Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Edit: found the paper: https://sci-hub.ac/10.1071/AN15576
According to figure 2 it looks like 2-10% of the feed is sufficient to achieve near-total methane reduction and <5% does not negatively affect digestibility, so 2-5% is the sweet spot.
It's very hard to pass this analysis, since "high tech" is almost universally more valuable to humanity, per unit, that something low tech like farming.
If you're already in tech and you want to "help the world", giving money is almost always the best choice.
http://www.givewell.org/ is a good resource for where to give effectively.
> but the typical conclusion would be "effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming."
Don't make assumptions. Life is meant to be enjoyed, and we work for a third of our lives. Perhaps some of us don't want to do the same work for our entire lives.
Lastly, tech isn't how I would give altruistically. I'd trade options and futures and donate the profits. The impact would be orders of magnitude higher than donating my hourly/salary wages.
In amongst those tenets is the precept of comparative wealth, quoted here:
> Many effective altruists believe that, as formulated by Peter Singer, "if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it".[18] Anyone with an income of above $52,000 PPP is in the 1% richest people globally.[19] Therefore, many effective altruists donate a significant portion of their income to highly effective charities, since doing so would not cause them to give up important purchases.
In short, if you're making six figures in tech, it is generally more charitable to keep doing the tech that you're doing and donate more, and if the tech work you're doing isn't a net negative, you'll be doing more good by donating your tech largesse to a seaweed farmer instead.
> effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming
Offtopic, but since when did contextual assumption become something people weren't supposed to do?
Large scale farming is not low-tech. Presumably someone moving in to farming from a tech discipline would seek to optimise their tech use as a competitive advantage over incumbents.
Furthermore this is tropical algae and it traditionally hand harvested making it very expensive to produce. I don't know if it could be mass produced in sea farms.
Source:
http://uses.plantnet-project.org/en/Asparagopsis_taxiformis_...
Cattle, like most ruminants, rely on the fermentation of cellulose for most of their energy needs. Any feed additive that shuts down this process will result in malnourished cattle, and is unlikely to see broad adoption in the industry. Luckily for the PEI farmer, the seaweed he used didn't have this effect.
I.e. shutting down the methanogenesis does not shut down all fermentation, it just takes other pathways. It is not an essential component.
You can live on a vegan diet, but it is easier to live on an omnivore diet. And since for most people easier is preferable, and when talking about the population of the world as a whole, you'll still find that a large percentage of the world's population will eat meat if it is easily available.
So seguing into climate change issues, this took politics too. It started with grassroots taking hold in the 60's counter culture, then the start of political pressure in the 70's. The first big political move was Reagan coming on board during the 80's; and also some lucky technology hook ups like solar powered calculators (never underestimate the power of logistical growth from a low end but widely used product).
The 90's brought us government sponsored research and industry backed development and product roll outs; this led to massive improvements in cost mainly though scale. The last 15 years have led to product refinements, financing options, and a greater society wide understanding of just how bad climate change could be.
And now we are at a situation of solar becoming cheaper than coal for producing electricity. 50 years!
So if you want to achieve the same with meat vs vegetables there is an enormous amount to achieve, above all you'll need to convince people at least as well as climate change issues, get government backing, make it as enjoyable as eating meat, and drive down the cost of Lysine and Methionine extraction.
In fact Canola (low erucic acid rapeseed) meal (what's left over after oil extraction) is currently used as livestock feed, this could be used for human consumption but would require further post-processing and possibly protein profile adjustment.
To accept it you must either be against democracy as a concept of equal rights to vote, or for an almost equal distribution of income. Neither of which is particular mainstream ideologies today.
We could demand that farms had zero carbon footprint, zero water usage/drainage, a new tree for every cut one, and no pesticides. It is expensive, and food labeled under a mission which try to cover some of those aspects do demand a much higher price. At best it can be said is that its has a lower environmental impact that cows, even through my government (Sweden) explicitly says that if we don't get more farmers, most of the open field and bio diversity that comes from open fields will be lost.
Personally, I would go with a omnivore diet that pay a little extra (ie about double vs the cheapest) for products under environmental focused labels, and then just eat less of it. Even better, skip that car and you will end up having a much lower carbon footprint than any car owner has, regardless of diet.
Until someone can fix this and disassociate ecological efficiency from the limousine liberal, these programs are unfortunately going to only be marginal. Minimizing environmental externalities can't be seen as optional.
Lots of reasonable things increase cost - such as refrigerated storage and inspection. We don't tier the product market like this though, "oh you want your meat to be free of disease? Well then mr fancy pants... Here's the luxury product."
I agree in principle with your sentiment; however, I have yet to come up with an alternative which does not involve strong environmental legislation. Which, in the US at least, is only likely to happen after it's too late, if ever.
