Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral.
By contrast, when we dig up oil and burn it, there is no cycle. It's a one way street.
Methane production from cattle is slightly more complicated instance of a carbon cycle. The cows produce methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. However, it degrades in the atmosphere into C02. Since this C02 was obtained from the food the cattle ate, this is another cycle.
Since the methane released from cattle is continually degrading, it does not accumulate. The total amount of bovine methane resident in the atmosphere is ultimately a function of herd size, or perhaps more accurately quantity of feed consumed.
You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time. Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo which no longer exist in large numbers. As a result I would be very surprised to learn that bovine methane production is completely out of historical context.
As a result I see this as a topic which generally serves to distract from the root cause and real problem associated with climate change - fossil fuel usage.
That's like saying lakes are impossible because of rivers.
If you look at historical methane concentrations in our atmosphere, they are already almost 3x of pre-industrial levels, and over 3x of mean historical levels over the past ~1 million years [1]
Lakes don’t grow and grow and consume the world.
No, they don't usually grow forever, that's true. But floods happen, and that's bad. Last time methane was this high it was millions of years ago, and Earth had no ice caps. We have already flooded the atmosphere with methane, and the consequences of this will take decades, if not centuries, to play out. Contrary to our current instant-gratification dopamine loops of today, the lag between cause and effect isn't two damn seconds or even one frickin year. So stay tuned.
Was it all from agriculture? We don't know. There's plenty of methane coming from fossil fuel production. Just go read the Wikipedia article I linked. We do know that we are getting close to setting off some very bad feedback loops, as arctic permafrost is starting to thaw, and it's going to produce gobs of methane.
We are in the knifes edge of too cold. A little extra green house gas to buffer out the ice age is a good thing.
The alarmism is more likely propaganda than legitimate scientific inquiry.
Its happening and accelerating: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
If you need something visual look at the Miami type floods.
Also consider this is an issue that needs to be planned across hundreds of years. It might be slow but we dont move a city like NY in a decade.
Look at this: https://sealevelrise.org/states/new-york/#:~:text=The%20sea%....
Genuinely, do you feel these links are alarmism and propaganda?
That's much more akin to digging carbon out of the ground to run processes than steady state cow methane production/degradation
Methane leaks from fossil fuel systems: 30%
Methane from landfills: 20%
Animal agriculture, including also manure management: 30%
Plant agriculture: 15%
Other: 5%
Plant agriculture is especially rice paddies, I guess.
The first two categories are almost entirely new. Especially given human population is way bigger than it was in past ages, so past landfills likely weren’t so large.
This is surprising to me as I has figured ruminants caused more of an increase. If we could cut their emissions by 80% with seaweed this analysis suggests their overall contribution would be lower than it historically was.
An 80% reduction in CO2 isn’t quite enough, but it would avert most issues for a long time. More importantly doing something is much more productive than saying we need to change everything on day one which just promotes paralysis.
The obvious step one is to get cars and electricity to ~zero. That’s achievable in 20 years especially when you consider gas stations closing are going to make ICE engines unappealing.
This seems to be a good review, https://www.c2es.org/content/ipcc-fifth-assessment-report/.
The sixth report is due soon. Everyone should read the policymakers summary IMO.
> Across the study years, wetlands contributed 30 percent of global methane emissions, with oil, gas, and coal activities accounting for 20 percent. Agriculture, including enteric fermentation and manure management, made up 24 percent of emissions, and landfills comprised 11 percent. Sixty-four percent of emissions came from tropical regions of South America, Asia, and Africa, with temperate regions accounting for 32 percent and the Arctic contributing 4 percent.
[0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146978/methane-emis...
I’d like to add that much of the feed is grown using fertilizer, which is often/typically produced via fossil-fuel consuming processes (see Fischer Tropsch).
Where carbon is stored in the system is another major consideration.
Great post!
I'll add some additional caveats myself. In certain areas of the world (South America comes to mind) cattle production is driving deforestation.
Food transportation and farming equipment generally consumes fossil fuels.
I'm sure we can think of more!
Three-quarters [of global deforestation] is driven by agriculture. Beef production is responsible for 41% of deforestation [...]
It's true, not all cattle production can be held accountable for deforestation. For example, here in the UK, it's supposed to be a less carbon-intensive industry than in South America, because the grasslands on which cattle graze are good for little else - they are not really suited for crops. I agree on that point.
However (and from this point, it's speculation from my part), I am very skeptical about that grassland being grassland before agriculture arrived. Eg. was it part of the ancient forest that largely covered Britain? If so, it was indeed deforestation, only it was around 500-1000 years ago.
And this gives a whole other dimension to the discussion - we are OK with our deforestation here in Europe, because it happened a long time ago, but we are not OK with deforestation in Indonesia to produce palm oil (which WE consume) because it's happening now. Strangely, we are not that keen on re-forestation and we just want to push the burden to developing nations (a form of de-humanizing the poor, in my opinion).
