It’s not enough that poor and low-income Californians already face some of the nation’s highest housing, electricity, gasoline, and tax costs. Soon, thanks to the ever-diligent California Air Resources Board (CARB), they’re likely to face higher prices for one of the most basic foodstuffs, especially for children: milk.

That’s because CARB is targeting dairy cows’ flatulence as the next great front in its war against global warming. Because the methane in cow farts, though it stays in the air for only a comparatively short time, still contributes more per molecule than CO₂ to global warming, CARB wants California’s dairy farmers to “curb the natural gas emanating from dairy farms.”

How? As the Wall Street Journal reports, by purchasing “technology to capture methane and then sell the biogas to customers.” This would only be cost-effective with “substantial government subsidies and regulatory credits.”

Another way might be to genetically engineer cows, or the microbes that live in their guts, to produce less flatulence. (Where are the anti-GM Luddites when we need them?)

“If dairy farms in California were to manage manure in a way to further reduce methane emissions,” says CARB, “a gallon of California milk might be the least [greenhouse gas] intensive in the world.”

Perhaps. But as the Journal points out, whether farmers cut their cows’ emissions by methane capture and sale or by genetic engineering, the result might also be the world’s most expensive milk.

Frankly, because the reduction in global warming, and so likewise its benefits, would be infinitesimally small, but its harm to California’s poor significant, the policy doesn’t pass the smell test.