Conservatives are unlikely to be OK with someone knowingly and intentionally exposing people to fatal levels of radiation in the way they are OK with adverse ecological systems.
It needs to leave the intellectual space of optional or preferential discourse and enter the one of rights and crimes.
I don't think that's true. They defended the cigarette industry, for example. They oppose laws and regulations protecting people in the workplace. They support and encourage law enforcement's abuse of the poor and minorities.
> It needs to leave the intellectual space of optional or preferential discourse and enter the one of rights and crimes.
That would help, but for many it's about ideology and greed and not about rational debate.
For instance, if a beer commercial was jingoistic and patriotic, we'd probably agree that it was a marketing tactic and not necessarily the drinking choice of nationalists.
I agree, but many self-identified conservatives believe these things, according to polls.
I'm pretty sure this move was made by the 'anti-environmentalists', including big industry and those fighting the ideological war against 'liberalism'. They would have found a way to discredit it among their followers - if not this way, than another.
Even these terms are from their propaganda, but lots of people repeat them as if they have meaning and represent something real.
> rich liberal urban elite.
> limousine liberal
I didn't say the terms were unintentionally used, I said they were empty stereotypes from conservative propaganda.
Regarding their emptiness: Can you define the terms? Do you have some data to back up the existence of the demographic and their purported behavior?
http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/ukhome/food-quality/eggs.html#clo...
Couldn't you look at it as a vanguard thing? Like, once the public is more used to the idea because it's been on the market in some form, it's easier to mandate it?
Only in the short term.
Methane has a GWP (Global Warming Potential or equivalent impact compared to same amount of carbon dioxide) of 86 over 20 years; 34 over 100 years; and 7.6 over 500 years.
34 / 5 is 6.8 so most of that 500 year potential is front loaded to the first 100 years. The difference from 7.6 vs 6.8 is because it breaks down into some CO2. And in fact is less potent than C02 from year 100-400.
This is how Norway encourages bottle recycling: There's no law mandating recycling of bottles, but there's a substantial tax on beverage containers that you get a reduction of in proportion to your return rate. This has resulted in a return rate of 99%+ of recyclable bottles by making it economically beneficial for retailers and distributors to participate in fairly elaborate and expensive collection and recycling schemes.
It takes some work to get mechanisms like this in place in a way that isn't easy to exploit, but get the incentives right and you can let economic interests do most of the work.
After some while, giving more marketing about "going green" and calculating that money was being throw at the garbage, some stores like restaurants and supermarkets began to collect those aluminum cans. Profit for then, recycling still being profitable to companies, poor people lost this income they have fomented.
Getting the incentives right across the whole chain is important.
E.g. I can't rememember ever seeing an automated bottle return machine like these [1] [2] in a US grocery store. It's been a few years, so it may have gotten more widespread, and I know some states have had return laws that have been more effective, so I'm sure it depends on location. In Norway the norm is for most grocery stores and shopping centres with any stores that sell bottles to have those.
Part of the reason is that in Norway, if people don't return bottles, the cost for retailers and distributors go up (or more precisely, their tax does not go down) by more than the cost of the recycling, so it's not just consumers that are incentivised, but retailers and distributors too, with the result that there's a massive infrastructure targeted at making it easy to return (and as a result one of the largest manufacturers wordwide of automated return solutions is Norwegian as well).
I currently live in the UK, which is much worse than the US when it comes to bottle rturns, and really wish the above solution would become more widespread.
The relevant part is from 13:58 (Andrieu, Eric) to (including) !4:00 (Eck, Stefan). I'm not sure if there ever existed software that worked on that site, so you probably have to skip to 1:48 in the stream mms://vod.europarl.europa.eu/wmv/nas/nasvod02/vod0910/2015/wm/VODChapter_20151028_12104300_14320200_509dc321150aee25e47-337f.wmv?wmcache=0
It's not like that voting is directly relevant in the legislative process but that's another discussion.
I think we will be able to detect methane emissions on a large scale from space sometime soon, e.g. [1]. At that point, farmers can't escape the law in any way, and they will have an incentive to reduce emissions.
[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0615/NASA-detects-meth...
You don't want to make the law something they must "escape" from, but rather something they can profit from by not polluting. Like tax credits.
"Yes, there is a lot of work on finding methane emissions by satellite. This is good as a broad guide to spotting big emissions like the huge US leak: the real problem we have is in quantifying emissions at ground level from a wide range of much smaller sources, and in placing good accurate numbers on the fluxes.
Unfortunately, the emission is from the ground into the boundary layer, at the bottom of the atmosphere, while satellite observation sees through the total column. We use wind back-trajectory analysis to identify the source of the methane (running the weather backwards), but there have been bad examples in the past where the media latched onto claims of major methane anomalies seen from space (e.g. in the Arctic or in S America) and didn’t realise that the methane was in the mid-troposphere in air that had last been in contact with the ground many thousands of miles away.
