Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps | Hacker News Reader

Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps

independent.co.uk

160 pointsTomte82 comments

An earlier HN post about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17036221

This is a perfect example of why "sin taxes" like the proposed tax on meat[1][2] to fight climate change are a bad idea.

You need to tax the externality (greenhouse gas emissions), not an activity which currently causes such emissions, because then you don't have any incentives left (such as in this case) for industries to reduce those emissions.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-tax...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_tax

Of course the remaining sin being treating animals like a commodity, making them suffer, driving them around in crowded conditions for hundreds of miles...

It‘s not just the environment that suffers from our industrialized way to produce meat

That's another good example. Tax that, and you create an incentive to either eat "dumber" meat like fish instead of pigs, or meat where you've avoided the "sin" altogether. Such as lab-grown meat.

So, why would that be a negative outcome?

It's not - I think OP is saying tax the animal suffering, not the eating of meat generally.

I feel the same way about vegetables. Cutting down in the prime of their life, and shipping them to stores across the country packed in crates. It's unconscionable.

Vegetables are not conscious, and they cannot feel and interpret pain.

Taking your logic, I can extend your argument in the opposite direction towards humans. But I have a feeling no one would condone that!

That gets a bit more complicated though, greenhouse gas emissions through burping is just one of the many impacts cattle have on the planet: land usage, water usage, manure (harms water supplies, runoff, release gasses, etc), and then you have the knock-on impacts of all the feed that needs to be produced to feed them.

Your point is correct, but you can apply it in the other direction; adding a sin tax also has knock-on effects and often produce unexpected market distortions.

I think your point just argues for pricing in more externalities, rather than abandoning the goal of pricing them and using even more opaque sin taxes instead.

True but I think some of these issues are also fundamentally harder to tax. Everything uses land and water, the problem is how much cattle use per calorie produced.

I suppose you're saying we should tax usage of these things based on calorie produced?

Nothing needs to be taxed based on calorie produced. For the purposes of sustainability you tax externalities. Whether that's releasing carbon into the atmosphere, or whatever it costs to fix the land or water you're polluting.

If you're polluting as much as your neighbor but producing fewer calories you'll make less money, so market forces will take care of that and you'll be more likely to go out of business. There's no need to tax anything based on caloric production for the purposes of taxing pollution.

That of course assumes that you're producing the same product as your neighbor, but maybe he's making dogfood and you're making Kobe beef. Then it's OK for your business if you're producing fewer calories per unit of pollution.

Right, my point is that producing any type of meat consumes excessive amounts of land vs other forms of producing food, I guess what I'm asking is: how do you classify 'land' as an externality?

With per-acre property taxes. If you need 10x the land to produce a kg of beef v.s. a kg of lentils you'll pay 10x the property taxes, which'll be worked into the price of your product.

The question of e.g. water consumption or pollution is a separate question. It's possible to pollute a lot in a very small area, and that should be priced accordingly.

Fair enough, I see the logic behind what you're saying, but taxing that as an externality would require a massive change in the way farmland is managed and taxed in most of the western world.

I'm not saying this is right, but farming is such a difficult and low-margin occupation that most countries have policies of helping farmers and having low to no taxes (even to the point of giving cashback in the EU) on land classified as "farmland"

So "sin taxes" would be a way of targeting some of the biggest problems (meat) without completely restructuring the food and taxation system around the world.

The "sin taxes" would just be another and less efficient form of restructuring. You'd reduce meat consumption, thus screwing over some polluting farmers, but also equally screwing over other farmers who pollute less to produce the same product.

But on the topic of say EU farming subsidies: You'd still raise the taxes dramatically to price the externality of pollution, but could just on top of that decide to give tax rebates that would amount to the same net subsidy.

The reason it's important to do it that way is two-fold.:

First you want to as a matter of public policy see how much you're actually paying for this subsidy. E.g. corporations in the EU usually pay a reduced VAT rate via rebates, we don't pretend that the concept of VAT doesn't apply to them. We could see that we like farming so much that we're spending however many billions of EUR/yr on offloading pollution on future generations.

