Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cows fart methane even if they are just fed for milk. I'd rather have cow from milk than a synthetic substitute.
You can also have milk from plants.
I'd call that juice, not milk.
Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
131–140 of 152 posts
Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
#132Does that require the cows to be entirely fed on the seaweed or does it work as part of a mixture? Edit: found the paper: https://sci-hub.ac/10.1071/AN15576 According to figure 2 it looks like 2-10% of the feed is sufficient to achieve near-total methane reduction and <5% does not negatively affect digestibility, so 2-5% is the sweet spot.
the abstract also says they didn't test it in vivo
Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ter…
I think you've got some homework to do on the etymology of those terms. They were pretty intentionally used here.
Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pa…
The point was that many species of algae already produce and release it. Using some of them as feed does not introduce additional emission sources, unlike artificial production would.
Slow release in the cow might help to smooth out the dose so it inhibits methane generation throughout the whole digestion time. But that part is entirely speculation on my part. Something has to make this particular alga better than the others tested.
Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Those are the kind of "up market" consumers you want to target new expensive products to. Eventually they'll trickle down to other people when they realize it'll save them money (after economies of scale have been reached, R&D expenses paid off, etc). For example fake meat products right now is being targeted to "elite" coastal types. But once this stuff is really good, and really cheap it might disrupt traditional m…
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Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
#136Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
#137That guy 'Billy Scientist' strikes again, taking all the credit for the work of Joe Dorgan and Rob Kinley
Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP here. Your assuming I'd stay in tech to arbitrage the wage gap to give altruistically. You discount that maybe working in tech isn't what makes me happy (disclaimer: I like my current gig because of the people I get to work with, but nothing is forever), farming seaweed from my 41 foot catamaran (now depreciable as a business expense if commercially farming seaweed) might make me happier after working in tech for…
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…
Question : what kind of altruist can I be if don't make "six figures in tech" ?
Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
#139You can feed your goats 100 dollar bills and increase your goat production, but this plan have some gaps.
What the article forgets to mention is that seaweed is a product valued in millions of dollars. And they create fragile ecosystems also that support a lot of juvenile fish, octopus and shellfish; wich are also expensive products. The delicious sea urchins depend entirely of seaweeds for example. On the other side, Asparagopsis taxiformis is an australian invasive species; so the idea of harvest it cuts both ways. Could be good (erradicate) or a big mistake (propagate even more).
And you need to develop a selective extracion method. If you use all seaweeds to feed cattle, inland cows will have a fartastic life, but a lot of fishermen living in small coastal villages with poor soils will lost their jobs.
Or maybe to synthetize the seaweed metabolites. Its life cycle is complicated. They are two different algae packed in one single species (Asparagopsis taxiformis and Falkenbergia hillebrandii). This is a problem if we want to culture it. We'll need to understand the delicate interactions and chemistry of the poisons of this plants and grant that no bad collateral effects will appear; i.e. Kill the intestinal flora that the cattle needs. Do you want to know another thing that could emit lots of metane? microscopic algae blooming after macroscopic algae vanished (and maybe a bunch of dead macroscopic algae drying at the sun?).
Re: Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
#140Earlier 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.
It's similar, but not quite the same. The above creates an incentive for people to collect bottles, but not an incentive for retailers to encourage bottle returns, which results in experiences for consumers that often makes it seem like it's not worth it. E.g. if you're forced to bring your bottles to a recycling centre instead of to the grocery store you're headed anyway, it's a lot less likely to happen.
Getting the incentives right across the whole chain is important.
E.g. I can't rememember ever seeing an automated bottle return machine like these [1] [2] in a US grocery store. It's been a few years, so it may have gotten more widespread, and I know some states have had return laws that have been more effective, so I'm sure it depends on location. In Norway the norm is for most grocery stores and shopping centres with any stores that sell bottles to have those.
Part of the reason is that in Norway, if people don't return bottles, the cost for retailers and distributors go up (or more precisely, their tax does not go down) by more than the cost of the recycling, so it's not just consumers that are incentivised, but retailers and distributors too, with the result that there's a massive infrastructure targeted at making it easy to return (and as a result one of the largest manufacturers wordwide of automated return solutions is Norwegian as well).
I currently live in the UK, which is much worse than the US when it comes to bottle rturns, and really wish the above solution would become more widespread.