131–140 of 302 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only grass decomposed in an anaerobic environment would produce methane. Grass decomposed aerobically would produce CO2 instead.
But methane decomposes into CO2 on a relatively short timescale(12 years?) so surely....it's a wash?
A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission. You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral. By contr…
I’d like to add that much of the feed is grown using fertilizer, which is often/typically produced via fossil-fuel consuming processes (see Fischer Tropsch).
Where carbon is stored in the system is another major consideration.
Great post!
Is anything being done? Are algae or seaweed being added to the cow's food? If not, why not?
A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission. You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral. By contr…
Not eating cows or drinking cow milk reduces your carbon emissions from cows 100%. You actually don't need technology or a start up to solve this issue!
You do if you want it to scale to large numbers of people. Affordable lab-grown meat (when we have it) and intermediate solutions like the one in this article (if it's indeed viable) actually work for everybody. Even if we assume that veganism is an okay choice for one's health, trying to convince people to go vegan won't get you very far.
A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission. You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral. By contr…
Do you have a source for this? Wikipedia says there are an estimated 75 million ruminants worldwide, while there was a peak of 1 billion cows on Earth in 2014.
A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission. You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral. By contr…
> Since the methane released from cattle is continually degrading, it does not accumulate. That's like saying lakes are impossible because of rivers. If you look at historical methane concentrations in our atmosphere, they are already almost 3x of pre-industrial levels, and over 3x of mean historical levels over the past ~1 million years [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
Lakes don’t grow and grow and consume the world.
There is an incredibly important part of this that I feel everyone is missing. The grass eaten by the cows would produce exactly as much methane if it was just left to rot. It's not as if cows somehow produce methane out of grass that would otherwise just....turn into dust? None of those studies take this into account, they all just measure what comes into a cow and what comes out, but no one takes into account the a…
> None of those studies take this into account, they all just measure what comes into a cow and what comes out, but no one takes into account the amount of methane produced from the same feed even without cows involved. Nobody's missing anything. That feed wouldn't have been planted in the first place if it weren't for feeding the cows. And that would translate to less deforestation [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/…
Unless rainforests have an ever increasing layer of carbon (charcoal/coal) building up under them - which they do not - they stabilize with their total carbon intake being roughly the same as carbon released through other means. In most cases this happens (rate decreasing over time, though total carbon storage quantity slowly increases until a wildfire) in less than 100 years after a complete denudation event, most of it happening much sooner than that.
If you want to lock up carbon, you need to take it from the plants and sequester it somewhere natural forces (rot, weathering) won’t break it back down again - like a house, or in a cave, or in a hypoxic environment.
Methane is definitely a significantly more powerful forcing gas than co2, but also breaks down in the atmosphere in a short period of time into co2. Cow fart composition changes also only have a similar local, short term effect.
Short term effects can be helpful, but this only changes some parts of the (closed) cycle.
You only really change the math if you change how things are getting into or out of the overall cycle, which requires long term bonding of carbon to things such as rocks, or burial.
Converting atmospheric co2 (or methane) into plastic that gets buried in a landfill is net negative carbon balance for instance. Making the plastic out of oil products and then putting it in a landfill - net neutral (minus processing energy costs). Burning it for fuel? Contributes fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
This is like improving ICEs to enable their continued existence. To what end? How about eliminating meat ag altogether since it's a waste of resources, a significant component of man-made climate change, a pandemic risk, a major source of pollution, driver of deforestation, and poses a threat to antibiotic resistance? But no, the typical rationalizations include: "Muh cheezburger is muh freedom. I can eat whatever I…
What if you: feed them algae, don't deforest, and don't give them antibiotics unless absolutely necessary?