I don't have any argument here, I just thought I would share my thoughts.
Forests are largely steady state. They're carbon sinks when you go from no forest to forest, but not just keeping the forest around
My Google results say 94.4M cows in the US. Assume a quarter of those are milk cows, leaving 70.8M beef cattle. Assume a ratio of 1:1 cows to calves, leaving 35.4M adult cows for slaughter. 1000lbs. of cow will will average around 430 pounds of retail cuts. So, with 1/4 lb. servings, one cow will feed 1720 people. Contrary to beef sellers' belief that eating red meat every day is good, one should not consume more than 3 portions of beef a week if one hopes to live to old age. Population of US is 328.2M people, assuming they all eat precisely maximum amount of beef a week to remain healthy, that is about 51.2B servings (let's say 1.4 lb. each serving) of beef a year consumed, which is about 7.4M cows per year. There appears to be a needless surplus of 28M head of cattle.
So many things bother me about the cattle industry. The horror of it, the cruelty, the waste, the destruction of wild habitat, the environmental impact, the greed, and the bullshit idea that we as a society need to do anything to preserve the way of life for rich ranchers (such as the Bundy's, et al).
Do you have a source for this? Wikipedia says there are an estimated 75 million ruminants worldwide, while there was a peak of 1 billion cows on Earth in 2014.
US Numbers [0] direct from USDA and World Numbers [1] who claim to be from USDA but I haven't been able to confirm that yet.
[0] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Cattle/inv.php
[1] https://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-1960-2014...
Not at anywhere near the density you find in modern agriculture. Domesticated cattle and pigs alone are 15x the biomass of all wild mammals combined. Wild ruminants are somewhat insignificant compared to that.
Also as a point of nuance, I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well. I'm not trying to say no increase has occurred, simply that it is less than one might expect. Unfortunately I don't have exact numbers to back this up though. I wasn't planning on writing all this when I woke up today, and it's admittedly not my field. Here's to hoping more informed people take over!
There are 94.4 million cattle in the United States and around 4.5 million in Canada according to a quick web search.
A full grown Bison weighs 1600kg, and the average weight of a steer at slaughter is 600kg or so.
There was likely a dip between the virtual wiping out of Bison in the 19th century and the re-establishment of large herds of ruminants across the Great Plains via ranching, but in terms of biomass I think we can at least say that they are in the same ballpark.
(this puts aside the extirpation of antelope and deer species from large areas of their previous ranges. There were for instance 10 million elk in North America prior to European contact compared to 1 million today at 400-500kg fully grown).
(edit: according to statista your headline number of 1.5 billion is also off: “ The global cattle population amounted to about 989.03 million head in 2019, down from over one billion cattle in 2014.” — https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop... )
As you stated, this doesn’t need to be the case since a lot productivity gains come down to more frequent harvesting. The natural lifespan (not average due to low survival rates in the first year) of a Bison can be up to 18-20 years, while a typical beef cow is slaughtered at 18 months. Ruffed grouse have an average lifespan of 1.5 years or so, but can make it up to 7 years or more. Chickens are typically slaughtered at 8 weeks.
As for crops, large swathes of them replaced forest which were larger pools of biomass that still cycled into the atmosphere through decay and fire.
I think historical context is useful information, but just because it was fine at some point in the past does not mean it is fine in the current context. There are new sources of greenhouse gases and, as the dominant species, we have to make decisions about which ones are most important to us and make trade offs. Reducing the emissions from farmed biomass means we have to make less of a tradeoff.
Certainly the neutrality matters - that makes it a O(1) process, where as we have somewhere between O(n) to O(e^n) emissions.
We have too much of one greenhouse gas, and so far we've been unable to change that. Reducing another greenhouse gas could partially compensate for that.
For a large portion of the global Methane pollution from cattle, the carbon cycle started out with natural gas being used to produce artificial fertilizer. If we wanted to address methane pollution it would make sense to start there in order to address both leaks and the introduction of carbon into the system, but this is where politics comes in. Artificial fertilizer is not just the building block for most cattle farmers, it is also the building block for most meat alternatives and the so called "renewable and carbon free" biomass industry.
On my free time I often spend time diving in the Baltic sea, and every time I go below the surface I see the effect that artificial fertilizer has. The excess nutrient is killing the whole area, which in turn release more methane from the ocean bottom. Currently the area is around of 60,000 km2, but the effect can easily be seen in nearby "healthy" areas.
Probably won't help with runoff issues though, as it'll be chemically identical, just with a lower carbon footprint.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-28/spain-cou...
However, misapplication of fertilizer, and the resulting destruction of aquatic ecosystems, will take other fixes, and strong penalties on farmers that do this sort of damage.
No only is trying to do all subsidy non tax embarrassingly weak politics, it's a stupid game of whac-a-mole a market can just route around.
All of modern agriculture and food science has been about turning inedible calories into edible ones (think: cooking meat with wood, baking bread). There is almost no food you eat that isn't touched by fossil fuels at some point in the process.
