[HN Gopher] Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane ...
___________________________________________________________________
Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in
beef steers
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 234 points
Date : 2021-03-22 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.plos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.plos.org)
| stakkur wrote:
| Thereby raising harvesting and consumption of seaweed, shifting
| the burden from one ecosystem to another.
| kleton wrote:
| The active ingredient is bromoform, which might even be cheaper
| to dose than the raw algae.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Which is fascinating, because I thought seaweeds only helped
| cattle by adding protease enzymes, which also works with
| humans: try cooking legumes with kombu/konbu.
|
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Is this what's new about it? I thought this finding was already
| known?
| kleton wrote:
| I'm not sure what's new here. All of this has been known at
| least 5 years.
| twic wrote:
| The nature of science is that experiments are repeated many
| times with slight variations before we consider that
| something is known.
|
| 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.
| ars wrote:
| Bromoform is incredibly toxic, and possibly even a carcinogen.
|
| 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.
| AlanYx wrote:
| I agree with you. The EPA classifies it as a Group B2
| probable human carcinogen, and it has been shown to cause
| liver and intestinal tumors in animals.
|
| 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?
| valgor wrote:
| Not eating cows or drinking cow milk reduces your carbon
| emissions from cows 100%. You actually don't need technology or a
| start up to solve this issue!
| MsMowz wrote:
| This isn't true unless your substitute is to eat nothing.
| arcticfox wrote:
| The "from cows" technically makes it pretty much true.
| Regardless, it's not a constructive comment for that reason.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| There was an interesting TV show on British TV (apologies, my
| Google foo is not able to find the name at this moment in
| time) where they invited a number of people to eat dishes at
| a hypothetical restaurant, after each course the tallied the
| carbon emissions released in creating the dish.
|
| 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.
| valgor wrote:
| Not all sources of food contribute equally to climate change.
| That is why this article is about cows, and why I commented
| about cows. They pollute the most.
| beforeolives wrote:
| You do if you want it to scale to large numbers of people.
| Affordable lab-grown meat (when we have it) and intermediate
| solutions like the one in this article (if it's indeed viable)
| actually work for everybody. Even if we assume that veganism is
| an okay choice for one's health, trying to convince people to
| go vegan won't get you very far.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| I agree, we've created a culture where even smallest of
| inconveniences is literally impossible for anyone. Anyway
| lets just finish destroying the planet because of bacon memes
| or whatever.
| Tepix wrote:
| Look at India. There you have more than a billion people who
| don't eat cows.
| samatman wrote:
| India isn't a great place to be looking if you don't want
| to see a bunch of cows.
| nkingsy wrote:
| They do drink the milk
| briandear wrote:
| How's their carbon footprint?
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| way better than the US
| meowgoldie wrote:
| Not much (per capita)
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| More importantly: what is their CO2 efficiency? How much
| GDP and science do they output per unit of CO2?
|
| 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/
| snarf21 wrote:
| It is such an unpopular opinion but this is the answer.
| Humans are selfish. The earth can't sustain 8B+ people.
| _Maybe_ 2B max with some technological advances for
| cleaner cars and other renewables.
| goda90 wrote:
| But how much does it reduce your total carbon emissions from
| all food sources? Any food source, animal or plant, can have a
| big impact if the agricultural practices involved are not
| sustainable. Destroying rain forests for palm oil plantations
| is arguably worse than raising cattle on pre-existing
| grasslands and using beef tallow in place of palm oil.
| valgor wrote:
| Reducing total emissions is another question.
|
| Checkout 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.
| mrfusion wrote:
| So if we ever did have a mini ice age, releasing methane might be
| a good way to manage it? Since it's short lived.
| Doji wrote:
| A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic
| arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way
| carbon emission.
|
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| The Haber process which you mentioned is really key here. It
| uses a lot of natural gas - more interesting than cow methane
| might be using nitrogen fixing bacteria or crop rotation
| (legumes) to reduce it's usage.
| analog31 wrote:
| From what I've read, you can't grow enough legumes to fix
| the needed amount of nitrogen for high intensity
| agriculture. The Haber process sustains a sizable fraction
| of the world's animal population.
| seunosewa wrote:
| Human urine would be a sufficient source of nitrogen but
| it ends up in sewage nitrification-denitrification
| reactors that eventually turn most of the urea back into
| nitrogen gas so that the effluent can be safely
| discharged into water bodies.
| analog31 wrote:
| I guess that makes sense, the nitrogen has to go
| _somewhere_.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm not sure what it does to their methane output, but
| can't you feed legumes straight to cows? You definitely can
| to chickens and pigs.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Very well explained! This is the kind of insight I signed up
| for.
| josefresco wrote:
| > distract from the root cause
|
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| This is the wrong way to look at it.
|
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| Being steady state is what matters about the boivne methane
| production, rather than if it's natural.
|
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| No this is wrong.
|
| 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.
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| Oil and coal also used to be organic matter, so it also is a
| cycle. Just a much longer one.
| thealienthing wrote:
| I never knew/considered this. I wanted to clarify something.
| What you mean when you say that there is no cycle in the
| burning of fossil fuels, do you just mean that it is a net
| positive gain of carbon in the atmosphere because the carbon
| did not originate from the atmosphere? Plants can still process
| the carbon put there by the burning of fossil fuels but there
| is an excess because that carbon does not originate from living
| things? I guess I'm just trying to clarify that there isn't
| something about the carbon from fossil fuels that makes it
| impossible for plants to consume it.
| Doji wrote:
| Yes that's right, plants can't tell the difference between a
| carbon atom which came from fossil fuels, and a carbon atom
| which came from an animal. It's all mixed together /
| fungible. Nevertheless, there's an important distinction
| here, because emissions from food are fundamentally limited
| by how much food we can produce, so it's carbon balanced on
| an extremely short time horizon. Meanwhile fossil fuel
| emissions are uncoupled from any sort of sequestration, and
| if it balances on any time horizon at all it will be a very
| very very long one.
| vkou wrote:
| > You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has
| remained relatively stable over time.
|
| 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.
| belorn wrote:
| The start of the carbon cycle is one which I have found to be
| very unpopular to discuss, and it has a direct connection to
| methane in the atmosphere. Artificial fertilizers is produce
| through a process which takes in natural gas as its primary
| ingredient. The process is also a major source for methane
| leaks, with a large variance in claimed contribution for the
| global methane pollution.
