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Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
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Re: Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
#72Sure, but have you tasted the milk? It really tastes off.
Re: Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
#73Methane .... having an estimated lifetime of 8.9±0.6 years. (Wiki - Atmospheric_methane)
Currently Global Warming is doing good, it starts going bad in about 5 years, then I'm unsure how long it'll be before it gets back to normal... then we finally see the bad.
So reducinging at the moment is useless and by the time it's negative I can't see how we won't have lab grown meat, which solves actual issues like massive amounts of land being used to make meat .
Re: Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can anyone provide a sense of scale and impact if these results were to hold and if the majority of the world beef production were to switch to it? My understanding is that around half of the world's greenhouse gas comes from livestock. Would it mean that this could cut our emissions by half? Would it be therefore much more cost efficient to have the government invest is growing and distributing red algae than whatev…
> My understanding is that around half of the world's greenhouse gas comes from livestock That's not right. The highest number I've been able to find for the whole of agriculture is 24% of world greenhouse gas emissions. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss... About 25% of that is methane from livestock ( http://old.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/greenhouse-gas-emissi... ) So livestock is about 6…
Random Gaurdian story puts methane :
"Methane accounted for about 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2015, according to the IPCC." (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/29/methane-...)
Wikipedia puts (with some question about the citation) methan at 4-9% of total greenhouse effect contribution, and CO2 at 9-26%. (And then water vapor way above that, at 36-72%.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Greenhouse_gase...
Re: Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any immediate economic incentive to adding algae into feed? Wouldn't you agree that markets don't deal effectively with many or most commercial endeavors' unwanted side effects (negative externalities), and so authorities often need to step in when market failure causes damage? In this case, if the science is real, a global treaty would seem in order to simply mandate the effective use of seaweed in cow feed…
A carbon tax or cap and trade system would create such an economic incentive.
What's to discourage the cattle owner from claiming their cows produce no methane due to seaweed use & then collecting the cap and trade/carbon tax benefit while not bothering with the seaweed?
More broadly, how does cap and trade/carbon tax measure the footprint of a business in the first place? I've found no material on the subject but my guess is that they do it based on the power plant/fuel you're using & how much energy your using. Not sure how they measure gases as a byproduct of industrial processes but maybe that's minuscule?
Re: Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
#76As if we need more reasons to consume even more dead flesh...
Re: Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
#77It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because right now the West coast from San Francisco North to at least Fort Bragg, has been suffering a kelp die off of great proportions. No one is quite sure whats going on, but apparently due to climate change, or at least warmer ocean water from further South that we've had for the last 5 or more years, has caused the kelp to die off at a rapid rate, to the point o…
This is part of the opportunity cost of the current extreme political climate and economic situation. Though people would still not necessarily pay much attention.
Re: Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
#78Why don’t they just feed the bromoform compound responsible for the activity? Seems a lot easier than trucking seaweed all over the place.
Re: Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
#79Few stories make me as happy as this one did. Thank you OP. Hopefully in the future I can enjoy a beef-steak guilt-free! The cow methane problem is one that literally keeps me up at night. I kept thinking about my inevitable switch to chicken and missing out on a tenderloin.. and how my kids won't be able to eat like me.
People are also trying to make meat without animals, by culturing animal tissues outside of an animal. You can see on a number of previous HN threads on this topic that a lot of animal advocacy groups have been forming a consensus about supporting these. I don't think any limits have been established on their eventual "realism" or biological similarity to tissues grown inside an animal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w…
As that Wikipedia article mentions we would need a plant-based growth medium to get the meat to grow.
Today they are using fetal bovine serum as a growth medium, which is both expensive and it is a by-product from the dairy industry.
When a cow coming for slaughter is identified to be pregnant, the cow is slaughtered and bled, and the fetus is removed from the mother and brought into a blood collection facility. The fetus, which is kept alive alive during the following process to ensure blood quality, has a needle inserted into its beating heart. The blood is then drained until the fetus dies. The whole process takes about 5 minutes. The blood is then refined and filtered, and the resulting extract is fetal bovine serum.
Until we no longer extract fetuses, I can't see many animal advocacy groups being that positive about it.
Re: Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
#80Why don’t they just feed the bromoform compound responsible for the activity? Seems a lot easier than trucking seaweed all over the place.
ever heard of chloroform and its characteristics?