The cows are eating grain raised using anhydrous ammonia (made with natural gas) and processed using diesel/gas/electricity to be edible before the cow ever sees it. That cow is 'eating' all of those fossil fuels. Only silvopasture cows wouldn't be, but have methane emissions from those cows been studied?
It's all hands on deck dude. Do you think we have the luxury to focus on just the worst offender? People (society) can work on more than one problem at-a-time, it's not a "distraction" it's doing anything and everything we can to prevent extinction of our species. Meat consumption and the environmental damage caused by it's infrastructure AND fossil fuel usage need to be addressed, not one or the other.
It sucks, but it is what it is, and it's not going anywhere.
The environmental movement was fully compromised a long time ago, it has absolutely nothing to do with the environment anymore, it's all about profit and shame.
Remains to be proven, it's never a linear process, once certain critical masses are reached it will happen more or less instantly. We're about due for an ice age, and from what I understand this is possibly how they start.
It’s also a cycle, the period takes some million years though.
Absolutely surprised. Do you have science to back up this claim? ... That goes back more more than a couple decades?
https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/st...
I suppose some people may consider stable to be overstating this situation. Nevertheless, when put into context of natural wild herd sizes as done by krrrh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26543346 , I believe my overall point stands.
The root cause of artificial fertilizers is fossil fuels.
The root cause of feedlot runoff is... feedlots? I'm not sure if there's something more fundamental at play here. I'd like to see a fundamental analysis of this.
Cattle feed is generally not human edible, that's the beauty of ruminant animals. Even conventionally raised cattle usually grow up on grass, only to be finished on grain. Granted as cattle are slaughtered at younger and younger ages, the grain finishing portion is consuming a larger percentage of their overall lifetime feed stuff. But even so the grain they're eating wasn't going to just end up on your dinner plate. They eat the husk and all. And besides this is only bad insofar as growing food in general is bad, so that's the root cause.
You missed deforestation, which we discussed elsewhere in the comments. I recommend to check it out.
Compare that with regenerative farming where if done right, the cattle actually captures more carbon in the soil than is released as co2 or methane. Even just having animals not taking a leak where they dump their manure makes a difference. Amonia is nasty and gets created when you mix the two. That's why cattle farms smell so nasty: it's the urine and manure mixing when they shouldn't.
Same steak but completely different from a sustainability point of view. Expensive but tasty. Might actually scale if farmers were incentivized to try this. There's no shortage of land to restore.
Feeding cattle seaweed might help a little. But maybe let's not intensively farm oceans to feed land animals. That sounds like a net loss.
Also biomass is a better proxy, and here the presence of cattle has increased significantly.
It hasn't, though. You need to be comparing pre-industrial herd sizes (Which fed less than a billion people) to modern herd sizes (Which feed nearly 8 billion people.)
The per-capita beef consumption was not 8 times larger back then.
It's true that there were large herds of wild ruminants wandering around, hundreds of years ago. However, the increase in the biomass of domesticated cattle vastly overshadows the decrease in biomass of all wild land animals.
This doesn't seem to be true, at all.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cattle-livestock-count-he...
This data goes back to 1962 and shows a trend. I suspect that if we had data from before the advent of industrial agriculture, that curve would tend to approximate lower and lower numbers as we go back in time.
Atmospheric forcing doesn't distinguish between "natural" and "unnatural" causes. Let's grant that methanogenesis from ruminant bellies has been a constant throughout history (unlikely, but as we'll see, irrelevant): that methane contributes a certain amount to the greenhouse effect.
That amount is non-trivial, because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and there are a lot of cattle out there. It does break down, but more is constantly being emitted: all of this is factored in to calculations giving cattle's contribution to warming.
A cheap mitigation which eliminates this source of methane is great news, because it reduces the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere: which is the only thing we care about, certainly not whether that gas is au naturale.
Our problem isn't the steady state processes, it's the growth ones, and we won't be able to solve our growth problems by reducing the steady state ones.
It's a simple "shut up and calculate" situation, any reduction of greenhouse gasses is equally to be esteemed in proportion to the amount of forcing effect it eliminates from the atmosphere.
It's true that removing all "natural" emissions is both impractical and insufficient (I don't intend to stop exhaling!), but reduction is reduction, full stop.
Besides which, what you said is wrong on the face of it: turning the year-over-year growth in carbon emissions into a plateau is woefully insufficient to mitigate warming. Besides, we're well on track to achieve it, though some of that is due to the pandemic. We have to reduce emissions substantially below current levels, and find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere faster than natural processes will do it for us.
In no conceivable way is drastically reducing bovine methane anything but assistance in that goal.
Isn’t that what reducing beef consumption does?
Natural ecosystems tend to not exploit resources to the point of collapse. Large herds of bisons may have roamed the lands, but their existence wasn't borrowed from erroded soils, drained sources, globalized deforestation and synthetic fertilization from mined minerals. They were bound to what their local ecosystem could provide.