|
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| It will be fairly straightforward to decarbonize fertilizer
| production, using electrolyzed hydrogen rather than natural
| gas. As the industry matures, it's likely to be even cheaper
| than naturals gas derived ammonia. Here's a pilot project in
| Spain, for example:
|
| 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.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| This is why the Carbon and other externalities taxes always
| have to come as soon as possible. They are not just good
| ideas in themselves, but the resulting price _corrections_
| will make further investigation and planning easier.
|
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Fertilizer runoff has absolutely decimated the fresh and
| brackish water systems that I'm familiar with, even in
| protected areas.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| That fertilizer accounts for about 2% of global carbon
| output, but it does seem on track to be replaced with ammonia
| made from green hydrogen rather than steam reformed from
| fossil gas.
|
| Probably won't help with runoff issues though, as it'll be
| chemically identical, just with a lower carbon footprint.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Does that include all the supply chains required? You have
| to deal in EROEI not specific process steps.
| Doji wrote:
| This is a very insightful comment, thank you!
| titzer wrote:
| > Since the methane released from cattle is continually
| degrading, it does not accumulate.
|
| 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]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
| agurk wrote:
| Interestingly only about 1/4 of today's emissions are
| directly caused by all agriculture according to NASA[0]. A
| decent chuck of modern emissions are caused by other human
| activities.
|
| > 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...
| cwkoss wrote:
| I suspect that methane emission levels from energy industry
| are likely downplaying and underestimating total methane
| emissions from fracking and similar activities because they
| have a strong financial/political interest in doing so.
| pharke wrote:
| The wikipedia page you link to clearly shows that enteric
| fermentation accounts for 16% vs Coal and Oil at 19%. There
| is also another 36% anthropogenically produced methane in
| that chart so I think that easily accounts for the 3x
| increase without pinning it on cows. Interestingly rice
| cultivation contributes a whopping 12%.
| titzer wrote:
| It's like we got shot by a firing squad of 6 people and
| we're arguing about which one of them had the blank.
| pharke wrote:
| Not really, we're trying to do some important math to
| figure out how to balance a carbon budget. We need to
| know what options are on the table and how much each of
| them contribute. It's the same as balancing a household
| budget, you don't just flail wildly about slashing costs
| and enduring privation. You reduce expenditures in areas
| where they are unnecessary and try to cause the least
| disruption to your life.
| titzer wrote:
| I get what you are trying to say, but we _don 't have a
| carbon budget_, nor a methane budget. Maybe attitudes
| need to shift gradually to make other people feel more
| comfortable, but the fact is that we need to make radical
| changes to _all_ areas of human existence in order to
| deal properly with the magnitude of the crisis. It seems
| like...smart...to be rational, and weigh costs and impact
| and supposedly choose the smartest strategy and all, but
| it 's mostly just a vehicle for one sector to shift the
| blame on another and try to make it someone else's
| problem. I know you specifically aren't doing that, but
| the end result is that nothing will ever get done, as we
| will be in analysis paralysis even as it all comes
| unraveled.
| Retric wrote:
| Natural CO2 sinks that absorb carbon from volcanos exist.
| As such we can have some net human CO2 production without
| making things worse than they are today.
|
| 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.
| graeme wrote:
| Is that from cow herd size increases or other causes? OP's
| point was that with q fixed herd size the amount of methane
| accumulating in an atmosphere is stable.
|
| Lakes don't grow and grow and consume the world.
| sampo wrote:
| Methane from human activities: Methane
| leaks from fossil fuel systems: 30% Methane from
| landfills: 20% Animal agriculture, including also
| manure management: 30% Plant agriculture: 15%
| Other: 5%
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions
|
| Plant agriculture is especially rice paddies, I guess.
| graeme wrote:
| If methane is only 3x larger than before, that suggests
| animal husbandry is only a small part of the increase.
|
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| > 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.
| zackees wrote:
| Going to chime in here - ice ages cause extinctions, not
| warm ages.
|
| 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.
| dTal wrote:
| _Change_ causes extinctions. If the temperature suddenly
| swings down, things die. If it subsequently swings back
| up, do they come back? No! More things die.
| howlin wrote:
| The problem is the millions to billions of people who are
| living in areas that will become virtually uninhabitable
| due to temperature changes and sea level rise. The first
| way climate change will seriously negatively impact
| humanity is through geopolitical conflict and a massive
| refugee crisis.
| 8note wrote:
| Floods tend to come from melt or tonnes of heavy rain.
|
| That's much more akin to digging carbon out of the ground
| to run processes than steady state cow methane
| production/degradation
| LetThereBeLight wrote:
| Let's not forget that all the grain those cattle are eating
| were grown in nitrogen fixed soil produced via fossil fuels.
| Nor that roughly 40% of the world's crops are used to feed
| cattle. Or the other detrimental environmental effects to the
| land such as feedlot runoff that pollute streams and rivers.
| The environmental impact of raising cattle is by no means
| something we should ignore.
| Doji wrote:
| I agree we should not ignore detrimental environmental
| effects. However we should strive for a nuanced view which
| attempts to determine root causes.
|
| 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.
| acchow wrote:
| So you're saying if we want reduced methane in the atmosphere
| to help alleviate the climate situation, we need to reduce herd
| size.
|
| Isn't that what reducing beef consumption does?
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| > By contrast, when we dig up oil and burn it, there is no
| cycle. It's a one way street.
|
| It's also a cycle, the period takes some million years though.
| Doji wrote:
| Yes this is correct, I'm guilty of oversimplifying.
| [deleted]
| samuelbalogh wrote:
| > You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has
| remained relatively stable over time
|
| 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.
| mogadsheu wrote:
| That's a great start to understanding flows of carbon and other
| substances through the ecosystem!
|
| 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!
| Doji wrote:
| I wasn't aware that fertilizers are commonly produced from
| fossil fuels. That's definitely a problem!
|
| 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!
| samuelbalogh wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to treat deforestation as a local
| issue. Cattle production drives deforestation - whether
| it's in Brazil or the USA or China, doesn't matter, because
| we share the atmosphere.
|
| Three-quarters [of global deforestation] is driven by
| agriculture. Beef production is responsible for 41% of
| deforestation [...]
