191–200 of 302 posts
Has anyone checked if the animals also end up healthier?
(I've no domain knownledge on this, but saw an interview with the founders of a company that produce seaweed for cattles. they do claim healthier animals)
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You're essentially correct, and (I think) being downvoted for the tone of your rhetoric, which could be phrased in a more pleasing and convincing way. Also, most of us do love cheeseburgers, unhealthy though they may be. Either way, humanity hasn't matured enough for this viewpoint to be considered common sense. Give us another few centuries.
The truth is painful and people will never listen because it threatens their identity and their lifestyle, so it doesn't matter how it's phrased. Only top-down mandates, unlike democratic processes, can solve climate change. I hope China threatens every country with obliteration unless they meet net carbon negative goals and participate in international CCS efforts to reduce GHGs immediately. No other mechanism will…
In any case, enforcement of anything will require boots on the ground (or boots programming and building the drones). So you’ll have to convince the unwise 99.9% of something. Unilateral climate rescue by the enlightened 0.1% is, to me, a fantasy, as is anybody listening to threats by the Chinese government. They already do a lot of threatening.
In my opinion, this line of thinking will inevitably be hijacked to commit genocide so some group or groups can stay in power.
Would be nice to find another way.
Essentially, it's only useful for pasture raised cows (soy and corn fed feedlot cows already produce a fraction of the methane) and there's no practical way to add algae to pasture raised cows' diets. They also speculate that cows' microbiomes will adapt to the algae.
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It's like we got shot by a firing squad of 6 people and we're arguing about which one of them had the blank.
Not really, we're trying to do some important math to figure out how to balance a carbon budget. We need to know what options are on the table and how much each of them contribute. It's the same as balancing a household budget, you don't just flail wildly about slashing costs and enduring privation. You reduce expenditures in areas where they are unnecessary and try to cause the least disruption to your life.
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> Why is it now "well, others are doing bad things, we may as well pollute the shit of the planet too"? Why is the burden on me? That's never been explained by all the climate religionists out there. When the west does something it's bad. When everyone else does it, they get a pass? We already did the industrial revolution. We already went through the long process. They have free wins - they don't need to design new…
The per-person consumption of electricity and oil - along with the CO2 emissions due to our lifestyle in the US is higher than just about every country in the world. WE are the ones that need to cut back.
My wife asks if this can be used for human males.
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1) It IS huge news. It's been reported pretty heavily. (Or at least, I've stumbled across this news many times from many different and mainstream sources. I suppose it's possible that my filter bubble is making it seem like a bigger deal.) 2) What's the incentive for the farmer? The benefits are entirely externalized. Less methane is good for the planet, but paying to add seaweed to the feed is nothing more than an a…
There may be no incentive for the farmer but plenty of incentive for the scientist, the government and the philanthropist. My conclusions is that GHG from cattle is simply not as big of a deal as the environmentalists would make it seem. Another comment mentions that decaying grass also releases methane so I'm not even sure if there are any accurate numbers on the true effect of livestock on emissions.
All plants eventually decompose, but it happens at a much slower cycle than if we actively harvest it, feed it as grain, grow more where the original harvest was, etc. By speeding up the cycle, we end up with much more of it. Or at least that's my non-scientist take.
We gotta remember that "greenhouse gases" aren't a bad thing. They're fundamental to making Earth hospitable for life. But there's a balance. When we speed up the "carbon cycle", we end up with too much of the stuff, which throws the whole system out of balance. But we could just as easily end up with too little some day in the future, which would cause us all sorts of other problems.
As for whether we have truly accurate numbers for any of this, I too am skeptical. But it's early days for research in this area. One or two studies doesn't cut it, but that doesn't mean they're not onto something huge.
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…
For a large portion of the global Methane pollution from cattle, the carbon cycle started out with natural gas being used to produce artificial fertilizer. If we wanted to address methane pollution it would make sense to start there in order to address both leaks and the introduction of carbon into the system, but this is where politics comes in. Artificial fertilizer is not just the building block for most cattle farmers, it is also the building block for most meat alternatives and the so called "renewable and carbon free" biomass industry.
On my free time I often spend time diving in the Baltic sea, and every time I go below the surface I see the effect that artificial fertilizer has. The excess nutrient is killing the whole area, which in turn release more methane from the ocean bottom. Currently the area is around of 60,000 km2, but the effect can easily be seen in nearby "healthy" areas.
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> Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo Not at anywhere near the density you find in modern agriculture. Domesticated cattle and pigs alone are 15x the biomass of all wild mammals combined. Wild ruminants are somewhat insignificant compared to that. https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
This article measures current biomass distribution. Given that Bison herds in North America has reduced from 60 million to 30 thousand, and I suspect other species have seen similar changes, I'm not surprised by the result. Also as a point of nuance, I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well. I'm not trying to say no incre…
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Not really, we're trying to do some important math to figure out how to balance a carbon budget. We need to know what options are on the table and how much each of them contribute. It's the same as balancing a household budget, you don't just flail wildly about slashing costs and enduring privation. You reduce expenditures in areas where they are unnecessary and try to cause the least disruption to your life.
I get what you are trying to say, but we don't have a carbon budget , nor a methane budget. Maybe attitudes need to shift gradually to make other people feel more comfortable, but the fact is that we need to make radical changes to all areas of human existence in order to deal properly with the magnitude of the crisis. It seems like...smart...to be rational, and weigh costs and impact and supposedly choose the smarte…
An 80% reduction in CO2 isn’t quite enough, but it would avert most issues for a long time. More importantly doing something is much more productive than saying we need to change everything on day one which just promotes paralysis.
The obvious step one is to get cars and electricity to ~zero. That’s achievable in 20 years especially when you consider gas stations closing are going to make ICE engines unappealing.