Game meat is often carbon neutral because of that, whereas very little meat produced today is.
Essentially, it's only useful for pasture raised cows (soy and corn fed feedlot cows already produce a fraction of the methane) and there's no practical way to add algae to pasture raised cows' diets. They also speculate that cows' microbiomes will adapt to the algae.
I haven’t read the Wired article yet but my critique is that there isn’t enough seaweed being farmed to adequately enrich a significant cattle population and all this headline does is relax self-judgement of environmentally-conscious meat eaters.
The grass eaten by the cows would produce exactly as much methane if it was just left to rot. It's not as if cows somehow produce methane out of grass that would otherwise just....turn into dust?
None of those studies take this into account, they all just measure what comes into a cow and what comes out, but no one takes into account the amount of methane produced from the same feed even without cows involved.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/mar-2-2019-the-goodness-para...
Not really? Otherwise grass fields would piled up with grass several feet high.
Nobody's missing anything. That feed wouldn't have been planted in the first place if it weren't for feeding the cows. And that would translate to less deforestation [1].
No one in America has slash and burned a forest to feed cattle for a very long time.
It is extremely fertilizer and pesticide intensive, and entirely engineered. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the fertilizers are also fossil fuel based.
True, but these only account for 1% of energy demand[1]. Fertilizer is all about the nitrogen, not the carbon. The carbon for the corn is taken from the atmosphere.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...
However, my impression this is very unique and produces much less pounds of beef per acre than most places. The cattle breeds there are leaner and half wild. I'm hesitant to speak more definitively because I don't know specific statistics on how ranches in other regions differ. My impression is that the difference are substantial.
There are actually a lot of researchers who believe that the Native peoples were keeping the forests back via controlled burns, since grassland is better for hunting and agriculture, and the forests have regrown substantially _since_ most of the indigenous people died via disease.
> In the Eastern Deciduous Forest, frequent fires kept open areas which supported herds of bison. A substantial portion of this forest was extensively burned by agricultural Native Americans. Annual burning created many large oaks and white pines with little understory.[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_savannas_of_Nort...
Unless rainforests have an ever increasing layer of carbon (charcoal/coal) building up under them - which they do not - they stabilize with their total carbon intake being roughly the same as carbon released through other means. In most cases this happens (rate decreasing over time, though total carbon storage quantity slowly increases until a wildfire) in less than 100 years after a complete denudation event, most of it happening much sooner than that.
If you want to lock up carbon, you need to take it from the plants and sequester it somewhere natural forces (rot, weathering) won’t break it back down again - like a house, or in a cave, or in a hypoxic environment.
Methane is definitely a significantly more powerful forcing gas than co2, but also breaks down in the atmosphere in a short period of time into co2. Cow fart composition changes also only have a similar local, short term effect.
Short term effects can be helpful, but this only changes some parts of the (closed) cycle.
You only really change the math if you change how things are getting into or out of the overall cycle, which requires long term bonding of carbon to things such as rocks, or burial.
Converting atmospheric co2 (or methane) into plastic that gets buried in a landfill is net negative carbon balance for instance. Making the plastic out of oil products and then putting it in a landfill - net neutral (minus processing energy costs). Burning it for fuel? Contributes fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
Conditions on the forest floor typically facilitate aerobic decomposition which does not release methane. [1]
>If you want to lock up carbon, you need to take it from the plants and sequester it somewhere natural forces (rot, weathering) won’t break it back down again - like a house, or in a cave, or in a hypoxic environment.
Hypoxic environment is exactly the conditions methanogenic bacteria operate in to turn biomass into methane. [2]
> Converting atmospheric co2 (or methane) into plastic that gets buried in a landfill is net negative carbon balance for instance.
Except for the energy needed to convert the molecules, the energy needed to transport plastic to a landfill. Energy production and transportation both are powered by fossil fuels mostly.
[1]http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/fundamentals/consideration...
For instance - cows are raised on many parts of moorlands in the UK, where they eat only the grass growing there. But if you removed the cows, the moors would be exactly as they are now - they cannot support forests or any other kind of vegetation, because they are basically solid rock with an inch of soil on top. I understand that on the "intensive farming" lots where cows are fed corn/hay specifically grown for them that doesn't really apply - but farmers do absolutely raise cows in such places where it makes no difference - even in the absence of cows or sheep you aren't going to have a forest there.
I understand this isn't potentially isn't helpful, but the problem is very nuanced - some cows are fed in such a way that their methane emissions are a net positive. But I'm also sure there are some where the emissions aren't positive at all, yet it's all bundled into the same "meat causes climate destruction" bandwagon.
[0] https://www.moorsforthefuture.org.uk/our-purpose/habitats-fo...
Lets say the carbon in the grass goes into the cow and X% goes through the cow's metabolism and is exhaled as CO2 or becomes part of the cow itself. Y% becomes a part of the cow's manure. Z% is released as methane into the air. The carbon of grass decomposing on the ground will turn some parts as methane into the air, but also some parts into the food chain of smaller creatures, some parts as CO2 into the air, and some parts into the soil itself. Cows and decomposing grass releasing the same amount of methane seems unlikely to me.