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation
| Doji wrote:
| I'm likewise unsure if it's fair to treat cattle
| production which did not engage in deforestation (perhaps
| located on the great plains or similar) the same as
| cattle production which did. However I find your argument
| interesting. I will spend more time brooding on it.
| samuelbalogh wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
|
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| How relevant is deforestation to our shared atmosphere
| though?
|
| Forests are largely steady state. They're carbon sinks
| when you go from no forest to forest, but not just
| keeping the forest around
| samuelbalogh wrote:
| I think that in the systemic terminology, a mature forest
| is a carbon "stock". Deforestation means getting rid of
| that stock and putting all of its CO2 into the
| atmostphere by burning it. Unless you use all that wood
| for something else (buildings or whatever) which is
| possible but I think it's unlikely. I might be wrong
| though!
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| asciimo wrote:
| > You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has
| remained relatively stable over time.
|
| Absolutely surprised. Do you have science to back up this
| claim? ... That goes back more more than a couple decades?
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Per capita red meat consumption has been declining in the
| U.S. for decades from ~130lbs/yr in 1960 to 112lbs in 2020.
| At the same time, chicken went from 34lbs/yr to 113lbs so
| overall meat consumption has actually increased.
|
| https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-
| industry/st...
| Doji wrote:
| agurk found some nice charts:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542283
|
| 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.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| You are half right about that. It also matters how these gases
| are released. Intensive cattle farming involves a lot of CO2
| and methane that has more to do with supply chain of the food
| for the animals than it has to do with the animals themselves.
| Think soil erosion due to tilling (which emits massive amounts
| of C02 & methane), fertilizers, pesticides, etc. needed to
| compensate for that. Transporting of the animal food and the
| rest of the supply chain. And getting rid of the excrement and
| methane.
|
| 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| There are more _pounds_ of live cattle today than there ever
| were wild bison. There are close to 94,000,000 cows in the US
| right now.
| Maursault wrote:
| I apologize in advance for my bad math. Please adujust and
| correct if any have the inclination. Thank you.
|
| 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).
| titzer wrote:
| > You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has
| remained relatively stable over time.
|
| 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.
| agurk wrote:
| I've been doing some research on this lately.
|
| 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...
| brnt wrote:
| Even more precise: gasses in the atmosphere convert and
| stabilize at an equilibrium concentration, depending on their
| marginal rate of production versus conversion. Therefore, an
| increased production van lead to an increased equilibrium
| level.
|
| Also biomass is a better proxy, and here the presence of cattle
| has increased significantly.
| oivey wrote:
| It's kind of irrelevant whether or not a cow is carbon neutral
| by some definition. The point is that greenhouse gas emissions
| are effectively reduced using this feed. Sure, it isn't as
| great as getting rid of all fossil fuels, but it's something
| relatively easy we could do.
| Doji wrote:
| If the seaweed is a pure win, then I agree with this. I just
| think a deeper understanding is also worthwhile.
| 8note wrote:
| As long as it doesnt add another carbon producing supply
| chain along the way...
|
| Certainly the neutrality matters - that makes it a O(1)
| process, where as we have somewhere between O(n) to O(e^n)
| emissions.
| frederikvs wrote:
| Even if atmospheric methane has not increased in recent times,
| it may be a good idea to try and reduce it.
|
| 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.
| Doji wrote:
| Sorry I didn't mean to say that atmospheric methane has not
| increased. It definitely has, as other commenters have
| pointed out. However, I contend that most of this increase is
| likely from other factors. Melting of the polar ice caps,
| factory emissions, etc.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| > Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like
| Buffalo
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
| Doji wrote:
| This article measures current biomass distribution. Given
| that Bison herds in North America has reduced from 60 million
| to 30 thousand, and I suspect other species have seen similar
| changes, I'm not surprised by the result.
|
| 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!
| krrrh wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| eigenket wrote:
| 60 million to 30 thousand is a rounding error, there are
| 1.5 billion cattle in the world.
| Doji wrote:
| You're comparing north america to the world, and the
| American Bison are only one species while cattle have
| displaced many species.
| krrrh wrote:
| Bison have never roamed outside of North America, so
| let's look at local cattle numbers instead of worldwide
| populations if we want to compare.
|
| 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... )
| gambiting wrote:
| There is an incredibly important part of this that I feel
| everyone is missing.
|
| 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...
| eigenket wrote:
| This point relies on the assumption that the cattle are out
| eating grass (or other plants) which would naturally be growing
| and rotting without human intervention.
|
| 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...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean
| tengbretson wrote:
| Surely its clear that if the soybeans aren't growing in the
| field that something else that grows, dies and decomposes
| would be.
| eigenket wrote:
| Yeah, and we even have a word for the "something else" that
| you're describing - its a rainforest.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Something like a forest with large trees that lock up
| carbon for many years, and a lack of commercial fertilizer
| (which uses natural gas).
| tw04 wrote:
| I don't think they're missing that at all. The cattle in
| question are eating feed (mainly corn) not grass.
|
| 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.
| jessermeyer wrote:
| Why is this incredibly important? Is there some huge proportion
| of unused, rotting feed in the world?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Honestly, I don't trust the source. What an animal science
| professor says off the cuff in an interview is something that
| should be verified with real data.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jstimpfle wrote:
| If there is no difference there (I don't know anything about
| this), doesn't agriculture at least lead to higher rate /
| volume of grass growth?