What is needed is an integrated approach at all levels, using satellite observation, wind-tracking using chemical transport models, and careful ground measurement to identify sources."
So far, the ones I've found range from awful, to quite ok to drink but nothing like milk. For e.g. baking, the taste may matter less if they get the consistency right.
But for drinking, I've yet to found any that I'd be willing to consider replacements for milk, though I've found a couple that I may buy now again because their quite different taste is a nice complement.
http://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-me...
There are about 92 million cows and calves in the U.S. today.[1] Estimates for the number of bison at their peak range from 30 million to 60 million.
[1] http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2014/8/22/buffalo-extermination-e...
For these very reasons organic meat is much better for CO_2 reduction. It doesn't use fossil fuels just to feed cattle, it limits the area foodprint of cattle production and by making meat scarcer, it last not least shifts meat based nutrition towards five-a-day nutrition.
It would be great for the seaweed industry here too it used to produce Irish moss for carageenan, a thickening agent for food.
But as it is with the Irish moss it will go to Asia tropical waters produce more seaweed.
What the article forgets to mention is that seaweed is a product valued in millions of dollars. And they create fragile ecosystems also that support a lot of juvenile fish, octopus and shellfish; wich are also expensive products. The delicious sea urchins depend entirely of seaweeds for example. On the other side, Asparagopsis taxiformis is an australian invasive species; so the idea of harvest it cuts both ways. Could be good (erradicate) or a big mistake (propagate even more).
And you need to develop a selective extracion method. If you use all seaweeds to feed cattle, inland cows will have a fartastic life, but a lot of fishermen living in small coastal villages with poor soils will lost their jobs.
Or maybe to synthetize the seaweed metabolites. Its life cycle is complicated. They are two different algae packed in one single species (Asparagopsis taxiformis and Falkenbergia hillebrandii). This is a problem if we want to culture it. We'll need to understand the delicate interactions and chemistry of the poisons of this plants and grant that no bad collateral effects will appear; i.e. Kill the intestinal flora that the cattle needs. Do you want to know another thing that could emit lots of metane? microscopic algae blooming after macroscopic algae vanished (and maybe a bunch of dead macroscopic algae drying at the sun?).
Interestingly, I heard that the particular seaweed that is effective is not commonly found in large amounts and does not grow by itself in open water. This means it either has to be farmed using novel techniques on the sea (like what northseafarm.com tries to do) or a new breed of seaweed has to be created (see hortimare.com). Cool stuff.
That's the problem - I'd love to eat more, but a lot of it it's just not appetising. Eating the salads you get in Korean / Japanese restaurants is like eating soft leather.
They discussing and were eating a sea cucumber with a rubbery texture.
Then again dulce a seaweed is a food in the Canadian Maritimes it's not common but enough that most people have heard of it.
The USDA nutrient database lists 8 types of seaweed. Only one of these these ("Canadian Cultivated EMI-TSUNOMATA") contains B12, and it appears to be a proprietary land-cultivated strain of Irish moss, so hardly representative of normal seaweed. The generic Irish moss is also listed with zero B12.
So either it's a some kind of symbiosis, or they are mixing it in afterward.
"At room temperature and standard pressure, methane is a colorless, odorless gas. The familiar smell of natural gas as used in homes is achieved by the addition of an odorant, usually blends containing tert-butylthiol, as a safety measure."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-cow-f...
Seaweed is worth studying and has promise but I'm skeptical when it comes super food claims.
It's only fed in sub-toxic amounts to the cows I don't think it bio-accumulates, so the meat should be safe for consumption.
in other words, it has nothing to do with antibiotics.
Plus I assume that it being part of the plant matters slows its release.
I read that line several times, and I can't figure out what one has to do with the other. The depletion effect doesn't change based on the source.
> And algae naturally soak it up from sea water, so you don't have to extract it from minerals or anything like that.
It's made from bromine, it's not a hard element to get a hold of.
> Plus I assume that it being part of the plant matters slows its release.
Slows the release in the cow, or after leaving the cow? Because we care only after leaving the cow, and at that point it has to have been released (in the cow) in order to function.
Slow release in the cow might help to smooth out the dose so it inhibits methane generation throughout the whole digestion time. But that part is entirely speculation on my part. Something has to make this particular alga better than the others tested.
I would not be comfortable eating products from a cow fed this without some careful safety studies first.
Otherwise you are potentially poisoning people in exchange for some methane reduction - that's not a good tradeoff.
We are only at the beginning of understanding how the gut micro-biome relates to human and animal health. Possibilities for complications exist e.g.
- Methane production keeps parasites in check
- Methane producing bacteria may be part of a synthesis chain for a specific nutrient.
- Recalibration of blood health indicator values
There are always risks in scaling up things to population levels. The history is full of them. Soylent recently ran into some problems. Gut biology is not an area where things are very predictable.