That's not to say I think we should eliminate cattle. Well managed grazing actually does amazing things for the health of soil, and can even fight desertification.
This is kinda not true. Grazing systems supply about 9 percent of the world's production of beef [1]. 80% of the global soybean crop is used to feed livestock [2]. A lot of these soybeans are grown on land that used to be rainforest.
Your comparison shouldn't be cow vs grassland - it should be rainforest vs (cow + soybean + transport + processing).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Types_of_cattle...
Furthermore the grass in question likely wouldn't "decompose" like what I believe that's describing. It probably depends on where you're physically located, but in the north - grass grows for the duration of the season, until it eventually dries out in the fall to go dormant over the winter. I guess I haven't personally tracked that process but I would be very surprised if it's releasing methane in the same way that freshly cut grass left to decompose (via bacteria) would.
The question relies on how much carbon ends up in CO2, CH4, and fixed in the soil between use of what would become cattle feed. Carbon is conserved without a doubt, but how much ends up as gas and which gas is important.
Carbon dioxide doesn’t matter because every bit which ends up in the air had to be taken from the air a short time before to build plant matter. Methane matters because it is a much more potent greenhouse gas and how much gets as methane instead of carbon dioxide makes a difference.
Coal and oil formation is not being fed by plant life today. The carbon in plants is recycled rather quickly in to the ecosphere.
Today’s ecosystem can metabolize cellulose, so no more fossil fuel production. Quite literally an unsustainable fuel!
Now obviously being a TV show they had to show some extreme examples but it was definitely interesting when things like imported asparagus dishes released more than the British beef dish. However, things like the wine were even more challenging, wine imported from Australia in bulk tanks was relatively ok, but wines imported after bottling (from Europe for example) where horrible because of the extra transportation.
There are plenty of market-based methods for accounting for these externalities though, such as Pigovian taxes.
India is close to Italy in Scientific output [1]: 1040 units vs 1104 respectively.
India's CO2e output is 2.62 billion tonnes, vs Italy 337 million tonnes.
India's GDP is $2.869trillion vs $2.004 trillion.
India's population is 1,336million vs Italy 60 million.
So, India consumes 7.7x the Earth's CO2 budget, but generates only .94x the scientific output and 1.43x the GDP.
Or put another way: the average Italian consumes 2.86x the CO2 as the average Indian, but generates 23x the scientific output and 15x the GDP.
Its really the 2nd and 3rd world who are flagrant wasters of the Earth's resources, not the developed world. Looking at CO2 on a per-capita basis is basically irrelevant.
The inescapable solution to climate change and resource degradation is population reduction of the 2nd and 3rd world to density and intensity levels seen in the 1st world, or perhaps even lower seeing as housing is typically unaffordable in most 1st world countries.
This would suggest a sustainable population of India of about 650 million - which was the population of the country as recently as 1977 [4].
[1] https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/glo... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/india [3] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/italy [4] https://www.populationpyramid.net/india/1977/
The earth population that can enjoy life is not fixed at 2B, that's very myopic thinking. We should fund science & tech so that it's possible for 11B people to enjoy life without damaging the planet, instead of blaming the "others" based on racist anti-science attitudes and deliberately keeping them poor by punishing them economically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzBAxcJDSsc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348
http://www.overpopulation.world/
Anyway, earth could very well sustain even 20 billion people according to Martin Rees (in "On the Future"). It does require that we really reduce our resource usage, however. Going vegan, using virtual reality instead of travelling etc.
Luckily the trends seem to indicate we won't reach more than 11 billion (which is still way too much at today's resource usage) before the numbers go down.
Heck, a trillion or more, if we all agree to be suspended in tanks and fed by tubes!
Literally the only thing that matters is CO2 per capita. India's is way low. The low scientic output is a consequence of low per-capita income, it has been increasing and will keep increasing, will definitely cross Italy's (having lived in South Europe I know how the culture here is). It's only a matter of time. India's population has always been historically very high due to fertile lands. It would have been much lower, but 200 years of British colonialism deliberately kept Indians in poverty, keeping birth rates high. And suggesting population reduction - how exactly will you do that? Genocide? War? Try it and see how that goes.
You should focus on reducing your arrogance, racism, denial of facts, and over-consumption. You are not better than others. Learn some morals. The real solution to climate change is science & technology. Our current consumption level is just not inline with the current renewable tech.
You just want to forcefully keep the rest of the world poor so you can enjoy driving your SUVs and eating steaks, while somehow blaming the rest of the world based on some made-up metrics. Guess what that's not gonna happen. Try it if you can.
1.83 tons of CO2 per capita for India
15.74 tons of CO2 per capita for the USACheckout the first graph on this site: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local?fbcli...
