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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

Also relevant: Feeding dairy cows seaweed mitigates the amount of methane they pass. Irish famers are beginning to do this because seaweed is easy to come by in Ireland.

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-seaweed-relieve-gassy-cows-dai...

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The name of the game in that case is overgrazing or at least a bad case of abusing the soil for entire generations.

Fires eliminate the shrubs leading to more pastures. After a cycle of repeating the process, all the fertile soil ends in the sea... And then your grandsons have a big problem.

This would be a great win-win! But wouldn't the sequestered CO2 get released back into the environment and potentially the atmosphere?

Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.

For a shorter period of time [1]

> The lifetime in the air of CO2, the most significant man-made greenhouse gas, is probably the most difficult to determine, because there are several processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years. The rest is removed by slower processes that take up to several hundreds of thousands of years, including chemical weathering and rock formation. This means that once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can continue to affect climate for thousands of years.

> Methane, by contrast, is mostly removed from the atmosphere by chemical reaction, persisting for about 12 years. Thus although methane is a potent greenhouse gas, its effect is relatively short-lived.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...

My understanding is that the majority of Methane molecules end up as CO2 anyway (Methane -> CH3 radical -> Formaldehyde -> CO2): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Removal_pr...

So the underlying CO2 ~100 Yr+ effect is still there, but you also get a 500x benefit from Methane while it is persistent in the environment.

Even then, it's worse by weight over most timescales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential: "In the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, methane has a lifetime of 12.4 years and with climate-carbon feedbacks a global warming potential of 86 over 20 years and 34 over 100 years in response to emissions."

(CO2, being the baseline, has a GWP of 1.)

Yes, if you want to "permanently" (i.e. a thousand years at least) sequester carbon from biomass sources you have to burn them to charcoal and bury that.

If you bury it deep, millions of years easily.

You can also pump CO2 into deep coal seams, displacing CH4 which is then burned in a closed capture system. The CO2 released from burning the CH4 is also sequestered resulting in a net gain since CO2 preferentially adsorbs to coal at a roughly 3:1 ratio to CH4. Economically viable coal seams are widespread globally, and exist within 50 km of most coal burning power plants in the United States.

On a different note, i recently read that adding charcoal to the feed may help as well...

Hackernews loves these articles that give some kind of hope for a magical solution to climate change. It's easier than the thought that it will require a huge concerted effort across the world and changing the habits of millions

I don't see anyone claiming the existence of or holding their breath for a magic solution. All I see is people sharing discoveries that might contribute towards a solution. Reducing the emissions caused by cattle can be a part of the "huge concentrated effort across the world" you mentioned.

Sure, but there is a solution that is orders of magnitude more effective: don't buy meat, thereby allowing cow farming to end.

Not eating meat is however seen as too 'inconvenient' a solution, so instead someone is trying to sell seaweed fed cows as a "partial solution" where it is really more of a gimmick.

Statements like "don't buy meat" are much more of a gimmick than tinkering with cattle feed. The latter is a realistic option -- which might not make a huge difference, but it will make a difference. The former is a pipe dream. Humans have been eating meat since before they were human. Good luck changing that in the timeframe we have before climate change becomes very painful.

Not buying meat might be to hard to attain, but not eating lamb or beef, and only eating chicken is a step in the right direction.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-top-10-foods-with-the-bigg...

However, to be fair, if you remove all pastures all together, there are probably other bad consequences on ecosystems (including people!).

(Disclaimer: I am still eating beef, but less that I used to, which in the grand scheme of things is probably useless)

Sorry, it's not a gimmick. There are plenty of cultures which eat far less meat and are very healthy. In my opinion the difference is they know how to cook other food well. Of course I don't expect everybody to stop eating meat entirely, but why isn't it part of the answer to climate change?

Do you think people ate as much meat then as now? The mass farming of animals is an incredibly new phenomenon in comparison to how long humans have been around. And what about driving? By your argument it should be easy to give up considering we only started it recently.

These solutions are simple, but not easy. Therefore people are looking for a complex solution that's also easy and I think we'll be looking for it as the water rises above our necks.

It'd be a lot easier to convince society if we could convince a relatively few major business leaders of the world to change their company processes. Especially since industrial processes are a major contributing factor to climate change.

I believe the opposite: the easy thought/magical solution is “Huge concerted efforts across the world and changing the habits of millions”.

Yeah I was thinking the chances of tech solutions like solar wind and batteries getting better helping are quite high, the chances human nature and habits changing are a bit lower.

We could already do this if we wanted. The technology exists. And it's cheap too, if you factor in the costs and subsidies oil gets.

There is a term for this 'solution based optimism, often of a technocratic nature': Solutionism.

Well some hope is good. Cows are a bigger deal than you might think see eg. "Cow 'emissions' more damaging to planet than CO2 from cars" https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cow...

I agree that livestock is a huge problem, but I think this kind of article is a false hope that prevents people grasping the true problem. It's like playing the lottery - something inneffective that still gives us a warm feeling nonetheless.

The solution isn't magical. The mechanism is explained in the article.

Also, it doesn't promise to solve climate change, only to limit the output of methane pursuant to California regulation.

Solutions like this are preferable than complete upending of our quality of life and economic systems. The anti-capitalists would prefer “huge concerted effort” as opposed to simpler, less economically disruptive solutions. I often feel like people on the far left actually don’t want simple, market-based solutions and would prefer instead to use fears of catastrophe as a means to enact their social and economic agendas. It’s no different than 1984 where the perpetual war with Eurasia (or was it Eastasia?) is used to hide totalitarian aims.

It's not individuals exercising bad habits that causes climate change. It's the fact that the current political, economic, and ecological landscape incentivizes behaviors that cause climate change.

The deterrent of trying to give people a guilt trip for driving in a hurry or for eating beef is not sufficient to counteract the tremendous tragedy of the commons that makes those behaviors happen. Regulations that associate financial costs with the ecological costs that people and businesses are currently free to ignore are the answer, along with technologies that use those funds to reverse the needs that remain.

Get your priorities straight: When the half gallon used while people brush their teeth is the most important waste of water, then address it! But when the farm down the road pays next to nothing to pour out three feet of water on its entire land area, any expenditure on toothbrushing habits is wasteful.

I'd even say that the focus on personal responsibility for climate change is creating unnecessary resistance.

I live in a conservative area, and I've been trying to be more proactive about trying to understand the viewpoints that cause people to be skeptical of things like climate change.

I recently had a conversation with someone who was skeptical of climate change - but had an education with a scientific background and the tools that should help him land on the side of clear science.

What it came down to is that he feels personally attacked by many of the personal recommendations for reducing CO2 emissions.

For example, when someone says that we need stricter emissions regulations for vehicles, what he hears is "you're a bad person for driving your old truck." In reality, if we could get people like him to emissions regulations for new vehicles and stop guilting them about driving classic cars, we'd be doing great things for the planet.

My impression is that there's a significant number of people who aren't opposed to the actual large scale changes that would make the biggest positive difference in the fight against climate change, but are put off by the "only you can stop climate change by switching your gas lawnmower to electric" style rhetoric that does more damage than good.

Especially if some believe the exact opposite and prefer "drill, baby, drill".

Getting farmers to change their ways will be a huge concerted effort that will change the habits of millions.

"A thousand goals have there been hitherto, for a thousand peoples have there been. Only the fetter for the thousand necks is still lacking; there is lacking one goal. As yet humanity hath not a goal."

I bet it’s the chlorophyll

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