Secondly because such a tax subsidy could be structured to give more money to farmers if they pollute less, instead of them coming out even if they continue doing what they're doing now. Right now a farmer who releases way more CO^2 than his neighbor doesn't pay any more taxes, maybe you'd like to keep it that way for political reasons, but we could at least structure it so that his neighbor makes money by polluting less.

I agree with what avar is saying above and in the sibling thread.

> producing any type of meat consumes excessive amounts of land vs other forms of producing food

I think this is quite different from CO2 and pollution, which I'd agree are true externalities. I'm not sure I follow " how do you classify 'land' as an externality" though. Why is it an externality? It is a good that has a price.

It sounds like you're believe that there's something inherently bad about meat consuming more land to produce than other types of food. But I think to first approximation, the free market just sorts that one out; if there were other uses for that land that were more profitable on a per-acre basis, then you'd expect land-owners to convert to those uses.

This was ops point, if you tax the emissions only people can innovate and reduce emissions in all these areas to the same effect.

But how do you tax the potential land usage? Are you saying we should tax farmers based on how many acres it takes them to produce a calorie?

This could also have a knock-on affect of encouraging _more_ cruelty (if that's even possible at this point).

I think we should tax them based on emissions which includes deforestation / clearing yes. Separately I would definitely like to see animals regulated with X land per animal like free range chickens are regulated. Given the current state of pig farming I don’t think we can physically go worse than status quo.

I understand “tax emission” has many edge cases and will be tough to nut out without a general rule being possible, but it’s really important the cost of polluting is actually paid for with dollars and this is what we pay politicians to do every day (despite what it looks like).

Great point about taxing the externalities. Also, I think that elected officials with the livestock facilities in their jurisdictions should be required to live (or spend a significant amount of time) downwind of the facilities.

Some externalities are hard to tax. For example, consumption of red meat probably increases cancer risk [1]. We can't introduce a tax on cancer, but we still want to reduce the occurrence of cancer, so all that's left is taxing red meat.

[1]: http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/

What? We most certainly can introduce a tax on cancer. Don't you know anything about US health care? We can make cancer in remission a pre-existing condition, and make those who have it practically uninsurable, so that their next major health-impacting event bankrupts them, or kills them, or both.

If someone with cancer dies, their cancer also dies. Net result: less cancer. (Unless it is important to research, such as HeLa. In that case, the cancer can go on living with all expenses paid, and the human it came from can be forgotten, and their estate uncompensated.)

~ (Poe's law: insincere.)

What about letting people make their own choices without trying to social engineer them, which is essentially forcing our values onto them?

"But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion."

-- The Tragedy of the Commons

I recommend the whole paper as a good think on the unintended consequences of not biasing the options of people away from collective irresponsibility.

Because their choices have consequences for others.

You might not care about some health risk, but when you get sick, your family is going to be affected, your coworkers are going to be affected, and society has to pay for you to get well (by paying more for health insurance).

And we're social animals. We care about one another. And caring sometimes means that we nudge people into a direction that makes them healthier.

(I don't actually know if red meat is dangerous enough to justify a tax, but for the sake of argument, let's assume it is)

First of all you can tax cancer, you make people who engage in voluntary cancer-inducing activities such as smoking pay higher health care costs.

But secondly that WHO page is frequently cited by people who apparently haven't understood the numbers behind it. It's not worthwhile to tax meat as a cancer risk because the health impact is a rounding error.

According to the WHO:

> about 34 000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.

That's the population of a village worldwide. To turn that into a death rate for the world population in 2015 is 34000/7400000000*100000 = 0.45.

That wouldn't even make it onto this table[1] of most common worldwide death rates. You can see rates like 15 for diabetes, and 115 for heart disease, both of which are strongly linked to diet.

If everyone in the world adjusted their diet so they wouldn't be overweight or obese, but kept eating processed red meat, then diet-related illnesses would be rare enough that nobody would even bother talking about them, as opposed to being the one of the leading causes of death in the western world.

Citing a WHO report which says that evidence of carcinogenicity is strong without context is correct but misleading. As that page points out you can have strong evidence but tiny effect sizes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...

