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Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

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Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

#121

Post by ars »

the8472 wrote: post #31
heisenbit wrote: post #28

If seaweed eliminates methane it likely will affect some gut bacteria more than others. We would not blindly swallow antibiotics affecting what is happening in our gut. There will be side effects one way or another - usually the more effect the more side effect. Seaweed is worth studying and has promise but I'm skeptical when it comes super food claims.

If i read it correctly the paper says the effect comes through bromoform contained in the algae, which inhibits the enzymes participating in the methane production. It's only fed in sub-toxic amounts to the cows I don't think it bio-accumulates, so the meat should be safe for consumption. in other words, it has nothing to do with antibiotics.

Bromine is not safe to eat, and it's eliminated very slowly, so it would accumulate in the cow.

I would not be comfortable eating products from a cow fed this without some careful safety studies first.

Otherwise you are potentially poisoning people in exchange for some methane reduction - that's not a good tradeoff.

Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

#122

Post by ars »

the8472 wrote: post #44
petra wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be better/cheaper just to make and feed the cows some bromoform ?

It's an ozone-depletant, so you want a natural source. And algae naturally soak it up from sea water, so you don't have to extract it from minerals or anything like that. Plus I assume that it being part of the plant matters slows its release.

> It's an ozone-depletant, so you want a natural source.

I read that line several times, and I can't figure out what one has to do with the other. The depletion effect doesn't change based on the source.

> And algae naturally soak it up from sea water, so you don't have to extract it from minerals or anything like that.

It's made from bromine, it's not a hard element to get a hold of.

> Plus I assume that it being part of the plant matters slows its release.

Slows the release in the cow, or after leaving the cow? Because we care only after leaving the cow, and at that point it has to have been released (in the cow) in order to function.

Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

#123

Post by woliveirajr »

tootie wrote: post #72
vidarh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add a default per-cow tax, and deduct from it for purchase of a seaweed feed, and make it bite sufficiently that it becomes substantially cheaper to include seaweed in the feed. This is how Norway encourages bottle recycling: There's no law mandating recycling of bottles, but there's a substantial tax on beverage containers that you get a reduction of in proportion to your return rate. This has resulted in a return r…

US does the same actually. $.05 tax on all bottles, $0.05 payment for recycling. It used to get people to recycle but now the penalty is too small to be worth it. On the flip side, rooting through garbage cans for recycling deposits is now a viable source of income for urban poor.

In Brazil it worked out in a similar fashion: poor people would seek for aluminum cans inside garbage and then sell it for recycling companies. So it was a cheap source of aluminum, companies would get enough profit to continue in business, and some people made a living out of it.

After some while, giving more marketing about "going green" and calculating that money was being throw at the garbage, some stores like restaurants and supermarkets began to collect those aluminum cans. Profit for then, recycling still being profitable to companies, poor people lost this income they have fomented.

Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

#124

Post by bmelton »

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #120
bmelton wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not who you were replying to, but he wasn't necessarily making an assumption. There is a philosophical theory named "effective altruism" which includes tenets such as cause prioritization, cost effectiveness and comparative wealth to (hopefully) allow the most good to be done the most efficiently. In amongst those tenets is the precept of comparative wealth, quoted here: > Many effective altruists believe that, a…

You assumed OP wanted to be an optimally efficient altruist - but this wasn't suggested anywhere. If you read his above reply he explains briefly why he is still in tech and elaborates a bit on his goals.

The only assumption that I made was that when erichocean said something that began with a social buzzword and ended parroting the theory that reflects the definition of that social buzzword, that he was referring to the actual theory defined as "effective altruism":

> effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming

Offtopic, but since when did contextual assumption become something people weren't supposed to do?

Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

#126

Post by hackuser »

kristopolous wrote: post #29
chillydawg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest producers are and will always be the mass market stuff, though. Who cares if 1% of beef is produced carbon neutral? It's nice, but it makes no tangible difference. Sadly this method of encouraging better behaviour won't work unless a costco or a mcdonalds, for some insane reason, wants to cut their profit margin and buy more expensive beef.

The worst move the environmental movement did is let the environmentally sensitive product be associated with consumption by a rich liberal urban elite. Until someone can fix this and disassociate ecological efficiency from the limousine liberal, these programs are unfortunately going to only be marginal. Minimizing environmental externalities can't be seen as optional. Lots of reasonable things increase cost - such…

> The worst move the environmental movement did is let the environmentally sensitive product be associated with consumption by a rich liberal urban elite.