It shows how eating animals and animal products is far worse. So even if we don't immediately eliminate all carbon emissions, reducing our consumption of animals can have a huge impact.
There was a study (Swedish researches I think) that looked at what purchasing effect have form vegetarians as they typically spend less on food than meat eaters. It found while they do have lower green house gas footprint from food, the additional purchasing power brought this back around 2% overall.
So if you look at this holistically, stopping one thing doesn't end its effect unless there is zero flow on from other behaviours as a result.
If there are any companies out there getting into growing this stuff for industrial uses, I’d certainly be interested in investing.
(I've no domain knownledge on this, but saw an interview with the founders of a company that produce seaweed for cattles. they do claim healthier animals)
Reducing the effect that industrial meat production has on the environment is great and it's something we as humans do, improve the negative effects of our behavior when instead it would have far greater effect to change our behavior instead.
If you are in high school or above you should also ask, how does reducing methane, which seems like a big chemical reaction change, effect growth.
If growth is reduced by 1%, then you better start cutting down forests to grow more cattle. If it is better then you get to save forests and ecosystems.
Stop cargo culting Global Warming. What you should care about is the environment and people, not reducing CO2 and methane. We need to make growing meat more efficient. (And Jevons paradox's isn't real is just another scripture from the environmental cult)
CSIRO has a good FAQ on seaweed for cattle which they own IP for - https://www.future-feed.com/faqs
This paper does add details I hadn't seen before - it shows that adding algae to the diet increases the efficiency of converting feed to body mass, and reduces feed intake. There was reason to believe that would happen, but I'm not sure it had been demonstrated experimentally.
But if you feed them seaweed then it's suddenly all natural. /s
That might be why. But in seriousness, I'm not so OK with feeding animals bromoform or seaweed for that matter if that's a common component.
I wonder if the reason the industry is pushing red seaweed supplementation rather than direct bromoform supplementation is that the latter might require greater evidence of safety (being essentially a medication rather than a foodstuff) before being allowed?
But cooking up enzymes outside of seaweed seems a lot more costly than synthesizing solvents, assuming dosing cattle that way doesn't taint the end product.
Is anything being done? Are algae or seaweed being added to the cow's food? If not, why not?
This "we can make cows climate friendly with seaweed" story pops up regularly. Call me skeptical as long as this is based on a few small studies and nobody ever tried this at scale.
Seems like at least one group trying to do something with it.
2) What's the incentive for the farmer? The benefits are entirely externalized. Less methane is good for the planet, but paying to add seaweed to the feed is nothing more than an added case for the farmer.
So if we wanted to roll this out, we'd have to provide publicly-funded incentives for farmers to do so.
My conclusions is that GHG from cattle is simply not as big of a deal as the environmentalists would make it seem. Another comment mentions that decaying grass also releases methane so I'm not even sure if there are any accurate numbers on the true effect of livestock on emissions.
All plants eventually decompose, but it happens at a much slower cycle than if we actively harvest it, feed it as grain, grow more where the original harvest was, etc. By speeding up the cycle, we end up with much more of it. Or at least that's my non-scientist take.
We gotta remember that "greenhouse gases" aren't a bad thing. They're fundamental to making Earth hospitable for life. But there's a balance. When we speed up the "carbon cycle", we end up with too much of the stuff, which throws the whole system out of balance. But we could just as easily end up with too little some day in the future, which would cause us all sorts of other problems.
As for whether we have truly accurate numbers for any of this, I too am skeptical. But it's early days for research in this area. One or two studies doesn't cut it, but that doesn't mean they're not onto something huge.
The first problem is that cattle account for about ~5% of the emissions from industrialized countries. So it's not actually that high of a priority from a climate standpoint. It's also not the first time that microbial fermentation has been successfully diverted away from methanogenesis; look up "biohydrogen" to find other examples where H2 is the terminal electron carrier instead of CH4 (I assume that happens here; fermentation needs an electron sink). Furthermore, a high proportion of the emissions related to agriculture comprise fertilizer-derived nitrous oxide, which has a longer half-life than methane and is thus more damaging. Further-furthermore, you still have open questions on how this affects long-term health and the rumen microbiome, which simply won't be answered quickly.
The smart money IMHO is on lab-grown meat. I expect seaweed may feature into a future market for ethically sourced fancy cheeses, but is unlikely to affect the market for staple foods.
Livestock contributes to 15% of all greenhouse gasses. But the solution is easy, cheap, and only midly inconvenient. Going vegan.
This has the added benefit of protecting threatened ecosystems in the rainforrest and seas.
We could then spend that energy on the difficult stuff. Fast tracked rollout of renevables and interrim energy storage.
You still have the climate, land, and water impact of the majority of the feed.
You're also stil stuck with the huge water requirements, antibiotic resistence, disease, and animal cruelty.
You're advocating for a reduction of at most 50% of the harmfull effects. But going 100% is trivial, so why not do it?
We can't even convince the public to wear face masks in public and that vaccines are safe, and you're telling me that it would be trivial to make everyone go vegan? Even discussing this is pointlessly filling the atmosphere with more CO2.
