Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
1. Banking on the Seaweed Rush - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35322725
2. Ocean Farming: Seaweed is having its moment in the sun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35176560
Banking on the Seaweed Rush - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35322725 - March 2023 (46 comments)
Ocean Farming: Seaweed is having its moment in the sun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35176560 - March 2023 (45 comments)
Amazon funds seaweed farming at offshore wind farm to test CO2 capture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34839380 - Feb 2023 (91 comments)
Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28243731 - Aug 2021 (59 comments)
Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540737 - March 2021 (289 comments)
Feeding cattle seaweed reduces their greenhouse gas emissions 82% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26495536 - March 2021 (9 comments)
Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24574992 - Sept 2020 (314 comments)
Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711498 - Aug 2019 (393 comments)
A diet supplemented with red algae could reduce greenhouse gases emitted by cows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18521471 - Nov 2018 (20 comments)
Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18385384 - Nov 2018 (82 comments)
Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17704479 - Aug 2018 (159 comments)
Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17036221 - May 2018 (264 comments)
Scientist discovers particular seaweed nearly eliminates cow methane emissions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998395 - Nov 2016 (147 comments)
Discussions and thinking around sustainability underestimate the complexity of the problem we are facing. Climate change is but one symptom of the anthropocene (defined as the extremely intensive utilization of planetary resources).
In the fullness of time it might prove that climate change isn't even the most dangerous of the anthropocene side-effects. We already have several other channels and signals besides GHG emissions and induced climate change: ozone layer depletion, microplastics, invasive species, biodiversity loss etc. and there is a "smell" about them that's worse than rotting seaweed on a beach.
Don't get me wrong, various (bio)technological adaptations may play a role to expand our options, but fundamentally they need to fit together in a package that is conservative and will not lead to more harm and further degradation.
The principal component of our collective survival strategy is hard to substitute: Where possible, we need to do more with less. Where that is not possible, we simply need to do less.
OK but I think there will be.
We currently have financial incentives for producing CO2, which are proving almost impossible to reverse.
But let’s say we reverse them and create incentives for CO2 removal.
How are we going to change the incentive yet again, when it’s time to stop? By the time this happens, the CO2 removal lobby will be strong. Think about the jobs! The taxes! The communities!
But when you say:
> This is a far easier problem to solve. I’ll leave the solution to your imagination.
It pretty clear you're not really arguing in good faith. Dog whistle is pretty loud.
H2O + (Solar) Energy + CO2 => Useful hydrocarbons (everything form sugar to gasoline)
O2 + Hydrocarbons => Useful Energy + CO2
When you burn a log you're really using a solar battery that took potentially decades to charge and roughly 25x the energy you feel from the fire (photosynthesis is only 4% efficient).
The same process that feeds us powers the global economy, but at the cost of emitting CO2 in direct proportion to the energy we're using and benefiting from.
This is why "miracle" solutions are so unlikely. Because they require a major disruption of this process in a way that it's not clear is fundamentally possible. Anyway to massively remove CO2 from the atmosphere is fundamentally going to require energy. And because of the nature of inefficiency, will always be a poor use of any energy you used to create the problem.
This is obviously where things like nuclear fusion do provide the possibility of breaking this process because they create a lot of energy outside of solar powered carbon cycle.
Plus, climate change is not the most existential threat.
That would be the biodiversity apocalypse in every part of the bio-web being caused by a myriad of pollutants, pesticides, monocultrue farming, habitat destruction, light pollution, and hundreds of other scaled-up human activities, all leading to the breaking of the food web.
When the food web fails, it'll be nonlinear, and humans will not do well.
And even if such a miracle drug did exist, if seems like the better solution is to simply lead a healthier lifestyle to begin with.
We should be pursuing fusion as if the survival of the planet depends on it…because it is likely that it does.
People can hardly be trusted with a dangerous nuclear power.
400 years to boil the oceans, but that kind of timescale means we can have 300 years of business as usual followed by using a von Neumann probe to rearrange Mercury into a Dyson swarm, at which point the Earth's temperature is under total external control because we can switch the sun off when we don't like the heat.
