171–180 of 409 posts
This whole "if cows eat seaweed that'll vastly reduce their carbon footprint" is based on a single study with 12 cows.
If you take into consideration that especially small, never replicated studies often don't hold up to scrunity the next thing to do is not to ask how to produce the seaweed. The next reasonable step would be to try to replicate this study in a larger sample (and probably also with a larger variety of cow breeds).
There are many planet saving discoveries like these. There's also a catch, which is why the planet hasn't been saved yet. > “If we’re able to work out how to scale up the seaweed to such a level to that can feed all of the cows and the sheep and the goats around the world, then it’s going to have a huge impact on the climate; And there you go. That's the hard part that you cannot just hand-wave away. You also have to…
From an environmental perspective, it's easier to directly consume fruits, vegetables and nuts yourself, rather than have an animal do the same, then eat the animal. That doesn't address the human appetite for animal proteins, but there is beyond meat.
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8% for the sake of what amounts to a flavour in your mouth is pretty earth shattering. Consider: would you spend 8% of your entire financial budget on beef? On an income of $30K, say, you'd spend $2400 on beef, ignoring all other food and other expenses? I'd even flip it around - take a random person off the street, in the UK, say, and tell them you'll give them 2 grand a year to stop eating beef. How many people do…
>> you'll give them 2 grand a year to stop eating beef I think the vast majority of people would turn down your offer. There's too little enjoyment in life as it is. Life without steaks and beer is not worth living for most people.
But not water usage, land usage, suffering for sentient beings, transport of feed, waste of human food for feeding etc etc
My inner child was disappointed to learn that cow farts are not the major source of bovine methane emissions. But saying cow burps is stilly pretty funny. https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/33/which-is-a-bigger-methane-so...
There are many planet saving discoveries like these. There's also a catch, which is why the planet hasn't been saved yet. > “If we’re able to work out how to scale up the seaweed to such a level to that can feed all of the cows and the sheep and the goats around the world, then it’s going to have a huge impact on the climate; And there you go. That's the hard part that you cannot just hand-wave away. You also have to…
I would rather we focus on cutting down the rest of the 90% of emissions than the natural emissions which have been occurring since before the industrial revolution messed it up. There is a fine balance in nature and maybe cows are the wrong place to experiment.
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True that that's a non-trivial problem, but seaweed farming is actually something that we could massively scale up. With vertical farms, a ton (metaphorically speaking; more than that literally) of food can be grown in a small surface area of ocean. Would be much more efficient for feeding livestock than relying on farmland that could be growing human food. (Although as an aside I'm personally in favour of a decent a…
Why not have the herd on a surface barge and have an automated system pull seaweed up a conveyor belt to feed them? This would free up the land acreage for human use!
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It's easier to consume those things... until winter arrives. Unless you support the massively carbon intensive process of shipping ~80% of each hemisphere's food supply to the other during winter, this isn't viable. Even if that is acceptable, it isn't sustainable.
That's only because people insist on eating the same food all year. There are plenty of vegetables that grow and harvest in the colder months. If we ate summer vegetables in the summer and winter vegetables in the winter we wouldn't need to ship food around so much.