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.
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.
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:
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.
You are right, in the longer term, but hydrogen from electrolysis comes at a levelised cost approximately four times grey hydrogen. Of course that is comparing apples and oranges a bit (the grey hydrogen externalises some of its costs) but I think it is still over double as expensive as blue hydrogen. I would be delighted if electrolysis becomes two to four times cheaper than it is today but for a relatively mature chemical process I'm just not sure I see it happening in the next couple of decades.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
Gas stations are closing because ICE engines are getting more efficient and now have a lot more range. I think this is going to make them more appealing in the short term.
FWIW, IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) reports gather statistics and best practice across science and engineering and produce reports at multiple levels to detail pertinent statistics on this area.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One alternative would be accepting that the climate has always changed, regularly dramatically so, and focus on adapting to survive the inevitable.
It sucks, but it is what it is, and it's not going anywhere.
The environmental movement was fully compromised a long time ago, it has absolutely nothing to do with the environment anymore, it's all about profit and shame.
The geological record is quite clear that the climate has never changed like this without extinction events that kill 75% of all life on earth. Personally, I don't like those odds, especially since we have an alternative (keep the climate from changing). Furthermore, the climate has never changed anywhere near this quickly before. Natural warming and cooling happens over 100s of thousands of years, not a lifetime. This is unprecedented and preventable.
My point exactly, so we're better of figuring out how to survive it asap.
Remains to be proven, it's never a linear process, once certain critical masses are reached it will happen more or less instantly. We're about due for an ice age, and from what I understand this is possibly how they start.
> 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.
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!
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... )
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 [...]
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.
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.
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!
The carbon cycle is rather irrelevant. The trophic pyramid is what's to argue about. All the energy food provides comes from the sun hitting the land. We need to start there. Meat still only conserves 10% of the energy the plants provided to the animal. Therefore meat consumption is insanely wasteful use of land and resources. We could grow soy for human consumption on a fraction of the land for meat production and reforest the remaining space for carbon capture.
Natural ecosystems tend to not exploit resources to the point of collapse. Large herds of bisons may have roamed the lands, but their existence wasn't borrowed from erroded soils, drained sources, globalized deforestation and synthetic fertilization from mined minerals. They were bound to what their local ecosystem could provide.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes but also no... while it's true that it doesn't accumulate in the long term, in the short one it does induce a dynamic equilibrium with a higher concentration of greenhouse gasses that do contribute to atmospheric heating and the approach to potentially catastrophic tipping points... so no.
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.
What you are saying is true, of course, but you are overlooking the fact that cattle that graze on large enough areas (like the buffalo of historical time) are a part of an ecosystem that sequesters carbon dioxide.
Game meat is often carbon neutral because of that, whereas very little meat produced today is.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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].
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#/media/Fil...
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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].
What an ignorant comment. It just shows a failure of supposedly "superior" Western education, your citizens are deliberately kept uninformed in a desperate attempt to hold on to the power that was unfairly acquired by exploiting much of the world. Your arrogance just cannot bear equality, can you? The days of Western dominance are numbered, you cannot stop it. World power has been gradually shifting eastwards, rightfully. This is the Asian century.
Literally the only thing that matters is CO2 per capita. India's is way low. The low scientic output is a consequence of low per-capita income, it has been increasing and will keep increasing, will definitely cross Italy's (having lived in South Europe I know how the culture here is). It's only a matter of time. India's population has always been historically very high due to fertile lands. It would have been much lower, but 200 years of British colonialism deliberately kept Indians in poverty, keeping birth rates high. And suggesting population reduction - how exactly will you do that? Genocide? War? Try it and see how that goes.
You should focus on reducing your arrogance, racism, denial of facts, and over-consumption. You are not better than others. Learn some morals. The real solution to climate change is science & technology. Our current consumption level is just not inline with the current renewable tech.
You just want to forcefully keep the rest of the world poor so you can enjoy driving your SUVs and eating steaks, while somehow blaming the rest of the world based on some made-up metrics. Guess what that's not gonna happen. Try it if you can.