That red meat is carcinogenic was just an example for illustrating my point that externalities are hard /impossible to tax.

I could just as well have said that red meat increases risk of heart attacks, red meat increases choleserol, raising cattle for meat uses lots of fresh water in areas that don't have enough, that a lot of feed is required to produce very little meat...

It just happens that one externality (methane emissions) is easily measured, but all the other externalities of meat consumption are not, hence a tax makes sense.

You're right that it's impossible at the micro-level, but things don't need to be taxed down to that level.

E.g. are we going to tax farmer John more than farmer Bob because John feels he needs to smoke cigarettes while farming (and thus makes some small extra contribution to CO^2 emissions), no. Measuring things at that level would be silly.

But it's easy enough to get sufficiently right for the purposes of discouraging externalities and encouraging innovation. Farms, power plants, cargo ships etc. are all major contributors to pollution, and the taxes they pay can be calculated as a function of regular inspections, which all those industries need to undergo anyway.

Why not tax cancer? If I eat red meat and don’t get cancer, then why am I paying an extra tax? It isn’t like my red meat consumption is causing other people to get cancer.

Nice, so we should just farm manatees? :)

Joking aside, for the more curious, the article mentions work by Australian scientists exploring the idea in 2015: The red macroalgae Asparagopsis taxiformis is a potent natural antimethanogenic that reduces methane production during in vitro fermentation with rumen fluid

> http://www.publish.csiro.au/an/AN15576

I've been seeing this same story for what feels like a decade now. Anyone know why this hasn't been implemented yet?

>Anyone know why this hasn't been implemented yet?

The same story for anything. The market pressure to precipitate this change isn't there yet.

Is that really true though? There's plenty of market pressure for green products generally. If you could label your meat as being "low emission" or something, I think a lot of consumers would prefer that. I certainly would.

So the clarification is "from their burps". What does it do to the greenhouse gas emissions from their farts?

The majority of methane produced by ruminants exits via the mouth. This is because methane is produced by bacteria -- animal cells cannot perform methanogenesis. The big difference between ruminants and humans digestively is:

- in ruminants, bacteria-assisted "fiber digestion" happens before protease-mediated "protein digestion": the rumen precedes the abomasum. (The other two stomachs, the reticulum and omasum, have an unclear function, but appear to essentially be large filters.)

- in other mammals, including most herbivores, bacteria-assisted "fiber digestion" occurs after protease-mediated "protein digestion": the stomach precedes the colon.

So while a human or other primate -- including leaf-eating monkeys -- expels most fermented gas via the anus, a ruminant will expel most of it from its mouth (eructation):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumen#Stratification_and_mixin...

or getting the seaweed there, or growing enough seaweed

Growing and delivering the seaweed is among the smallest problems to solve. The animal agriculture industry already involves growing and shipping billions of pounds of feed. This is just a different type of feed, and it is seemingly only needed in tiny quantities, so it will be dwarfed by other expenses related to raising cattle for consumption.

The only thing missing is a profit motive...without taxes and regulations that internalize those external environmental costs, there's no motivation for cattle producers to add even this small cost.

plus if they're all eating seaweed then they're probably caged (as opposed to out in pasture) which comes with other issues. Maybe they can be at pasture and eat seaweed from a trough but they're certainly not eating all their food from that trough then.

What happens to the molecules that would have become methane: what do they become instead?

> Enteric CH4 is a consequence of anaerobic fermentation of feed organic matter (OM) by a microbial consortium that produces substrate CO2 and hydrogen in a reduction pathway used by methanogens (Morgavi et al. 2010). Feed additives have been used to interfere with this pathway or otherwise reduce the numbers of functional methanogens.

(https://doi.org/10.1071/AN15576)

i guess that means they stay as co2 and hydrogen, but the paper also says that fermentation efficiency is decreased which ends up making the cows eat fewer molecules.

Methane is just CH4. I suspect it's not produced anymore on the partial-seaweed diet.

But it then it is diverted to other pathways. It could become meat, milk, or manure.

