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Comment by ehayes | Hacker News Reader

Hot take: actual steak is made from recycled carbon dioxide

Sort of, but you’re also re-releasing a bunch more of the CO2 than goes into the steak. Plus, direct air capture is much more space efficient then plants.

Plants have been doing a pretty good job of sustainably capturing carbon dioxide for something like three billion years. Is there any direct air capture technology that’s remotely as reliable and low maintenance?

Not sure why you're downvoted because the answer to your question is definitely "no". Everything else, at the moment, is not much more than slides on a pitch deck.

Meat production is not carbon sequestering, it is carbon emitting. Most agriculture in general involves replacing more carbon sequestering natural growth with agricultural fields.

I think that would depends on what the natural growth is actually able to sequester, no? Not all areas clearcut for farmland were lush, quite the opposite actually with artificial irrigation bringing in the possibility of generating all that biomass.

No, meat production is still carbon emitting. What you’re thinking of is having cows manage land. For that to sequester carbon, you have to keep the cows alive and not be in a constant consume-supply cycle.

There is carbon stored in the soil that tilling lets out.

And of course all of this is before you get into methane emissions from fertilizer, etc. and the fuel costs of transporting all these crops around as feed. I mean you can just look at the stats for carbon emissions from meat production.

I thought plants are notoriously bad at this in practice. Not because they can’t, but because they actually don’t need that much CO2, and are also rather finicky to keep alive. Other algae are better. And CO2 scrubbers exist for closed environments like subs and space ships.

Animals can use land that can't be used for direct air capture or plant agriculture.

Animals need enormous amounts of water. If you have water, you can produce plants.

What land specifically is useful for animals, but not capturing carbon or growing plants? Please give a specific example.

> If you have water, you can produce plants.

Simply untrue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica

> What land specifically is useful for animals, but not capturing carbon or growing plants? Please give a specific example.

Careful moving those goal posts, you'll hurt your back. Not a goal anybody set. But here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangeland

Animal farming improved human use of land, and indeed crop farming depends a lot on animal byproducts. Or do you prefer unsustainable mineral fertilizers?

Yes you’re right, but only insofar as those animals are not slaughtered for food.

Even then.

Even then what? If the cycle continues where you’re continuously slaughtering and replenishing the animals for food and not letting them live their natural life, the argument that it is better at carbon capture is moot.

Same argument works against the OP. Who cares if their meat is from captured carbon, if all meat has always been?

Because one (animal agriculture) emits way more carbon than it captures. That's what the article discusses - people trying to make a source of meat-like protein that emits no or negative carbon into the atmosphere.

Well, they use ever so slightly less fossil fuel methane (which is how this process is powered).

So much of a muchness, really.

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