OK, so more like "hiding" the sun — switching it off is still possible with a Dyson swarm but I don't know how long that takes — but from the point of view of Earth it might as well be switching it off.
Starship can carry 2 per trip. Inflatable, polymer hardening, weigh-shift controlled kites gliding just beyond L1 on the solar wind. We would have to launch 3 a day indefinitely, so we would still be encouraged to sort out our CO2 situation.
[1] https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
The Planetary Boundaries concept is in a sense the evolution of that initial internalization, the beginning of a more analytical approach towards long-term sustainability (a first UML diagram of our predicament if you wish).
the shape of humanity on the other side of this challenge (assuming it exists and we will somehow reach it) will be remarkably different from our current narratives and infatuations
The projection of multiple agenda only tangentially related to the the actual issue we are facing is not helping.
To me this implies the wizard spells (technology) are the only way out. We need to be able to control the climate through direct intervention.
...not to mention the extremely emotional language meant to manipulate instead of argue with evidence.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/16/1053758/running-...
> At least several of the departures were due, in part, to concerns that the company’s executives weren’t paying sufficient attention to the potential ecological effects of its plans. Some employees were also disturbed that Running Tide was discussing more controversial practices, including adding nutrients to the ocean to stimulate macroalgae growth.
I don't see how this is possible with our current population growth trajectory.
edit: better link
350 was the level around 1990, which is thoroughly "after we already messed it up".
We can probably do higher; we probably don't want much lower.
Net zero emissions means a much higher level, just one which isn't constantly still going up.
[1]: https://www.co2levels.org/img/graph_grid.png
[2]: https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/images/greenhouse-...
Instead of defining success based on climate stability itself, I think it makes more sense to define success in terms of what we care about: a thriving environment for humans and diverse other forms of life.
I think we'll be "winning" climate change, regardless of average temperature or CO2 level, as long as we're able to avoid catastrophic loss of human population and the rate of extinction is within some acceptable limit.
At the same time, the population has been booming to the point that close to half of the humans who ever existed are alive on Earth right now. This is a significant part of the current crisis actually.
https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived...
https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
(Obviously, the error bars for a prediction like that are large.)
Many developed countries are already losing population:
https://www.worlddata.info/populationgrowth.php
An even larger fraction of developed countries would be losing population already if it wasn't for immigration. This suggests that as the developing world becomes more like the developed world, human population will be less of a concern for the global environment.
My perhaps radical position is that two best solutions for surviving climate change are birth control and education for women. The fewer people we need to keep alive, the more easily we'll be able to adapt to the changing climate.
I think it’s a bit late for what you are proposing however. Most of the world population is quite young.
In answer to your question, YES. It probably is one of the fastest and least expensive tools to fight climate change. It requires next to no inputs, can be cultivated alongside other extractive species which foster biodiversity and clean waterways, and can sequester carbon. The products we can make from it can further reduce emissions.
However, we have to be super careful with overselling the solution. To have measurable impact, we need to grow a lot of seaweed OUTSIDE of Asia. Scaling up supply will be a challenge - because market demand for this seaweed as a food/feed/bioproduct alternative has not been completely validated. This will take time, but it will happen. Watch this space.
Overall, it's became very clear to me how hard it is to distinguish signal from noise in this sector. That's why the Paxtier Report newsletter is so good. If you're keen to better understand the space, check it out here: https://paxtier.substack.com/ . The Phyconomy newsletter is also superb: https://phyconomy.net/
Hope this helps. And shoot me a message if you have more questions.
Terrestrial ag fertilizers don't have to be produced by fossil fuels.
The Haber–Bosch process used to make ammonium nitrate can be solar powered instead of using methane.
Phosphate rock processing could greenified for a green "green" phosphoric acid wet process.
Potassium from potash is mostly a passive solar evap process.
For seaweed aquaculture, iron sulfate is used because iron availability is the most frequent limiting factor. It's frequently a byproduct of steel production, in much need of greening itself, and produced in large quantities. Volcanic ash is another abundant source.
One hypothesis is that algae are limited by some single resource which could be gradually dropped out the back of cargo ships as they cross oceans, seeding carbon-absorbing algal blooms as they go.