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| Only grass decomposed in an anaerobic environment would produce
| methane. Grass decomposed aerobically would produce CO2
| instead.
| gambiting wrote:
| But methane decomposes into CO2 on a relatively short
| timescale(12 years?) so surely....it's a wash?
| ufo wrote:
| Those couple of years where the carbon is in the form of
| methane instead of CO2 have a big impact because methane is
| a much stronger greenhouse gas.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Not a wash. Methane has 85x the impact per unit as co2
| which has a half life of 27 years.
| augustocallejas wrote:
| Wouldn't they make less grass then if it wasn't used to feed
| cows as much?
| PZ81JUXJE7uJ wrote:
| The problem is, most weed is produced exclusively for cows, so
| your argument does not work.
| BlackCherry wrote:
| But the cows eat the grass a lot faster than it would be
| rotting right? So wouldn't the speed of the methane entering
| the atmosphere be faster?
| gruez wrote:
| >But the cows eat the grass a lot faster than it would be
| rotting right?
|
| Not really? Otherwise grass fields would piled up with grass
| several feet high.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Would there be perhaps less feed grown if cows were
| supplemented with other feed? If 20% less of the cows' calories
| come from methane-producing sources, 20% less land/duty cycle
| is needed for cattle grazing/growing feed, so other things can
| be grown or don't get cropped as quickly.
| smcl wrote:
| I've got a question that may be stupid. So if you cut the same
| amount of grass a cow would eat every day and let it rot, then
| over the course of (say) a year both would release the same
| amount of methane overall. Do we know if this is the same as if
| we did _nothing_ to that grass - just let it grow and sit
| there, without repeatedly cutting it back? Because to me this
| seems to be what you 'd want to compare against.
| xphilter wrote:
| That simply can't be true in the wild. If that much carbon was
| released from plants in the wild, we'd never have coal or oil,
| right? Composting the grass might be the same as cows, but that
| process doesn't happen everywhere there's grass. In the wild,
| the grass would be trampled and new grass would sprout up to
| cover it, layers of soil would be generated. But honestly I'm
| just guessing, but your claim seems so far off the mark.
| jhayward wrote:
| Coal and oil come from carbon captured during the
| Carboniferous period, before the evolution of species of
| bacteria and fungi that could digest the lignin in plants.
|
| Coal and oil formation is not being fed by plant life today.
| The carbon in plants is recycled rather quickly in to the
| ecosphere.
| xphilter wrote:
| Fair. So then I would augment my comment to focus just on
| soil production in the wild. Not all of the plant debris is
| being composted. It gets buried too.
| PeterisP wrote:
| IMHO any plant debris that gets buried in the soil is -
| in the long term - also composted, only its breakdown is
| slower.
| unchocked wrote:
| I'm really glad you asked that! The reason we have coal and
| oil today is that earlier in Earth's history microorganisms
| lacked the enzyme to metabolize cellulose (the most abundant
| bioorganic material). So until then, it was buried and
| accumulated as fossil fuels.
|
| Today's ecosystem can metabolize cellulose, so no more fossil
| fuel production. Quite literally an unsustainable fuel!
| xphilter wrote:
| No I understand how it works. But what I'm saying is that
| the enzymes/bacteria in the wild dont process grass like a
| cows gut. You need composting to happen vs trampling and
| burying the grass. But ty!
| stevespang wrote:
| Not only that - - - but the effect of the red seaweed wears off
| over time as gut microbiota adjust to the methane depressant .
| . . .
| m000 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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].
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53438680
| tengbretson wrote:
| Then just buy American beef, which is produced without any
| deforestation.
| ddoeth wrote:
| Except the beef that isn't from free roaming animals but
| from mass producing facilities.
| titzer wrote:
| Is that sarcasm? Pretty much the entire midwest was forest
| before colonization. Now take a look at Illinois, Indiana,
| Iowa, Missouri...they're basically one big farm criscrossed
| by roads, highways, sprinkled with small spinneys of trees,
| and dotted with cities. Just load up Google Earth,
| satellite mode, turn off all labels, and zoom out. It's
| astonishing.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| This just isn't true. The Eastern half the US was heavily
| deforested by colonization, but that's really not true in
| the midwest. It was prarie.
|
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| Go argue with historians, if you like:
| https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/forestry/
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Indiana is the beginning of the Eastern forests. Prairie
| starts in Illinois and extends over most of the Midwest
| and runs North/South along the Rockies well into Canada
| and down to Texas, New Mexico.. nice map: https://en.m.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#/media/Fil...
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Like, I'm not saying wikipedia is an infallible source of
| truth, but I'm not exactly arguing for ancient aliens
| here:
|
| > 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...
| crishoj wrote:
| Are you accounting for animal feed grown on deforested
| lands?
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| It's not that simple. Not all American beef is raised on
| native grasses.
| lazide wrote:
| Why is native or not native important from a carbon
| balance perspective? Alfalfa still pulls carbon from the
| air when it grows.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Corn, people... American cows prominently eat corn.
|
| It is extremely fertilizer and pesticide intensive, and
| entirely engineered. As pointed out elsewhere in this
| thread, the fertilizers are also fossil fuel based.
| incrudible wrote:
| > ...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...
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Yeah, this is a bit what I was getting at. But all I know
| about cattle comes from my family's cattle background in
| Eastern Montana and the high valleys of the SouthWest
| corner of the state. In both those regions, many cows are
| raised in naturally occurring pastures, eating native
| grasses, save oats which are sown as a cover crop.
|
| 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.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| What I should say is, not all American beef is fed from
| naturally occurring pasture land. In fact, a good deal of
| it is not.
| lazide wrote:
| At this point, nearly all agricultural land was converted
| a century ago. The trend now is more towards decreasing
| total agricultural acreage if anything?
|
| No one in America has slash and burned a forest to feed
| cattle for a very long time.
| briandear wrote:
| So what would grow in that dirt instead? Nothing?
| lazide wrote:
| That seems wildly misleading? The rainforests that were there
| before certainly produce methane and other gases as things
| rot. Total biomass in a rainforest is generally stable - it
| is not really a sink over any significant timeframes. Plants
| take sunlight, use the energy from it to rip the oxygen off
| co2 releasing oxygen as a byproduct, and carbon to build
| themselves with.
|
| 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.
| bob29 wrote:
| >The rainforests that were there before certainly produce
| methane
|
| 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/considera
| tion...
|
| [2]http://solarcities.eu/faq
| matteuan wrote:
| Interesting, but still I don't think your comment is very
| relevant to this. Without cows we could have a forest instead
| of grass, instead of leaving it to rot. So if the number of
| cows remains constant you benefit from reducing methane
| emissions.
| gambiting wrote:
| But that's an issue with _where_ we feed the cows, isn 't it?
|
| 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.
| telchar wrote:
| I think you're underselling moorlands here. Trees can be
| planted on moors, and other even more carbon-sinking
| activity too: "It's worth remembering that the peatlands of
| the UK store more carbon than the woodlands of the UK,
| France and Germany combined!" [0]
|
| [0] https://www.moorsforthefuture.org.uk/our-
| purpose/habitats-fo...
| goda90 wrote:
| I'd like to see an actual study on this. Yeah decomposing grass
| releases methane, but in the wild does it release as much
| methane as it would being digested by a cow?
