A diet supplemented with red algae could reduce greenhouse gases emitted by cows | Hacker News Reader

A diet supplemented with red algae could reduce greenhouse gases emitted by cows

technologyreview.com

29 pointssmb11120 comments

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17036221

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998395

It's interesting that very effective technical solutions exist to the global warming. Yet, we are rejecting for political reasons the regulatory solutions that would see them deployed on an industrial scale.

A 10% levy on beef produced with strong methanogensis would make producers scramble for solutions such as these, while having an almost negligible effect on consumer prices - if sufficient time is allowed before the tax comes into effect. The results, absolutely massive, displacing trillions of equivalent investments in energy generation and transportation.

When I hear ideas like this, I keep wondering what the backlash would be if there was a 10% levy on all internet based services/software to tax the energy use of data centers, laptops trying to run electron apps and compile react projects.

If the levy was on data centres not consuming green energy sources, the backlash would be nil.

Agreed! In fact, many tech companies with large datacenters already use 100% renewable energy (or will soon). For example:

[1] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/environment/100-per...

[2] https://www.apple.com/environment/climate-change/

[3] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/08/renewable-energy/

A huge majority of the world's electricity emits tons of CO2 to be produced. Unless I'm mistaken, it seems datacenters would follow the same distribution

That's actually an excellent idea: only the tax should be higher and just applied directly to the non-green electricity used. Oh and to the entire supply chain of the infrastructure (servers etc).

Electron apps don't have the ethical issue of directly killing living things for our benefit. That's a good enough reason for a levy, imo.

The idea is to tax pollution at the source to influence behavior, as opposed to levies on random things.

I was going to patent this idea but it’s so simple I think I’ll let you guys have it.

Did you know methane is lighter than air and rises? So we simply house cows in a building where the ceiling is a conical shape and we periodically collect the methane from the top.

Or if it’s too hard to collect we simply pass it through a flame as it leaves the top of the cone and convert it to co2, way less of a warming gas compared to methane.

I suggest this under the assumption most cattle are factory farmed meaning raised indoors? But you could arrange for them to at least be in this building during peak methane production. Timing their food intake and such.

Master-Blaster from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome I believe already has this patent, although at this point the terms have probably expired. Maybe using cows rather than pigs would be novel enough to squeak through the patent office at this point...

Already being done to prevent explosions and to generate electricity in larger farms.

A cow release on the order of 100 kg of methane per year. Natural gas costs about 1 dollar per 2 kg of methane.

I don't know how hard methane extraction is from air with ppm concentrations of it, but could it be done for less than about 50 dollars per year per head of cattle?

Carbon emissions from cows are made up of carbon from the current environment. Not fossilized carbon. Even as methane, it's not a big deal, it's short-lived, and ultimately carbon-neutral.

Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas in the short and medium term, which is non-negligible due to feedback effects.

Additionally cows are not carbon-neutral if you take opportunity costs into account. The land used to make feed could be forest sequestering carbon instead since eating vegetarian or poultry based diet requires less primary production to yield the same calorie intake for humans.

It's not zero-sum, the carbon taken out of the atmosphere in the form of CO2 to make the feed is partly put back in the form of methane, which is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. This means a cow is a net greenhouse gas producer.

The half-life is not that long but not very short either, 10 years, but the lifetime is completely irrelevant: as long as we keep emitting the gas, the levels will stay the same or rise.

Or we could re-evaluate how we eat and drastically reduce the amount of meat produced and consumed.

Or we could do both.

So instead of taxing carbons... just mandate that cows have to eat these

And if any cow disobeys the mandate the punishment is dismemberment and being eaten.

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