of the NBA, NHL, and NFL refs and the staid all-blues of MLB umpires. Either way, I want to incorporate the white, wide-brimmed hats worn by Australian Rules Football umpires.

I may also want to incorporate their white lab coats.⁴ Uniform is important. A Jesuit priest once explained to me that priests and judges wear black robes because it’s hard to argue with someone in a black robe. I thought it was a joke at the time, but apparently it comports with California’s experience.⁵

So these guys pile out of the buses in their lab coats and rubber boots⁶ and deploy at Mr. MacDonald’s farm. They whip out stopwatches and they time burps for an hour. Then they draw straws out of a white, wide-brimmed hat to determine who has to measure the bull burps. Short straw goes into the bullpen.⁷

Then we compute the tax. So many burps per hour X average duration X 24 X whatever percentage of the day cows eat X 365 X number of cows in herd X tax rate = HTA.⁸

HTA will, of course, be referred to as FHTA⁹ by all the farmers who have to pay it. Those folks are protesting all over New Zealand. One said farmers are going to sell their land and go elsewhere “so fast you won’t even hear the dogs barking in the back of the pickup truck as they drive away.”

Those who choose to stay will—presumably more slowly—drive to the HTAAB: the Herd Tax Assessment Review Board. I mean, we gotta have an instant replay booth, right? We can’t have all these umps in the field making calls without oversight.¹⁰

So we’re gonna need a whole new infrastructure here. I don’t know what New Zealand’s employment numbers are like right now, but burp taxing is gonna provide more new jobs than the dot-com boom.

And then, when they begin taxing cow farts and sheep burps (27 MILLION sheep!), well, people from all over the world will be moving to New Zealand because there will be so much work.

Hmmmm, maybe this isn’t such a bad idea, after all. Maybe Congress oughta be figuring out how many cows we got.

BEDS NOTES

1. They also have 26 million sheep in New Zealand. I’m trying not to make a “slippery slope” joke here, but it’s difficult. Even the Kiwis call the research facility where they’re working on solutions for their livestock problem “Gumboot Valley.” (We would call them “rubber boots” or “wellies.”)
2. I don’t really know that much about cow burps. My dad, who grew up picking cotton in West Texas, would be better equipped to write this column than I am, but hell, you’re used to reading things you think I was ill-equipped to write. Right?
3. So to speak.
4. Aussie football is wonderful. You can actually score points by “kicking a behind.” And the umpires in white lab coats? Priceless.
5. By law, California judges MUST wear a robe on the bench. Government Code Section 68110. And it must have long sleeves and extend below the knees. Uniform is important.
6. Perhaps the most important part of the uniform since these folks will literally be “working in the field.”
7. For the benefit of these poor souls, we may have to dispatch a workers' compensation referee, or at least a videographer, with each group. More jobs.
8. Herd Tax Assessment.
9. I’m betting you don’t need an explanation of the “F”.
10. Said the man who’s spent the last twenty-six years in the instant replay booth.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.