I don't think there's a lot of aerobic activity going on in the rumen, so at least we know that it isn't immediately turned into CO2 (even if that would have been a win, methane is 10 times worse a greenhouse gas).

Really interesting, and potentially highly relevant to New Zealand where our many cows and sheep make up about a third of our emissions. Since cows produce quite variable emissions it sounds quite credible that some out of the box thinking like feeding seaweed could actually work in cutting emissions.

> (https://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/science/greenhouse-gases/...): Measurements of methane emission rates on sheep and dairy cows have repeatedly shown that the variability of emissions between individual animals is large (e.g. for young sheep grazing the same pasture, emission rates varied from 9 to 35 g/day per sheep). While this variability may one day be exploited to reduce methane release by selecting for low-emitting animals, it is not well understood.

this news has made the run once a year since I was in high school

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257589662_Methane_p...

so there's something to it that doesn't add up. either the economics of producing enough algae make it infeasible, or other factors come into play like milk/meat taste or even what to do with pastures if they aren't used for pasturing, it's not like you can grow stuff there.

Basic economics. There's no reason why farmers should switch to more expensive feed even if its better for the environment or cows. At least near term they will end up selling the same meat for a higher price to compensate for the feed, will sell less meat due to the price, ultimately hurting profits, and the plan will be scorned until it's abandoned. It doesn't even matter that seaweed is cheap and resource-light to farm, nor does it matter that only a small amount of this compound needs to be put in the feed. Shareholders will not tolerate more overhead unless forced.

This is the perfect place for government action to incentivize switching to this kind of feed, be it subsidy or tax break. Pollution is sadly profitable, and corporations need to be either fined for polluting or incentivized for reducing pollution; shareholders rarely see beyond quarterly profits, let alone the great economic consequences of pollution a century down the line.

Perhaps this is why we might lose the battle on climate change. Its the ultimate tragedy of the commons and we are genuinely all in it together.

It takes not government action, but global action. Why would producers in e.g. Germany put up with a carbon tax (or a methane tax) if producers in the US have their fingers in their ears, denying that climate change is a thing at all?

I believe the only way action will ever happen is if a global enforcement agency imposes environmental taxes on the world and backs it up with force. Its hard to even imagine what the world would look like as something like that comes to pass.

At the same time its a good thing to be preparing some solutions, e.g. carbon capture, seaweed eating cows. Just in case the world comes to its senses and decides to actually deploy/enforce said solutions.

Personally I'd prefer to tax pollution instead of rewarding good behavior with subsidies or cuts, hate to see tax dollars go to increase margins of private entities just because they're marginally less worse than the next one.

As to your last point, pastures could be used to plant forestry, which locks up carbon in timber.

There are lot of pastures that can't grow anything because they're too hig, I was taking about those kind of fields.

Unless we start farming seaweed not sure how we can feed all the cows we eat seaweed.

To produce feed that the cows enjoy, the researchers cut a small amount of red seaweed with cattle feed and molasses.

You only need to add a little seaweed to the cows' regular food.

Yep and I guess if it is only California dairy cows then that wouldn't be a lot either. Time to think about farming seaweed :)

Seaweed farming is a thing, and has been for about 400 years.

What’s also cool is that oceans sequester carbon in seaweed the same way forests sequester it in trees. So it’s a win-win to farm seaweed!

But does it change the taste of the meat? This is the real question and a deal breaker for many.

Grass fed meat is gamy than grain fed/finished, so I can imagine seaweed imparts an fishy taste to the fat and probably to the milk also.

Taste was my first thought as well, but rather than fishy, I would think if anything it might almost act as a tenderizer, adding natural sodium and umami to the meat. That does assume that the cows are eating it in a quantity where it makes any difference, but if yellow flowers can change the color of the milk, I don't know why seaweeds wouldn't do something to the taste.

That gives a whole new meaning to "surf and turf"... :)

All jokes aside, I wonder how they account for the extra salt that's in seaweed. I know cows usually have salt licks to supplement salt and other minerals; perhaps seaweed can supply all that's needed in terms of minerals?

Fishy? More like umami.