(I heard about this nearly 20 years ago, so I assume that has either been tested or banned since then…)
As mentioned in a sibling comment, it could run on some other heat source, but that hasn't been demonstrated yet on the scale of agriculture.
Keep in mind the vast majority of agricultural yield growth the last century is giving these limiting nutrients as fertilizer for plants, so it is successful and worthwhile for land based farming atleast.
https://www.dw.com/en/artificial-whale-poop-could-save-the-p...
and burning Australia is a proven way to generate more plankton. https://nicholas.duke.edu/news/australian-wildfires-triggere....
From that Wikipedia item,
"Each iron atom converted at least 13,000 carbon atoms into algae."
(Among other consequences.) https://www.cdc.gov/habs/environment.html
I think what we'd need to replicate the azolla event is a large fresh-water lake that's very still and stagnant, so that O2 levels in the deep parts are low enough that when the plant dies and sinks to the bottom it doesn't decompose.
Or alternatively would could have azolla-harvesting ships that skim the surface, and then we could turn the resulting plant mass into biochar and bury it, or something like that.
Azolla doesn't do well in salt water, but maybe we could engineer a salt-tolerant variant. The Black Sea, for instance, has about half the salinity of the rest of the ocean.
For some salt-tolerant azolla variant to get loose and cover the whole ocean sounds like it could be a major ecological disaster though, even if it does draw down CO2 really fast.
Azolla is sometimes used to feed livestock and as a fertilizer, so it could displace other, potentially more CO2 producing ways of accomplishing the same thing.
I think there have been some efforts to use it as a food for humans.
The cyanobacterian symbiont of Azolla, Anabena can produce neurotoxins.
So that leaves really one solution, which is attempting to reduce the amount of existing emissions to stop the rise to some degree, basically prolonging the enviable.
I personally think we probably need to just let it happen so we as a species can grow, or at least grow for a few hundred years till we forget.
The issue is not really people. The worst emitters are out of reach from us.
It’s good to make people more conscious of their environmental impact but what good does it really make when what is saved is a minute of energy production by the average Chinese coal power plant.
People who want food, transportation, electricity, heat, concrete, etc.
As you can see the most emitting sector is energy production. That’s mostly driven by countries using coal as energy source and countries with significant oil and gas reserves. It is a lever at the strategical and political level. Same with industry where gains are mostly achieved through regulation.
Construction is direly in need of innovation regarding its emission but unless you want people to sleep in the street remains somewhat unavoidable.
That leaves agricultures where people have a huge role to play by consuming less meat and somewhat transportation (even if that’s actually extremely linked to the offer of effective public transport).
For the rest and as much as I would like to believe in it, most actions I see people doing are actually fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. I’m a bit annoyed by it because it somehow lulls people into thinking they are doing something for the problem while the actual issues stay unaddressed.
Not that the US shouldn't also stop burning coal, mind you. Same with Germany.
We’ve been burning coal for hundreds of years and around 150 to make electricity. To suggest that others should do much less than we did and continue to do is, IMO, unreasonable to the point of being absurd.
Well then I’m being absurd because we are sharing the same planet and the fact remains that they are stupidly burning coal. The fact that they are late to the party doesn’t magically make it stop affecting all of us.
There is no place for virtue signalling here. At some point, some serious pressure will have to be put on countries which are not sorting their shit out or we will all pay the price.
A carbon tax could be imposed on companies selling products made using manufacturing processes that result in emitting CO2, regardless of where it's manufactured
e.g. American company C developed Phone P, sent it to china for cheap manufacturing costs, and sells ot to US people. C should pay a carbon tax to be allowed to sell that device.
Whether the company will pass that tax on the consumer or not or irrelevant.
I know... These are horrible, horrible ideas. And they really reinforce the "people don't care about the environment" thing, too. Maybe someone has better ideas?
Then: more food -> more organisms -> more CO2
It's a level of middle school
Your body, like a furnace, would break the seaweed down and re-release the CO2.
Better sequestration, would be to grow the seaweed and then bury it. Then in a million years future Earth inhabitants could dig up that broken down seaweed and have a new oil rush.
Which should be a hint to you that it's not anywhere near that simple.
No.