I'm pretty sure this move was made by the 'anti-environmentalists', including big industry and those fighting the ideological war against 'liberalism'. They would have found a way to discredit it among their followers - if not this way, than another.

Even these terms are from their propaganda, but lots of people repeat them as if they have meaning and represent something real.

> rich liberal urban elite.

> limousine liberal

Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

#127

Post by hackuser »

kristopolous wrote: post #113
woah wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about environmental friendliness? Liberals. Who has the money to pay extra for environmentally friendly products? Well-to-do liberals. I don't really understand how you think things could have gone differently.

Many environmental things have left the left/right discourse such as not being exposed to nuclear radiation or reducing smog to lead to breathable air. Conservatives are unlikely to be OK with someone knowingly and intentionally exposing people to fatal levels of radiation in the way they are OK with adverse ecological systems. It needs to leave the intellectual space of optional or preferential discourse and enter t…

> Conservatives are unlikely to be OK with someone knowingly and intentionally exposing people to fatal levels of radiation in the way they are OK with adverse ecological systems.

I don't think that's true. They defended the cigarette industry, for example. They oppose laws and regulations protecting people in the workplace. They support and encourage law enforcement's abuse of the poor and minorities.

> It needs to leave the intellectual space of optional or preferential discourse and enter the one of rights and crimes.

That would help, but for many it's about ideology and greed and not about rational debate.

Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

#128

Post by kristopolous »

hackuser wrote: post #127
kristopolous wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many environmental things have left the left/right discourse such as not being exposed to nuclear radiation or reducing smog to lead to breathable air. Conservatives are unlikely to be OK with someone knowingly and intentionally exposing people to fatal levels of radiation in the way they are OK with adverse ecological systems. It needs to leave the intellectual space of optional or preferential discourse and enter t…

> Conservatives are unlikely to be OK with someone knowingly and intentionally exposing people to fatal levels of radiation in the way they are OK with adverse ecological systems. I don't think that's true. They defended the cigarette industry, for example. They oppose laws and regulations protecting people in the workplace. They support and encourage law enforcement's abuse of the poor and minorities. > It needs to…

There's arguably a distinction to be made between what self identified conservatives believe and the PR campaigns which seek to align themselves with conservatives and attempt to hoodwink those people into supporting.

For instance, if a beer commercial was jingoistic and patriotic, we'd probably agree that it was a marketing tactic and not necessarily the drinking choice of nationalists.

Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

#129

Post by dharma1 »

amelius wrote: post #79
TulliusCicero wrote: post #7

There probably isn't an incentive to reduce methane emissions for farmers right now though, right? We'd have to pass regulations mandating a reduction, or an emissions tax or something.

> There probably isn't an incentive to reduce methane emissions for farmers right now though I think we will be able to detect methane emissions on a large scale from space sometime soon, e.g. [1]. At that point, farmers can't escape the law in any way, and they will have an incentive to reduce emissions. [1] http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0615/NASA-detects-meth...

I emailed an atmospheric methane professor about the NASA paper a couple of months ago, asking if it could be used for tracking permafrost thawing related methane leaks (in Siberia etc), and got this back:

"Yes, there is a lot of work on finding methane emissions by satellite. This is good as a broad guide to spotting big emissions like the huge US leak: the real problem we have is in quantifying emissions at ground level from a wide range of much smaller sources, and in placing good accurate numbers on the fluxes.

Unfortunately, the emission is from the ground into the boundary layer, at the bottom of the atmosphere, while satellite observation sees through the total column. We use wind back-trajectory analysis to identify the source of the methane (running the weather backwards), but there have been bad examples in the past where the media latched onto claims of major methane anomalies seen from space (e.g. in the Arctic or in S America) and didn’t realise that the methane was in the mid-troposphere in air that had last been in contact with the ground many thousands of miles away.

What is needed is an integrated approach at all levels, using satellite observation, wind-tracking using chemical transport models, and careful ground measurement to identify sources."

Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions

#130

Post by veli_joza »

oska wrote: post #115
kctess5 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming there is a law. I think we can already detect methane well enough to know that cows make a lot of it. You don't want to make the law something they must "escape" from, but rather something they can profit from by not polluting. Like tax credits.

I disagree. I think we need to increasingly shift to pollution taxes because 1) physical pollution is hard to hide and 2) minimising pollution both improves the environment and maximises industrial efficiency.

This new result could push things along, because it provides the solution without lowering production. There would be less lobbying and backlash against such measures if the industry has clear way of dealing with them.
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