I actually happen to think that our civilization will inevitably become vegetarian, but it won't happen within my lifetime, and in the meantime, some scientists have found a cheap way to reduce methane emissions. That's awesome! Stop pissing on their work.
Please stop making everything _my_ problem when other countries do not give a rats ass.
The richest countries are the reason for climate change. We've lived way past what is sustainable for a hundred years, and now you want to blame it on somebody else?
Sure, everything but taking personal responsibility...
This isn't correct.
Different types of coal can result in dramatic difference in CO2 production per kWh hour generated.
Why is the burden on me? That's never been explained by all the climate religionists out there. When the west does something it's bad. When everyone else does it, they get a pass?
We already did the industrial revolution. We already went through the long process. They have free wins - they don't need to design new processes or methods - they have plenty of money.
They have the wrong priorities.
Instead we can sit here and pat ourselves on the back for not using plastic straws, because save the turtles or some absolute crock, while 4 or 5 countries in asia produce almost ALL of the plastic trash in the oceans.
There are many things we could which even save money, make people some happier, and help the climate... but we don't.
Do I need to comment?
Although China still consumes 28% of the world’s meat, including half of all pork, and boasts a meat market valued at $86bn (£62bn)
That's the second sentence in the second paragraph of the article you linked.
i think making a point more extreme than necessary motivates people to disagree with you
It's a bit like saying: "Reducing the amount of fossil fuel is a good idea, but why go to zero?"
Nutrition is an entirely different thing. First of all, it is a very fundamental cultural and personal thing. Meat and dairy products have an important nutritional value, which isn't easily replaced, especially not by local foods in many regions. And except for the fossil fuels used in farming (both for meat and plant production), it is carbon-neutral. The problem with it are rather matters of scale and over consumption, so yes, the idea to just reduce meat consumption sounds like a very good idea overall.
I've read somewhere recently that you need 16kcal of feed to produce 1kcal worth of chicken. That's a 16 times loss in efficiency that requires a lot of plants to feed to the chicken that could have been consumed by humans.
I can't eat a lot of fats due to a bad pancreas, but I'm also B12-deficient and anemic. Doc asked me to eat more red meat on occasion, so I try to about once a week.
As an attempt at an alternative, I tried one of the popular substitutes. I tried it before my ... "pancreatic situation" was known to me. It made me sick for days. Vomiting, other digestive issues I won't list, and incredible abdominal pain and sourness of my stomach resulted.
I've even seen similar reports in various Vegan forums.
Those substitutes are filled with canola (and other) oils to add body, flavour, and characteristic "juiciness".
I'm intrigued by lab-grown meat, but those pea and soy meat substitutes are not viable. They're not even close to a viable substitute. Eating a steak or some bone marrow once a week or so keeps me feeling like I'm an alive human being, which I have to say is nice having been close to the alternative.
I take 1 1000% daily reccomended dose per day, as per consultation with my doctor. Together with D3, Folic Acid, and Iron.
Most people are vitamin deficient, meat eating/milk drinking or not, unless you actively substitute.
It's all the same stuff anyways. B12 is produced by bacteria living on the ground. Which would normally bio accumulate in livestock. Howeve since most livestock is fed with silo feed, theyd too get B12 deficiency, if it wasn't substituted.
So you have the choice of eating B12 directly with a lot of control over dosage, or have the livestock swallow the pill for you. Seems like an inefficient intermediary step.
It's not enough. And uptake is a complex process, it's not as simple as supplement with a given isolate. Unfortunately, not every human body will adhere to a textbook case where a single supplemental pill or shot does the trick. If it did, I'd be in a better way.
As it is, I'm working on staying ahead of any problems B12 and anemia can cause me down the line. I'd rather not reach the point of others I've known who have to have regular blood transfusions to stay alive and prevent their minds and bodies from eroding.
I'll stick to my physician's word and millennia of evolution on that one, if it's all the same to you.
And please, show me some respect: you must know that consuming a complex of nutrients through a food source is not the same as ingesting a copious amount of an isolate. It's certainly not akin to an animal "swallowing a pill" for me.
I wish you lasting health, but fear you are suggesting we all gamble on the oversight and benevolence of the food industry by eating even more processed, engineered foods than even Doritos or Taco Bell as your main protein source(s).
Yes, industrial food does bad things to produce large amounts of chicken, but there are quality farmers still in business, and I'll take a real, dead bird, fish or cow (and occasional pig, though harder to defend) any day over engineered replacement proteins.
I guess you meant "some humans eat meat", or else I cannot be human by your definition, and I sure look like one.
But then, some* humans also kill each other, rape their children (etc). But no one was trying to describe what some humans do/did but what they should better do if we're trying to live in a peaceful and sustainable world. Why should we care that some people eat meat? I don't care that some people burn their own houses unless it threatens mine or my neighbors'.
In the future, we may well learn that people were eating meat and some continue to do so. Just like some people still commute by horse.
