31–40 of 178 posts
Hot take: actual steak is made from recycled carbon dioxide
Sort of, but you’re also re-releasing a bunch more of the CO2 than goes into the steak. Plus, direct air capture is much more space efficient then plants.
Instead of elaborate carbon capture infrastructure, it seems more straightforward to just use photosynthetic organisms like algae. Either engineer algae to make the proteins you want, or engineer yeast or some other microbe that can take the products of algae and convert to these proteins. Honestly it sounds like a needless and impractical gimmick.
1. Assimilating photons from sunlight to generate electrical potential by oxidizing water (ps that is kind of a crazy concept).
2. Fixing carbon dioxide by using the electron from step one to reduce CO2 to C-OH (ish)
1. Photosystem-II-I systems really suck, like, commercially available photocells are more efficient than fundamental quantum limits of the protein complex, beyond what it is likely for us to be able to do design or evolve for. Our photocells are getting better too. Also, photosynthetic organisms, especially algae, self-shadow. That's why you almost have to have those rediculous algae racetracks (look it up) and of course often the least valuable land + where there is sunlight so that it stands a chance to make economical sense is often in the desert, so for algae you're stuck shipping water to the desert :/
2. Carbon fixation really really sucks. RuBisCo is the enzyme that is the bottleneck. It sucks so hard that RuBisCo is literally the most abundant enzyme on the planet to make up for how bad it is. Not only is it an annoyingly slow enzyme, it's oxygen sensitive, which is hilarious because step 1 of photosynthesis cracks water. Plants and algae do some crazy gymnastics to separate part 1 and part 2; look up C3 and C4 cycles, and algae had to invent colonial forms and terminal differentiation because their carbon fixers are kept segregated from their photosynthesizers; one algae -synechocystis 6803 has one of the biggest algae genomes, it probably mostly goes into a rigourous gene expression which is used to anticipate circadian cycles and prepare the cell to flip between day (photosystem) and night (carbon and nitrogen fixation) cycles.
It is pretty insane when you think about it. We could get all the climate harm reduction benefits the article mentions if people would just choose to eat plants instead. Seems like a very simple solution.
There’s nothing simple about changing human nature. If you have to start with "if people would just choose" then it's not viable.
In the end people can just choose. If someone reading this right now eats meat, then you can make the choice to eat more plants. Please do so as much as you can, that will make a difference in saving the planet!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of, but you’re also re-releasing a bunch more of the CO2 than goes into the steak. Plus, direct air capture is much more space efficient then plants.
Animals can use land that can't be used for direct air capture or plant agriculture.
What land specifically is useful for animals, but not capturing carbon or growing plants? Please give a specific example.
Instead of elaborate carbon capture infrastructure, it seems more straightforward to just use photosynthetic organisms like algae. Either engineer algae to make the proteins you want, or engineer yeast or some other microbe that can take the products of algae and convert to these proteins. Honestly it sounds like a needless and impractical gimmick.
If one is worried about the methane emissions of cattle, it's not really clear that this is even a secondary concern. The carbon that cows produce, whether it be methane or CO2, came from the atmosphere and is returned to the atmosphere. That is because cows are eating plants which derive their carbon primarily from the atmosphere. This is different from fossil sources of methane, which isn't atmospheric unless it's released. The isotope of carbon isn't even the same between bio-methane and fossil methane. The methane that cows release is oxidized after several years.
This is absolutely a 'do not trust these claims without seeing peer-reviewed publication in a reputable journal' territory. For one thing, this is likely to be a slow method of capturing CO2 (H2-powered CO2-capture metabolism, called 'chemoautotrophy' is almost certainly going to be much slower than green plant photosynthetic capture rates). Maybe you could speed it up by adding enough hydrogen at optimal rates, but…
Grass is made from recycled carbon dioxide and cows are made from grass. And we already know beef is delicious.
That's an interesting angle. I haven't pictured myself made from chicken before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why you're downvoted because the answer to your question is definitely "no". Everything else, at the moment, is not much more than slides on a pitch deck.
Meat production is not carbon sequestering, it is carbon emitting. Most agriculture in general involves replacing more carbon sequestering natural growth with agricultural fields.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of, but you’re also re-releasing a bunch more of the CO2 than goes into the steak. Plus, direct air capture is much more space efficient then plants.
Animals can use land that can't be used for direct air capture or plant agriculture.
I recently spoke with a researcher working in this field. She identified three key issues: 1. Doing it with microbes means keeping the microbes alive, which is hard. You need to essentially replicate the functions of an animal, and you’re not necessarily going to be more efficient at them. 2. You can solve this by just doing it in a chemical process with catalysts and stuff. This is pretty easy except we have no way…
There are absolutely ways to catalytically control chirality. See k Barry sharpless' Nobel prize, David macmillan proline catalysis, etc. Scale is still a problem.
The mirror images of proteins are highly unlikely to be toxic in the way that thalidomide is.