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| helen___keller wrote:
| I'm not sure how much this point matters, because the
| alternative isn't a field of rotting grass. If the land is
| undeveloped, the alternative is likely some kind of forest. If
| the land is developed, the alternative is probably cropland.
| Also to be clear, we're not just talking grass, there's also a
| massive amount of industrially farmed grains to fatten the them
| up, which wouldn't have been industrially farmed if it wasn't
| demanded for feeding cattle. So there's no real equivalence
| here.
| hannob wrote:
| Just wanted to point out: This is a study with 21 subjects, split
| into three groups. Those are very small numbers.
|
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| This is like improving ICEs to enable their continued existence.
| To what end?
|
| How about eliminating meat ag altogether since it's a waste of
| resources, a significant component of man-made climate change, a
| pandemic risk, a major source of pollution, driver of
| deforestation, and poses a threat to antibiotic resistance? But
| no, the typical rationalizations include: "Muh cheezburger is muh
| freedom. I can eat whatever I want. Where you gonna get protein,
| you pushy vegan weirdo, lettuce? Vegetables cost too much."
| klmadfejno wrote:
| You could start by not representing people who eat meat as
| stereotypical fat redneck americans, which, in addition to just
| being baseline offensive, is hardly a dominant trait among
| people who eat meat.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Some of my extended family raise longhorns in Texas for tax
| dodge ("working farm") and social validation reasons. They
| are definitely obese, redneck Americans who chew tobacco and
| are months away from their latest stroke, heart attack,
| and/or cancer.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| That's great for you. However, your extended longhorn
| family is not the only group of people that eats meat, and
| you come across poorly for making a straw man portrayal
| otherwise.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I question whether people who make such remarks have ever met
| a farmer.
|
| I really dislike this method of trying to attain one's
| vision; wantonly throwing around absolutes and creating
| enemies out of neighbours. It's hubris personified.
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| You're essentially correct, and (I think) being downvoted for
| the tone of your rhetoric, which could be phrased in a more
| pleasing and convincing way. Also, most of us do love
| cheeseburgers, unhealthy though they may be.
|
| Either way, humanity hasn't matured enough for this viewpoint
| to be considered common sense. Give us another few centuries.
| airhead969 wrote:
| The truth is painful and people will never listen because it
| threatens their identity and their lifestyle, so it doesn't
| matter how it's phrased. Only top-down mandates, unlike
| democratic processes, can solve climate change. I hope China
| threatens every country with obliteration unless they meet
| net carbon negative goals and participate in international
| CCS efforts to reduce GHGs immediately. No other mechanism
| will work because 99.9% of the planet aren't wise enough to
| save their own children. Those who prevent or avoid climate
| change GHG reductions are tantamount to firing guns at
| everyone else. And what do you do with someone who is trying
| to kill you and your family?
| peytn wrote:
| That's not necessarily the truth. It's more of a hypothesis
| or opinion.
|
| In any case, enforcement of anything will require boots on
| the ground (or boots programming and building the drones).
| So you'll have to convince the unwise 99.9% of _something_.
| Unilateral climate rescue by the enlightened 0.1% is, to
| me, a fantasy, as is anybody listening to threats by the
| Chinese government. They already do a lot of threatening.
|
| In my opinion, this line of thinking will inevitably be
| hijacked to commit genocide so some group or groups can
| stay in power.
|
| Would be nice to find another way.
| ReadFList wrote:
| How about we keep eating locally produced meat because it's
| healthy, far more than those "fake" meats that are no more than
| vegetable oils, estrogen from soy and the likes, and chemicals
| to add flavour, and instead reduce waste? Do you really think
| that the increase in vegetable prodution would not have any
| environmental impact? We grow them out of the air?
|
| And ICE should continue to exist to make sure we stop at the
| border all those who break the law to try to entering a
| country. No country owes any right to foreigners to enter
| illegally. Let them fix their countries first :)
| paulcole wrote:
| https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/soy/
|
| > Results of recent population studies suggest that soy has
| either a beneficial or neutral effect on various health
| conditions
| samuelbalogh wrote:
| Eating local doesn't even make a dent in reducing your carbon
| footprint.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
| etu wrote:
| Soy doesn't contain estrogen, it contains phytoestrogen which
| looks very much like estrogen but actually has the opposite
| effect and block "real" estrogen. Phytoestrogen can help to
| lower estrogen levels.
|
| Do you know where real estrogen comes from? Female animals.
| Do you know the gender of basically all meat/egg/milk
| products comes from? Females. So that's where your estrogen
| comes from.
|
| Not from Soy.
| rebuilder wrote:
| The devil is in the details, like: how do you get it done?
| j-pb wrote:
| You mean convince people to stop eating meat?
|
| It's already happening. At least in germany the number of
| vegan meat alternatives has exploded.
|
| These used to be niche products, you could only get in
| specialty stores. Now there's whole supermarked isles
| dedicated to them.
|
| The solution is pretty simple.
|
| Stop subsidizing meat and diary farmers. Stop their lobbying,
| which results in ridiculous laws like the ones in the EU,
| where you're not allowed to call Almond-milk Almond-milk,
| because the diary lobbied for "milk" to be a protected term.
|
| Put that money into vegan alternatives, and people will buy
| them automatically.
| airhead969 wrote:
| There is limited progress in terms of store representation,
| but it's not nearly fast or complete enough. It has to be
| mandated to stop it because there are too many "no mask,
| anti vaxx" people who will never stop using it like sugar
| of lead, DDT, asbestos, PTFE, or leaded gasoline.
|
| "Almond milk" grow of almonds is a waste of water in water-
| scarce areas. Also, compounds in almonds bind to
| testosterone. It's a very wasteful product.
| samuelbalogh wrote:
| Use the soy we are feeding cattle to feed humans directly.
| Cut out the middleman - lots of resources freed up all of a
| sudden.
|
| Keep subsidies to beef low and increase subsidies for plant
| protein (peas, beans, soy).
|
| Encourage healthy plant-based diets all over the world.
|
| Profit from the vast areas saved to start reforestation
| projects.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Why not tax meat into oblivion?