I'm not joking. It's been done so often that it doesn't add much to the conversation at this point.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... - over 2,000 hits.
I, for one, had never heard of Betteridge's law (:
[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/ (though surely everyone has seen that comic zillions of times, by now)
I see what you did there. Nice!
BTW, I am not advocating this approach. I just wanted to answer the question in the headline which can only be a clear "No".
Seaweed grows quickly, but it's almost entirely water by mass, and this strategy will really only work in coastal regions. If this strategy was adopted at a wide scale globally how much time does this really buy us? And this isn't even considering things like the unknown ecological effects of the plan.
The carbon in oil is lightweight relative to the two oxygens it combines with (atomic weights 12 and 16 respectively) from the air, so 1kg of oil emits about 3kg of CO2!
Punchline: we emit around 34 gigatons of CO2 per year.
Consider: One gallon of gas. [rest of world: liter]
1) How much CO2 does its combustion generate ?
2) How much does that CO2 weigh ?
3) At 100% concentration and sea level atmospheric pressure, how many Olympic-sized swimming pools (or football stadiums) would that CO2 fill ?
4) At current ambient concentrations (CO2 ppm), what volume does it fill ?
It is one of many viable solutions and humanity is working on many or most of them. We need them all. Seaweed would be great as cattle feed is one of the pathways this highlights.
>What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on weight before slaughter. There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output
[...]
>Unfortunately, adding the algae to diets on the pasture, where it’s most needed, isn’t a feasible option either. Out on grazing lands, it’s difficult to get cows to eat additives because they don’t like the taste of red algae unless it’s diluted into feed. And even if we did find ways to sneak algae in somehow, there’s a good chance their gut microbes would adapt and adjust, bringing their belches’ methane right back to high levels.
[...]
> All told, if we accept the most promising claims of the algae boosters, we’re talking about an 80 percent reduction of methane among only 11 percent of all burps—roughly an 8.8 percent reduction total
Yet the articles they cite (which both quote the same study) describe that on a diet of 0.75% seaweed (0.25% more than the research I saw years prior) only some cattle didn't like the taste and there was an unspecified reduction in feed intake, which hardly seems the foregone conclusion the Wired authors make it out to be. While the aspect about cows' gut reactions long term is also unknown, though one of their links mentions both a 72 and 90 day trial which showed no gut adaption or reduction in effectiveness which is said to be hopeful since 'most adaptations happen within a few weeks'.
Ironically the On Pasture link Wired cites for their argument against is more neutral/optimistic and also mentions that two other more common types of seaweed reduce methane output by 20% and encouraged experimenting with for cattle diets.
At this point the technology which is best in converting surplus electricity in something which counteracts climate change is most likely to become relevant.
It's much worse, this is off by a factor of ~365: that production of ~90M barrels is per day[1]. Global carbon emissions are up to 36 billion tons annually as of 2022[2].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-produc...
The cow burp effect is a myth. With five minutes thinking about it, is easy to see why is a no solution. I have explained here before why will not work.
Most of the seaweeds are water. And the dry matter is salty.
Coastal areas are extremely busy. You can't remove Honk Kong city to culture seaweeds. You can't block maritime traffic routes to culture seaweeds, or stop all commercial fishing near the shore, or ban tourism. In most areas is a no-way.
And there are other problems and obstacles that could be spotted easily by biologists, for example that water temperature is rising.
No. Ports are busy.
The coast is huge. Most of it, on the wet side, is mostly not busy at all
Sea lanes are further out, land dwellers on the dry bit.
But we could of course build it in the middle of nowhere, and then spend lots of fuel to move the product to the far-far-away markets, and even feel good about our ecological trace for a couple seconds.
I think you should think about what I actually said. Copacabana is right by a port
> But we could of course build it in the middle of nowhere
Often, in ,any places, wild and unpopulated wet bits are right beside transport routes on the dry bits.
Less than twenty miles from where I sit
And not all places are suitable to grow brown algae. (Not they aren't. Algae are not so easy to grow as National Geographic seem to suggest. They have predators also). Chinese grow a lot of Palmaria since thousands years and the trend is to replace it for its relatively low value by Hectare, either transform it into crab farms to increase the benefits, or turn it into a developed urban area.