I am not sure if the word inhumane can be applied to animals but reading about innovations in meat industry usually makes me sad. I am not advocating that everybody should become a vegan, but cutting one's meat consumption by let's say 75% (eat meat every other day and cut your portions in half) shouldn't be that hard.

IANA Biologist etc, but isn't the problem their gas emissions from the other end of the cow? Isn't this like some new tech eliminating all the carbon emissions from using the radio in a car, cool but not the problem?

"...90 to 95 percent of the methane released by cows comes out of their mouths, while 5 to 10 percent is released in the form of manure and flatulence."

https://ideas.ted.com/methane-isnt-just-cow-farts-its-also-c...

I guess farting out of your mouth is a side-effect of having two stomachs.

Four stomachs!

https://www2.kenyon.edu/projects/farmschool/food/milkbio.htm

Today is truly a great day for the expansion of my trivial knowledge!

A quick search suggests that in fact the 'vast majority' of the emissions are coming out the front, not the back:

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/gassy-cows-facts-about-beef...

This makes me wonder if the major source shifts to the back after the treatment.

That would kill the cow. Further down the digestive track can’t really handle volumous gas buildup

If the end result is less total emissions, then we've won.

This just feels like propaganda from the meat industry. For every bit of scientific research touting the demerits of industrial-scale farming, the meat industry is incentivized to fight back.

That's great though! If the action that the "meat industry" takes is action that reduces its environmental impact, then we win!

Also, we'd get seaweed flavoured beef! Wins all around.

I wonder if it affects the flavor of the milk.

For sure it does. People in Europe pay a premium for "high mountains cow milk" ("Alpenmilch").

I had the impression that US milk has no taste but always thought it's just in my mind. But when I was in Colombia I met a guy from Switzerland who studied in Canada and said:"Oh wow, the milk here really tastes good like in Europe. Not like in Canada." So the milk in Europe and North America must indeed taste different. It is not just in my head.

If you are in New York city (especially Manhattan), you can often get RonnyBrook milk at the Union Square farmer's market and various stores around Manhattan - it tastes so much better you might think it's a different class of drink.

It's grass fed; if you buy it in the farmer's market, it's a couple of days fresh; and they care about their cows. I bought a bottle once, which didn't taste as good as usual, and when I told the guy at the market (he actually raises and cares for the cows), he took notes to figure out which cow was unhappy/unwell.

Not affiliated, was just a satisfied customer until I moved out of NYC (and now have no good milk available :( )

To those longing for milk that tastes like something in the US, I'd suggest finding a supplier of Jersey cow milk if you can, a much richer and more flavorful alternative to the Holstein cow milk most commonly available. Jersey cows produce less milk than the Holstein, but its butterfat and protein levels are significantly higher [1]. The cows' diet is going to have the highest impact on flavor regardless of breed, so it's important that they be free-roaming and grass- (and maybe seaweed-) fed, but it's likely that any alternative to Holstein cow milk is going to have a better flavor.

In Northern California, Saint Benoit [2] markets Jersey cow milk and yogurt. The flavor of their milk is incomparable to all others I've ever tried stateside.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_cattle#Breeds

[2] https://www.stbenoit.com/

Milk is pasteurized differently in the US vs Europe. I’d bet that has the most impact on taste.

Are you referring to UHT (shelf-stable) vs. "normal" pasteurization? Both types are available in the US and Europe but probably to different degrees. In southern Europe I definitely encountered more UHT than in my native Germany.

The different milks in my US region (Pacific North West) definitely have different flavors but I have no idea if it's due to what they graze on or other stuff they are fed.

Can't a cow just eat what it wants?? Why put it on some superficial diet ?? is it not equal to saying all humans should eat one type of food to reduce global warming ?

Sorry to break it to you, but we force cows to do all sorts of things they'd rather not.

Humans should actually adjust their diet to reduce global warming and there's nothing wrong in saying that - that's one of the most effective methods of influence.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I live with one and I eat really small amounts of meat now compared to what I used to. I have no issues with that whatsoever, it's often even better and tastier this way, despite of me being a vegetable hater. I really can't see a reason why people so ridiculously defend their meat meals like they're addicted.

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