| samuelbalogh wrote:
| That would possibly be a solution, but alas I don't think
| it's going to happen anywhere soon.
| fastball wrote:
| What if you: feed them algae, don't deforest, and don't give
| them antibiotics unless absolutely necessary?
| airhead969 wrote:
| Where would the land come from to grow all of the grain
| required to feed 10 billion people Big Macs? Meat ag doesn't
| scale sustainably. See also: CAFOs.
| fastball wrote:
| Sure, and no CAFOs (which is somewhat a given/necessary if
| you're not abusing antibiotics). So grass-and-algae-fed
| beef in regions where growing crops for human consumption
| is not very viable, because not everything grows everywhere
| and because humans (unlike cattle) do not have 4 stomachs
| with which to process plants that are not particularly
| nutritious.
|
| Additionally, are you implying that _anyone_ is suggesting
| beef should be the primary food source for 10B people?
| Because I 've never seen anyone make that claim. You didn't
| say "how about we reduce meat ag and use something more
| scalable for feeding most people", which is a stance I
| agree with. Instead, you said "how about eliminating meat
| ag altogether", which is what I was replying to.
| samuelbalogh wrote:
| I 100% agree.
|
| Even after the swine flu, bird flu, SARS, MERS, covid, HIV and
| other viruses, we are still keeping animals in confined spaces,
| butchering them and selling their meat on markets so we can
| consume parts of their dead bodies, hurting our planet and
| ourselves in the process.
|
| It's a grim side of humanity.
|
| edit: prions too, not just viruses.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| To be fair, improving ICEs have been a massive help for
| mitigating climate change. Going from 60s muscle cars to
| current day hybrids has undoubtedly helped with NOx emissions.
|
| Adding algae to feed might not get rid of meat production
| altogether, but it is a good transitional step.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I suppose, but it has also enabled larger and larger vehicles
| compared to the small vehicles of the late 70s. SUVs have
| never been more popular.
|
| To defeat Jevons Paradox (where greater efficiency just means
| more of the thing is consumed, making it potentially even
| worse than before), you gotta electrify everything. Perhaps
| even meat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| airhead969 wrote:
| SUVs are the dominant vehicles produced in the US. Many
| small- and mid-sized car lines have ceases production.
|
| Tax engine displacement into oblivion and then require EVs.
|
| Similarly, tax meat ag into oblivion and then outlaw it.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The best way to do it for cars IMHO is to add SUVs (etc)
| to the EPA fuel economy standards, double the minimum
| efficiency standard, and adjust the penalties for
| inflation from when it was first introduced. The EPA fuel
| economy standards actually poll really well (compared to
| gas taxes).
|
| Then, like you say, require EVs as soon as possible.
|
| In more detail, I'd say reinstate the EV credit, but make
| it per-mile range instead of per kWh (and make the
| benefits for the first 50 miles like 3-4x that for the
| next 200 miles... and make the latter credit only
| eligible if there's 100kW charging capability... and make
| the total incentive up to $10,000, which is roughly the
| inflation adjusted original EV credit). Then after 4-5
| years, require all new cars/trucks to at least have a
| plug, followed by all new cars/trucks having to be pure
| electric 5 years after that. Adjust the credits for
| inflation and simultaneously Phase out the credits for
| plugs once they're required and then pure electric once
| that is required. Once most vehicles on the road have a
| plug, introduce higher carbon tax on fuel until it
| reaches at least $1-2/gallon (and then require all fuel
| to be synthesized for direct air capture CO2). After 15
| years of the first mandate, start outlawing internal
| combustion engine vehicles on the road or requiring
| punitive registration fees. And transition road taxes to
| miles and weight-based about 5-10 years after the
| mandates start to bite. Keep electricity prices low by
| subsidizing clean electricity and then ratcheting up the
| CO2 taxes.
|
| The aim should be to provide a strong carrot incentive
| well before a stick incentive. Carrots pill better than
| sticks. And the stick incentives don't get enough
| political support until they only apply to a minority of
| people.
| PortlandMEnerd wrote:
| Am I the only one who is wondering why the sample size was so
| small? It looks like only 21 cows were used and 7 of them were
| used as controls.
| j-pb wrote:
| I guess everything helps, but we put so much effort into the
| problems with easy solutions, that could be invested into the
| difficult stuff.
|
| 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.
| whitepaint wrote:
| > But the solution is easy, cheap, and only midly inconvenient.
|
| 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.
| fogihujy wrote:
| To put things in perspective, I'm still trying to convince
| the in-laws to recycle basic things like paper and plastic
| instead of simply burning it in a barrel in the back-yard,
| and to recycle glass and metal instead of just throwing it in
| the bin. Because, you know, recycling is "mildly
| inconvenient".
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| "But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient.
| Going Vegan."
|
| "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.
| titzer wrote:
| > PEOPLE are scared, stupid, and crazy. They are lazy,
| apathetic, ingrained in habit, and tired.
|
| I think we both know where this is going.
|
| Me? I pick up litter. It's time to put lipstick on this pig.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| This reasoning is flawed in the same way recycling is flawed:
| it puts all the responsibility on individuals to change their
| behaviour rather than government or industry using their
| greater leverage to change the system itself.
|
| 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.
| j-pb wrote:
| What makes you think that it's not going to happen?
|
| 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.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| Meat makes human healthy like no plant based protein does.
|
| 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.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| >Going vegan.
|
| So not a solution.
| jinkyu wrote:
| lol. vegan is just as bad if not worse for the climate.
| _sustainable_ vegan is horrifically expensive. go make a
| victory garden in your back yard and sell your car if you feel
| so strongly about this.
| paulcole wrote:
| > I guess everything helps
|
| 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_.
| j-pb wrote:
| Yeah, don't cop out, go vegan then ;)!
| paulcole wrote:
| Yep! I have. I also don't drive, don't fly on airplanes,
| live in a tiny apartment, and will never have kids.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| How will we fix the topsoil damage caused by industrial
| monocropping without grazing animals? We only have a few
| decades left before our petrochemical dependent agricultural
| system will be impossible to sustain.
|
| Also, rebuilding topsoil with grazing animals has a side
| benefit of being a carbon sink.
| j-pb wrote:
| For every m2 of top soil you repair with grazing animals, you
| deforest 10 m2 of rainforest to produce their feed.
