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I thought that this methane emission was easily counteracted by some food additive, was it seaweed?

EDIT: yes, it was:

https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/case-studies/seaweed-suppleme...

Good point. But there are questions around the long-term safety of seaweed additives. And how many farmers would pay for seaweed while methane is free to emit?

Well, you can make it mandatory, the same way some countries require cattle vaccination, and other things. In the end it should be more acceptable to general public than just forbidding them to eat beef. And the seaweed shouldn't be too expensive, after all it is "weed".

And with more research they possibly could isolate that one tiny chemical substance from seaweed that does all the work here, and synthesize it, so we can produce it cheaply?

>easily counteracted

No, it's not easy.

This requires specific kinds of seaweeds to be effective, the species grows only in warm places(so not close to where we tend to keep cows) and it is not grown in large quantities yet, nor is the impact of doing that known.

We are quite some time away from doing this large scale.

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