THE 8th ANNUAL YEAR IN IDEAS; Eat Kangaroos To Fight Global Warming.

Of all the ideas developed to combat the climate crisis, George Wilson of Australian Wildlife Services may have the least intuitive: eating more kangaroos. In a paper published in June by the U.S.-based Society for Conservation Biology, however, he explains that 11 percent of Australia's total greenhouse-gas emissions come from the methane produced by the rumen of cattle and sheep. ''It's been long known that kangaroos don't produce methane,'' Wilson says, noting that kangaroos' stomachs have different microorganisms to ferment their food. ''I began to speculate, What if we managed the kangaroo population up and the cattle population down?'' Kangaroo is a specialty meat, gamy in taste, that is already available in some restaurants and many grocery stores in Australia. Wilson calculated that if by 2020 the kangaroo population was managed upward from its current 35 million to 175 million -- and if Australia could remove 36 million sheep and 7 million cattle from production -- the country would see a reduction of 16 megatons of greenhouse-gas emissions, 3 percent of its national total. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]