Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

journals.plos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 302 posts

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#271

Post by graeme »

sampo wrote: post #172
graeme wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that from cow herd size increases or other causes? OP’s point was that with q fixed herd size the amount of methane accumulating in an atmosphere is stable. Lakes don’t grow and grow and consume the world.

Methane from human activities: Methane leaks from fossil fuel systems: 30% Methane from landfills: 20% Animal agriculture, including also manure management: 30% Plant agriculture: 15% Other: 5% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions Plant agriculture is especially rice paddies, I guess.

If methane is only 3x larger than before, that suggests animal husbandry is only a small part of the increase.

The first two categories are almost entirely new. Especially given human population is way bigger than it was in past ages, so past landfills likely weren’t so large.

This is surprising to me as I has figured ruminants caused more of an increase. If we could cut their emissions by 80% with seaweed this analysis suggests their overall contribution would be lower than it historically was.

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#272

Post by samatman »

8note wrote: post #265
samatman wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the wrong way to look at it. Atmospheric forcing doesn't distinguish between "natural" and "unnatural" causes. Let's grant that methanogenesis from ruminant bellies has been a constant throughout history (unlikely, but as we'll see, irrelevant): that methane contributes a certain amount to the greenhouse effect. That amount is non-trivial, because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and there are a lot of cat…

Being steady state is what matters about the boivne methane production, rather than if it's natural. Our problem isn't the steady state processes, it's the growth ones, and we won't be able to solve our growth problems by reducing the steady state ones.

No this is wrong.

It's a simple "shut up and calculate" situation, any reduction of greenhouse gasses is equally to be esteemed in proportion to the amount of forcing effect it eliminates from the atmosphere.

It's true that removing all "natural" emissions is both impractical and insufficient (I don't intend to stop exhaling!), but reduction is reduction, full stop.

Besides which, what you said is wrong on the face of it: turning the year-over-year growth in carbon emissions into a plateau is woefully insufficient to mitigate warming. Besides, we're well on track to achieve it, though some of that is due to the pandemic. We have to reduce emissions substantially below current levels, and find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere faster than natural processes will do it for us.

In no conceivable way is drastically reducing bovine methane anything but assistance in that goal.

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#273

Post by cwkoss »

agurk wrote: post #169
titzer wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Interestingly only about 1/4 of today's emissions are directly caused by all agriculture according to NASA[0]. A decent chuck of modern emissions are caused by other human activities. > Across the study years, wetlands contributed 30 percent of global methane emissions, with oil, gas, and coal activities accounting for 20 percent. Agriculture, including enteric fermentation and manure management, made up 24 percent o…

I suspect that methane emission levels from energy industry are likely downplaying and underestimating total methane emissions from fracking and similar activities because they have a strong financial/political interest in doing so.

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#274

Post by seunosewa »

analog31 wrote: post #270
fred_is_fred wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Haber process which you mentioned is really key here. It uses a lot of natural gas - more interesting than cow methane might be using nitrogen fixing bacteria or crop rotation (legumes) to reduce it's usage.

From what I've read, you can't grow enough legumes to fix the needed amount of nitrogen for high intensity agriculture. The Haber process sustains a sizable fraction of the world's animal population.

Human urine would be a sufficient source of nitrogen but it ends up in sewage nitrification-denitrification reactors that eventually turn most of the urea back into nitrogen gas so that the effluent can be safely discharged into water bodies.

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#275

Post by Ericson2314 »

belorn wrote: post #198
Doji wrote: post #125

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…

The start of the carbon cycle is one which I have found to be very unpopular to discuss, and it has a direct connection to methane in the atmosphere. Artificial fertilizers is produce through a process which takes in natural gas as its primary ingredient. The process is also a major source for methane leaks, with a large variance in claimed contribution for the global methane pollution. For a large portion of the glo…

This is why the Carbon and other externalities taxes always have to come as soon as possible. They are not just good ideas in themselves, but the resulting price corrections will make further investigation and planning easier.

No only is trying to do all subsidy non tax embarrassingly weak politics, it's a stupid game of whac-a-mole a market can just route around.

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#277

Post by analog31 »

seunosewa wrote: post #274
analog31 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, you can't grow enough legumes to fix the needed amount of nitrogen for high intensity agriculture. The Haber process sustains a sizable fraction of the world's animal population.

Human urine would be a sufficient source of nitrogen but it ends up in sewage nitrification-denitrification reactors that eventually turn most of the urea back into nitrogen gas so that the effluent can be safely discharged into water bodies.

I guess that makes sense, the nitrogen has to go somewhere.

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#278

Post by acchow »

Doji wrote: post #125

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…

So you’re saying if we want reduced methane in the atmosphere to help alleviate the climate situation, we need to reduce herd size.

Isn’t that what reducing beef consumption does?

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#279

Post by minsc__and__boo »

PortlandMEnerd wrote: post #276

Am I the only one who is wondering why the sample size was so small? It looks like only 21 cows were used and 7 of them were used as controls.

If the delta is large enough then it should be statistically significant.

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#280

Post by ip26 »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #178
MsMowz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true unless your substitute is to eat nothing.

There was an interesting TV show on British TV (apologies, my Google foo is not able to find the name at this moment in time) where they invited a number of people to eat dishes at a hypothetical restaurant, after each course the tallied the carbon emissions released in creating the dish. Now obviously being a TV show they had to show some extreme examples but it was definitely interesting when things like imported a…

Too bad there isn't some sort of free market based mechanism that would inherently account for all of these factors without you needing to think about it.
Post reply on HN