| LegitShady wrote:
| What if you don't get your feed from the rainforest? I'm
| confused with the cause and effect of your statement.
| j-pb wrote:
| Most crops grown are for livestock.
|
| 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.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| This is utterly false. About 20% of livestock feed is
| fodder crops and grains. The rest is grass, leaves, and
| plant matter by-products such as crop residue, oil seed
| cakes, etc. All things that are inedible to humans.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22
| 119...
| etu wrote:
| Have you seen an image of a factory farm? They don't fix the
| soil. They ruin it more by having too many animals in a small
| space.
|
| 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.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| The solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Feed
| cattle some seaweed.
| yboris wrote:
| It doesn't solve the problem of dealing with water runoff
| pollution. Or air pollution (seaweed is not a 100%
| reduction). Or ethical problems with wellbeing of animals. Or
| health concerns of eating too much meat.
| j-pb wrote:
| The seaweeed is not a full on substitute for the refular
| feed.
|
| 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?
| [deleted]
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Because I like solutions that are possible, and I can't
| think of many things more difficult than changing people's
| behavior.
|
| 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| So we could all go vegan, skip off our normal diets, a huge
| change to the world OR china could stop running their very
| dirty coal plants.
|
| Please stop making everything _my_ problem when other countries
| do not give a rats ass.
| j-pb wrote:
| All coal plants produce the same amount of CO2, the dirtyness
| is inly related to micro-particles.
|
| 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...
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| > All coal plants produce the same amount of CO2, the
| dirtyness is inly related to micro-particles.
|
| This isn't correct.
|
| Different types of coal can result in dramatic difference
| in CO2 production per kWh hour generated.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station
| yboris wrote:
| Where's that American aim of being #1 ("exceptional") in ways
| like "ethically good" or "world leader taking the world into
| a better future"? Why is it now "well, others are doing bad
| things, we may as well pollute the shit of the planet too"?
| jinkyu wrote:
| really? America is far cleaner than it was in the 70-90s.
| but I'm sure giving a bunch of money to folks in Paris and
| Kyoto while they allow developing nations to dump smog like
| it was going out of style will fix this problem right up!
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > Why is it now "well, others are doing bad things, we may
| as well pollute the shit of the planet too"?
|
| 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.
| yboris wrote:
| The per-person consumption of electricity and oil - along
| with the CO2 emissions due to our lifestyle in the US is
| higher than just about every country in the world. _WE_
| are the ones that need to cut back.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| It's due to many reasons, and Americans are cutting back.
| Our CO2 emissions have steadily been dropping for
| decades. the US and Europe have been solving
| environmental problems. Since the US has started to lower
| global CO2 emissions have more than doubled. That's
| mostly due to Asia. Their per capita emissions continue
| to rise and rise and rise, that's even with their booms
| in population.
| coryrc wrote:
| For how much we spend, we can easily afford (aka minimal
| change to our lifestyle) to make electricity carbon-free
| in five years of we wanted to. We could charge trucking
| their true cost of road destruction and it would _save_
| us money and reduce CO2. We could allow dense housing
| neighborhoods (not force, just allow!)
|
| There are many things we could which even save money,
| make people some happier, and help the climate... but we
| don't.
| etu wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/09/chinas-
| appetit...
|
| Do I need to comment?
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Fades?
|
| _Although China still consumes 28% of the world's meat,
| including half of all pork, and boasts a meat market valued
| at $86bn (PS62bn)_
|
| That's the second sentence in the second paragraph of the
| article you linked.
| brightball wrote:
| The issue here is specifically with beef, so going to an
| extreme like vegan is way past the reasonable change line.
|
| 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.
| account4mypc wrote:
| eating less meat is a good idea, but why go to zero? how about
| eat beef up to once a week or smth like that?
|
| i think making a point more extreme than necessary motivates
| people to disagree with you
| j-pb wrote:
| Why not go to zero?
|
| It's a bit like saying: "Reducing the amount of fossil fuel
| is a good idea, but why go to zero?"
| _ph_ wrote:
| There is no fundamental need to get energy from fossil
| fuels specifically, we just have to work at getting
| replacements for all scenarios.
|
| 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.
| sesuximo wrote:
| Yeah I don't think zero is a good goal. Fossil fuels don't
| harm the environment at every scale.
| etu wrote:
| So you say that it's more extreme to eat beans than to raise
| animals by feeding them beans to then slaughter them to eat
| them?
|
| 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.
| sesuximo wrote:
| To the first part, yeah. It's more extreme in the sense
| that it requires bigger changes from more people.
| bookmarkable wrote:
| The world is not going to go vegan. Humans eat meat. No
| greenhouse argument will ever change this. This is worthwhile
| research, as is cultured meat and other options. Evolving the
| tech of raising and cultivating animal protein to eat is
| important work.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >Humans eat meat
|
| 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.
| bookmarkable wrote:
| Comparing child rape and murder to eating a dead chicken
| requires an impressive level of mental gymnastics.
| PeterisP wrote:
| IMHO price (or price/"performance") is a serious
| consideration for the actual food choices of many people,
| much more in practice than what they would say it is.
|
| 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.
| j-pb wrote:
| Habe you tried the latest substitutes? Artificial chicken
| based on pea proteins has become virtually indistinguishable
| from real chicken.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I have.
|
| 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.
| j-pb wrote:
| Why not take the B12 substitute directly?
|
| 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.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I do.
|
| 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.
| bookmarkable wrote:
| Artificial chicken stuffed with soy and other fillers can't
| be long term indistinguishable to your body.
|
| 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.
| j-pb wrote:
| Got any research to back up your claims?
|
| Your "natural" meat also contains "natural stress
| hormones", "natural inflamation inducing cytokines", and
| not so natural antibiotics.
|
| Your anti-scientific attitude is not helpfull.
| fogihujy wrote:
| Over-processed food is nothing new, and the issues with
| it won't go away just because you ditch the animal
| ingredients.
|
| I'll happily eat a vegan meal made from fresh and locally
| produced ingredients and prepared by a skilled chef. The
| vegan "burgers" and "sausages" from the store? I won't
| touch them any more than I'd touch frozen chicken nuggets
| or fish fingers.