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.
It's a very arrogant comment indeed. A human's permitted CO2 output should not depend on how much she/he contributes to science or even the GDP.
Anyway, earth could very well sustain even 20 billion people according to Martin Rees (in "On the Future"). It does require that we really reduce our resource usage, however. Going vegan, using virtual reality instead of travelling etc.
Luckily the trends seem to indicate we won't reach more than 11 billion (which is still way too much at today's resource usage) before the numbers go down.
It is rightfully unpopular, because it's not based on facts. The earth could easily sustain 8B+ people if certain countries do not over-consume as they are currently. But you are right, people are selfish, especially these over-consumers.
Pretty stupid thing to say. UN predicts 11B humans at peak. Certain new studies predict 9.7B. Global average birth rate is already close to replacement levels.
The earth population that can enjoy life is not fixed at 2B, that's very myopic thinking. We should fund science & tech so that it's possible for 11B people to enjoy life without damaging the planet, instead of blaming the "others" based on racist anti-science attitudes and deliberately keeping them poor by punishing them economically.
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.
Too bad there isn't some sort of free market based mechanism that would inherently account for all of these factors without you needing to think about it.
I'm not sure if this is sarcastic, but there quite literally is not a "free market based mechanism" to do this. If there were, there would not be the market failure that we can observe today.
There are plenty of market-based methods for accounting for these externalities though, such as Pigovian taxes.
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.
What do you substitute this? What do you spend your saved money on?
There was a study (Swedish researches I think) that looked at what purchasing effect have form vegetarians as they typically spend less on food than meat eaters. It found while they do have lower green house gas footprint from food, the additional purchasing power brought this back around 2% overall.
So if you look at this holistically, stopping one thing doesn't end its effect unless there is zero flow on from other behaviours as a result.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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I can't eat a lot of fats due to a bad pancreas, but I'm also B12-deficient and anemic. Doc asked me to eat more red meat on occasion, so I try to about once a week.
As an attempt at an alternative, I tried one of the popular substitutes. I tried it before my ... "pancreatic situation" was known to me. It made me sick for days. Vomiting, other digestive issues I won't list, and incredible abdominal pain and sourness of my stomach resulted.
I've even seen similar reports in various Vegan forums.
Those substitutes are filled with canola (and other) oils to add body, flavour, and characteristic "juiciness".
I'm intrigued by lab-grown meat, but those pea and soy meat substitutes are not viable. They're not even close to a viable substitute. Eating a steak or some bone marrow once a week or so keeps me feeling like I'm an alive human being, which I have to say is nice having been close to the alternative.
I take 1 1000% daily reccomended dose per day, as per consultation with my doctor.
Together with D3, Folic Acid, and Iron.
Most people are vitamin deficient, meat eating/milk drinking or not, unless you actively substitute.
It's all the same stuff anyways.
B12 is produced by bacteria living on the ground. Which would normally bio accumulate in livestock.
Howeve since most livestock is fed with silo feed, theyd too get B12 deficiency, if it wasn't substituted.
So you have the choice of eating B12 directly with a lot of control over dosage, or have the livestock swallow the pill for you.
Seems like an inefficient intermediary step.
It's not enough. And uptake is a complex process, it's not as simple as supplement with a given isolate. Unfortunately, not every human body will adhere to a textbook case where a single supplemental pill or shot does the trick. If it did, I'd be in a better way.
As it is, I'm working on staying ahead of any problems B12 and anemia can cause me down the line. I'd rather not reach the point of others I've known who have to have regular blood transfusions to stay alive and prevent their minds and bodies from eroding.
I'll stick to my physician's word and millennia of evolution on that one, if it's all the same to you.
And please, show me some respect: you must know that consuming a complex of nutrients through a food source is not the same as ingesting a copious amount of an isolate. It's certainly not akin to an animal "swallowing a pill" for me.
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"?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.