*I realized that the easiest way to curb climate change is simply to stop eating meat. I'm healthier and can cook more dishes than ever. Why would the world not go vegan? I can't find a good reason except "because I believe so". Then, again, more and more people become vegetarian so we can only bet.
Currently, meat substitutes are effectively a premium product - however, if (when?) they would be available at half the price of animal protein, then I believe meat consumption worldwide would decrease a lot even if people's preferences would not change. Cultural norms would shift eventually, but that's slow, and price changes can happen and affect change much faster.
We've known and broadly accepted that smoking is bad since 1964[1]. Yet new people start smoking every year. Even in countries where packaging displays disgusting pictures showing the long term results of smoking.
To me it seems unlikely that relevant parts of the world will become vegan in the short term, or that cattle farmers will pivot to something else. But I do often see that "green" initiatives that also save companies money are adopted quickly. Not all farmers may care about emissions, but needing less feed (and thus saving money) seems like an easy win. Hopefully all these small gains will add up.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/history/inde...
Just that going vegan is an incredibly simple solution, and itself super easy.
I probably wouldn't be vegan if it weren't for all those tasty vegan meat alternatives.
Just now I had a german "currywurst" made from wheat protein that tastes indistinguishable from the meat original. It actually tastes "better" becauese you don't get the "joyous experience" of biting onto a piece of bone or onto some chewy piece of atery or god knows what... shudder
And it'll work just as well.
If you want to stop people eating meat, the solution is to tax it so that the price of the good reflects its true cost. But that ain't gonna happen. So the least we can do is clean up the production and supply chains to reduce those externalized costs.
It's already happening to such a degree that diary and meat farmer interest groups are HEAVILY lobbying the EU, to make it as difficult as possible for replacement products.
We might as well put our efforts into cleaning up these roadblocks/corruption to a brighter future.
And why can't we do both?
Expect individuals to go vegan, expect governments to support the development of vegan substitutes. Have people take the bike instead of cars more often, but have a carbon tax on flights.
This is a dangerous attitude. While technically true it gives everyone an easy cop out to avoid making real substantive change.
Some things help and some things help.
Also, rebuilding topsoil with grazing animals has a side benefit of being a carbon sink.
I'm fine with having smaller amounts of animals in open spaces that goes around and take care of the fields, but today's animal agriculture doesn't take care of that.
We grow so much that we've stated to deforest the amazonas for it.
You will never be able to feed mainl seaweed, nor by grazing alone.
The advantage of soil protection from grazing is thus negated by the additional feed production.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...
Eating more shrimp/seafood, chicken, pork, etc instead of beef would be just as effective without all of the extra work necessary to ensure people are getting necessary amounts of protein.
Asking everyone to go vegan is selling a lifestyle and a belief system, not solving a problem.
Making ~99% of people vegans is anything but easy, cheap, and mildly inconvenient. In fact, it is impossible (until we manage to replicate meat in the lab).
Your view is ridiculously myopic; I will not and most people will not stop eating meat anytime soon. It is a simple fact and you must accept it before trying to solve this. Real solutions are something like the article describes.
"But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Ride a bicycle."
"But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Live in a solar powered minihome."
""But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Don't reproduce/have kids."
"But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. No plastics."
I am a huge environmentalist, and I've adopted large swathes of these policies personally. As MIB said, a person is smart, rational, and reasonable, but PEOPLE are scared, stupid, and crazy. They are lazy, apathetic, ingrained in habit, and tired.
Global warming in particular should be pursued in a multifront effort. No one can prognosticate and see "this is where we put ALL our efforts". To succeed it needs to be a combined, iterative, democratic process of research, technology, education, and cultural advancement.
I think we both know where this is going.
Me? I pick up litter. It's time to put lipstick on this pig.
Also, in terms of non processed stuff, the highest protein-to-calories ratio is Chicken Breast, lentils don't even come close (if you need 180g of protein, chicken breast will cost you 800calories while lentils will 2400cal).
Now I'm not aware whether eating chicken contributes as much CO2 as beef, but if it doesn't, why not tell people to switch to chicken instead of plant based stuff.
So not a solution.
"Asparagopsis taxiformis, (red sea plume or limu kohu) formerly A. sanfordiana, is a species of red algae, with cosmopolitan distribution in tropical to warm temperate waters."[0]
This seems to be a pretty big hurdle to overcome. Either all the cows are going to have to move toward the warm oceans or we will have to figure out how to grow the algae near the cows, both of these are huge undertakings.
I'm out of my depth, but is there any reason it couldn't be farmed in a hothouse?
The real challenge here is likely governments simply not wanting to invest in this.
You'll end up spending FAR more energy cultivating it in lots of small locales.
Algae to cow is likely a longer distance than cow to table, but one presumes the bulk of that is on rail and more efficient than the trucks used for feed to farm, cow to processor, and meat to table.
Shipping the algae doesn’t seem like a deal breaker.