| bigfudge wrote:
| It's not anti scientific to include a prior assumption
| that the food industry will suppress relevant data about
| the health implications of processed food. They have a
| long track record of doing this. I'd argue that this is
| actually a more rational Bayesian approach to the
| problem...
| Tenal wrote:
| Wow, listen to a few podcasts and educate yourself. Try
| Peter Attia at the very least.
| LegitShady wrote:
| It really hasn't not in flavour texture or nutritional
| content
| preinheimer wrote:
| I think it's really interesting that you view changing the
| eating habits of millions of people "easy".
|
| 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...
| j-pb wrote:
| Oh I didn't mean to say that changing people to go vegan is
| easy.
|
| 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_
| pvaldes wrote:
| This reminds me the kiri scam. Is a non solution from the start.
| Absolutely non-scalable
| staplung wrote:
| Legitimate question: how do they measure how much methane a cow
| produces?
| jayavanth wrote:
| It's not what you thinking. They use this
| https://www.c-lockinc.com/researchers/products/greenfeed-lar...
| headbee wrote:
| Article from Wired on why algae isn't the silver bullet it's
| marketed as: https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-
| algae/
|
| 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.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| If we're going to continue to have cattle, pasture raised is
| the only way to do it. Feedlots are not just devastating to the
| environment, they are inhumane on a level that is difficult to
| even conceive.
| pavedwalden wrote:
| Thanks for supplying the fact-check I was looking for. I think
| I've been seeing headlines about this "discovery" for over a
| decade, always presented as if it's a promising new technique
| but obviously there must be some reason it hasn't caught on by
| now.
| asciimo wrote:
| "I can keep eating steak because Science is about to solve
| that problem..."
| wyre wrote:
| Same. I would think at this point there would be companies
| focused on algae production for ruminants. AFAIK there is
| only one company in Australia that is doing this.
|
| 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.
| zests wrote:
| I find this hard to believe. Here is my epistemic estimation: if
| this were legitimate, it would be huge news. I've been hearing
| about this for several years now but somehow it never amounts to
| anything. I would have expected large scale cattle studies by now
| but I have not seen any of those.
| titzer wrote:
| You find it hard to believe that a $66 billion beef industry
| doesn't want to completely overhaul its logistics and incur
| massive switching costs and larger overhead?
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| 1) It IS huge news. It's been reported pretty heavily. (Or at
| least, I've stumbled across this news many times from many
| different and mainstream sources. I suppose it's possible that
| my filter bubble is making it seem like a bigger deal.)
|
| 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.
| zests wrote:
| There may be no incentive for the farmer but plenty of
| incentive for the scientist, the government and the
| philanthropist.
|
| 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.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| re: decaying grass, it's a question of speed and cycles.
|
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| > if this were legitimate, it would be huge news.
|
| 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.
| dbetteridge wrote:
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-18/csiro-super-seaweed-c...
|
| Seems like at least one group trying to do something with it.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| "Transportation of the processed or unprocessed seaweed should be
| kept to a minimum, so cultivation in the region of use is
| recommended specially to avoid long-haul shipping."
|
| "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.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asparagopsis_taxiformis
| ars wrote:
| Or, just ship the seaweed. There is no reason to "keep it to a
| minimum", shipping things takes far less energy than people
| like to imagine.
|
| You'll end up spending FAR more energy cultivating it in lots
| of small locales.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| Yes, but 'localism' lets people feel like they are 'making an
| impact', and that's what matters to them; feeling good about
| themselves.
| jws wrote:
| They are feeding, at the high range, 0.5% seaweed. A cow eats
| about 10kg of feed a day for 20 months before it is in turn
| eaten. That seems like 6000kg of feed which means 30kg of
| seaweed to make a 500kg cow.
|
| 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.
| shireboy wrote:
| Also, agricultural runoff can be an issue for oceans. I think
| that's mostly fertilizer, but I have to imagine a large scale
| beef operation near the ocean could have runoff consequences.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I think farming it at scale is something some groups are
| already pursuing--likely mainly because it could mean big, big
| business.
|
| I'm out of my depth, but is there any reason it couldn't be
| farmed in a hothouse?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Shipping by electrified rail is one option. Efficient and
| potentially 100% clean.
| vuln wrote:
| Where are you getting the electricity to power the rail?
| YorickPeterse wrote:
| Oh I don't know, how about: solar, wind, nuclear, hydro;
| plenty of ways to power a railway network without the need
| for fossil fuels.
|
| The real challenge here is likely governments simply not
| wanting to invest in this.
| mfi wrote:
| Volta Greentech is a Swedish startup currently working on scaling
| production of this specific seaweed:
| https://www.voltagreentech.com/
| barbazoo wrote:
| I wish we could collectively accept that meat consumption is a
| huge ecological and environmental problem our planet is facing
| and simply transition to a more sustainable, vegetarian diet.
|
| 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.
| tengbretson wrote:
| Don't expect the conclusions of people that have decided they
| don't like meat to change. Only their rationales.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Has anyone checked if the animals also end up healthier?
| JeanSebTr wrote:
| Possibly. My understanding is that seaweed improve the
| microbiota of the cattle which should be beneficial for the
| overall health.
|
| (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)
| Justin_K wrote:
| Or if the food product tasted the same or better!
| giardini wrote:
| My wife asks if this can be used for human males.
| aimor wrote:
| Yes, some people eat kombu (kelp) to alleviate gas caused by
| hard to digest sugars.
| aaron695 wrote:
| The only direction we should be wasting time with is lab grown
| meat.
|
| 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
| Tepix wrote:
| This is at least the 4th time that I read about this. The first
| time must be more than 10 years ago.
|
| Is anything being done? Are algae or seaweed being added to the
| cow's food? If not, why not?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Ok, but does it also work on humans? :)
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Does it work on humans too? Asking for a friend.
| brightball wrote:
| The first time I read about this a few years back I was wondering
| how long it would take to become the norm. Once produced at
| scale, its the easiest and fastest way to address the problem.
|
| If there are any companies out there getting into growing this
| stuff for industrial uses, I'd certainly be interested in
| investing.
| johnsutor wrote:
| I read a piece about https://symbrosia.co/seaweeda while back.
| I'm not sure if they have plans for large-scale production just
| yet, though.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| So, is the for grass-feed beef, or this is for corn-feed beef?
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