A bit tiresome repeating myself...
The dry bits are populated, not the wet bits
Dry areas are required for logistics and as a safety vault. You need space for storage. Space for wintering. Space for each machine that you need to process the production. And drying algae smell. And if you have a big storm alert, you will need to rush to move a huge volume of stuff, cords and algae safely ASAP to the coast and keep there for several hours. You can't just put this in the closest hotel terrace.
There is a lot of things that a sea farm needs to survive. And there is a huge load of legal issues, because the sea is not a "free for all" space. Is a high skill / high luck and deep pockets activity.
Why could be a big company be interested in this? Well, If you have the money you could culture much higher value products in the same space, right?. I would speculate that is a combination of being able to obtain government aids + real state grab. I can be totally wrong about it, of course.
[…]
>If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
There are net positive CCS projects we must complete to bring the planet back from annihilation.
Plenty
* Shut down the fossil fuel industry. Cannot be done in one stroke, but can be done
* Ground the airliners. We actually do not need to travel around the globe in hours.
* Carbon taxes. Well duh!
* Corollary to carbon taxes is "Fee and dividend" - recycle the money as citizen's dividends
* Reform agriculture - Regenerative farming and deepening topsoils
Really not hard to come up with ideas like this, vary hard to implement them in a free society.
To drive emissions down to zero, without massive economic disruption, start small and increase the tax gradually every year.
Coupled with a "border adjustment" (a tariff on goods coming from countries to compensate if they have less aggressive climate policies) you can solve the problem of industries being outsourced to countries where GHG pollution is cheaper, and simultaneously put pressure on those countries to implement similar policies.
The most straight forward way to do this would be to make doing the bad things more expensive, which means taxing carbon emissions.
Alongside this would be to create alternatives that are cheaper and easier to use.
Unfortunately this would mean actually spending money, making investments in public works, and changing things away from the status quo, and apparently this is impossible.
So we're going to sleep walk into our doom rather than do basic things like making gas more expensive and building public transit.
Yes. This is the solution starting in 1990. It is too late now, for this to be the solution. It is a good idea, but.
We are going to have to shut down hole industries, and the owners will loose their investment. We are going to have to make a lot of very rich people, ordinarily rich.
This is very hard to do in a democracy.
We build such systems all the time and they do appear to be stable. The modern world couldn’t exist without their success.
“Being greedy” is having food on the table, a roof over my head, and a few nice things?
Food on the table — Rice, lentils, peas: not greedy; Beef burgers, caviar, civet coffee: kinda is.
Roof over your head — traditional hut, not greedy; penthouse suite in Dubai, greedy.
A few nice things? So many options. Once was, aluminium and purple(!) both cost more than gold. Is it "a nice thing" or "greedy" for me to fly to some paradise island for a week vacation? Or to own a fursuit? Or a normal suit? Or to get an electric bike instead of a manual one?
(I'm in favour of raising everyone to the level of current royalty; I think this can be done without wrecking everything, but we have to solve some problems first).
What percentage of people do what you’re describing?
The correct answer is neither; we need advanced technologies and material wealth that will allow us to master the environment more robustly. Consider that in the past 50 years of climate change, the human population more than doubled yet the number of deaths from climate-related causes dropped to one-third[0], mainly due to the growing wealth of developing countries that allowed them to better shield themselves against extreme weather conditions.
The state of man in nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Anyone who has spent any time outdoors in remote places or tried to build even a rudimentary shelter knows how true that is. There has never been a time when the climate was conducive to human flourishing except when humans made it that way by ever-increasing per capita energy expenditures; hence today, despite everything, we are the most insulated from the effects of climate on ourselves.
To "stop" climate change is like telling Glurg the caveman no, you cannot light that stick on fire to keep yourself warm, because think of the CO2 emissions!
So… you know. No free lunch.
Hope we, as biological creatures borne of a billion-year old evolutionary process, don’t actually need the system that birthed us (for some reason).
I'm by no means advocating that we destroy nature for the fun of it! But if the alternative is between us destroying nature or nature destroying us, I know which side I'm going to pick.