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Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

neo.life

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Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#81

Post by virgildotcodes »

tomp wrote: post #80
virgildotcodes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are constantly pumping CH4 into the atmosphere over the long-term then you have a long-term climate impact as a result. This is without even taking into account whether the increased heating from the "short-term" impact of CH4 over a few decades causes us to hit tipping points sooner than otherwise, or that in the best case scenario we may have been able to avoid hitting at all.

No that’s not how physics works. If you keep pumping a constant amount of CH4 into the atmosphere, it keeps degrading into CO2, which is transformed into grass, which is transformed into cows. It’s a cycle. There is no long-term impact.

Let's say you have 100 units of CO2, and 0 units of CH4 in the atmosphere, you are producing 100 units of warming per year. Then you do something that converts 20 of those units of CO2 to 20 units of CH4, you are now producing 80 x 1 + 20 x 84 = 1,760 units of warming per year.

If you are performing this action at a rate that keeps replenishing the CH4 as quickly as it is degrading, let alone faster than it's degrading and subsequently increasing the amount of CH4 in the atmosphere, the amount of CH4 in the atmosphere is constantly being kept higher than it would be were you not performing this action, for as long a term as you continue to perform it. So you've now ended up with a planet that is constantly experiencing more warming than you would have otherwise.

If the permafrost requires 1,000 units of warming to melt and release its stores of CO2 and CH4, then this further makes the difference between triggering this tipping point or not.

Am I misunderstanding something?

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#82

Post by tgb »

dagss wrote: post #77
tomp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CH4 has a half life of like 10 years or so, so even if you deleted all cows from the world right now, in 20-40 years you'd be back to "only fossil fuel CO2 causing climate change". Furthermore, has CH4 from cows even increased historically? There are 30m cows in the US, compared to 60m bison 150 years ago.

2 things: A common error about CH4 is misunderstanding half-life vs CO2e calculations. The half life is 10 years but that does not make it a non-problem; a commonly used number is that CH4 is 25 more potent that CO2 -- but that number 25x is OVER A 100 YEAR LIFESPAN that already INCLUDES the decay over those 100 years. So if you mention that half year is 10 years you also throw the number 25x out the window, then the…

My understanding is that CH4 breakdown in the atmosphere isn’t a matter of exponential decay either but is (or could become) rate limited by OH radical availability. Such that the half life increases as more is in the atmosphere and it’s possible to totally outpace the breakdown even at constant emissions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#83

Post by ibz »

myshpa wrote: post #75
ibz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of the exercise is to find alternatives that aren't so hard on the environment. Cows and grass are "the environment". Millions of years of evolution refined cows to be the best mechanism for converting grass into meat. Some hippy scientists think they can do better? I doubt.

This is not a proper environment (= this is not right). https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2AB4XKW/kersey-colorado-a-cattle-f... https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/feedlot-picture-id17360... https://www.africahunting.com/attachments/cattle-feed-lot-jp...

Straw man. Cows should be grazing, not being locked up and fed corn.

Grazing cows actually make the environment better.

So rather than blaming cows, blame the way they have been grown over the past 50 years or so.

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#84

Post by manigandham »

azakai wrote: post #33
manigandham wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s nothing simple about changing human nature. If you have to start with "if people would just choose" then it's not viable.

It's not simple, you're right, but history has shown again and again that it can be viable. Society has made a lot of progress. 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!

Yes society has made a lot of progress - in offering more freedom, luxury and opportunity to more people than ever before - like eating meat.

Give me an example of the reverse happening. We cannot "choose" our way out of this situation by somehow getting the entire globe to agree to want less.

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#85

Post by manigandham »

myshpa wrote: post #62
manigandham wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s nothing simple about changing human nature. If you have to start with "if people would just choose" then it's not viable.

It's not human nature. It's just a tradition. And a tradition is just a story (maybe even a lie) we've been taught, and which we tell ourselves. Stories are easily changed - like slavery or patriarchy, for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7JE8j5Ncmw

Eating meat is human nature (and biology). We can digest just about any meat there is. We cannot digest any plant. Try eating a tree branch and see how far you get.

Likewise humans (like other animals) will always have tribal and territorial tendencies manifested in enslavement, war and conquest. First-world nations developed over centuries and still have countless problems, and they're only a minority of the global population. The current reality is far worse for billions of people around the world from rural China to Africa to North Korea.

Do you really think this all continues because it's just a story? If these situations are so easily changed then please go ahead and do so.

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#87

Post by lettergram »

I see the title and My first thought is literally: feed for livestock?

I cut hundreds of tons of hay a year for the cows I feed. The grass captures carbon, clover and various other plants add nitrogen back to the soil, and the grass (carbon) is fed to the cows. A well maintained pasture can be worked for centuries and increase production on average year over year.

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#88

Post by neuronic »

anothernewdude wrote: post #30

Oh just stop. I'll eat Falafel and other vegan foods. But why would I ever eat a chicken or beef replacement? Just make some unconstrained good vegan food. It'll be better.

Don't be this absolute, please.

So I love the taste of meat, but I generally don't think my personal enjoyment is sufficient reason to further harm both highly intelligent animals and the climate. It's a decision I have deemed egoistic with regards to myself (and myself only - I am not one for evangelism). I want to explain why my experience seems a bit different with "replacements".

It is very hard to change habits, so I have not stopped eating meat completely. However, I have successfully reduced my meat consumption by a significant amount, all thanks to some substitutes making it very easy to reduce some real meat while keeping my every-day habit foods. The quality and taste of the replacements range from excellent to complete utter shit. I exclusively focus on the currently good or excellent ones and adapt new items from now and then.

For example, the "Rügenwalder Mühle" company in Germany makes some excellent products [1] that are totally enough to satisfy me. Substitution works best with meats that are typically a highly processed mess filled with salt & spices. No, it doesn't fully taste the same as meat but, like I said, it tastes good enough and every gram less meat eaten is a microscopic positive change that still matters en masse.

[1] https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#89

Post by karagenit »

ibz wrote: post #56
dqv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are recycled jokes made of? The point of the exercise is to find alternatives that aren't so hard on the environment. >“By contrast, our process takes a few days to make a steak, has very low water utilization, is carbon negative, uses zero arable land, and minimal land overall.” The point is not recycling carbon for funsies, but to actually have a positive impact on the environment. Whether the process describe…

> The point of the exercise is to find alternatives that aren't so hard on the environment. Cows and grass are "the environment". Millions of years of evolution refined cows to be the best mechanism for converting grass into meat. Some hippy scientists think they can do better? I doubt.

I mean, photosynthesis is only about 1% efficient in the real world, whereas modern solar panels (the ones you can buy, not the ones in a research lab) are already at about 15%. I think there’s plenty of room for improvement in the efficiency of meat production too.

Re: Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide

#90

Post by tomp »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #81
tomp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that’s not how physics works. If you keep pumping a constant amount of CH4 into the atmosphere, it keeps degrading into CO2, which is transformed into grass, which is transformed into cows. It’s a cycle. There is no long-term impact.

Let's say you have 100 units of CO2, and 0 units of CH4 in the atmosphere, you are producing 100 units of warming per year. Then you do something that converts 20 of those units of CO2 to 20 units of CH4, you are now producing 80 x 1 + 20 x 84 = 1,760 units of warming per year. If you are performing this action at a rate that keeps replenishing the CH4 as quickly as it is degrading, let alone faster than it's degradi…

Yes. We didn’t start with zero.

> There are 30m cows in the US, compared to 60m bison 150 years ago.

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