The article only mentions that consuming this particular seaweed eliminates methane. I am missing the production perspective. How much more/less greenhouse gasses are created during production of the seaweed compared to traditional fodder? The net total is what counts.
Seaweed dries and rehydrates well, and like all vegetables it's mostly water, so if it's grown somewhere where it can be sun-dried then total energy cost for transport could be low.
According to figure 2 it looks like 2-10% of the feed is sufficient to achieve near-total methane reduction and <5% does not negatively affect digestibility, so 2-5% is the sweet spot.
Since this is aimed at environment efforts, I would ask how much 2-5% reduction in feed is in acres of land dedicated to farming and usage of pesticides. To my knowledge, seaweed farm are considered quite eco firendly, not size constrained, and don't need pesticides.
Not the OP, but the typical conclusion would be "effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming."
It's very hard to pass this analysis, since "high tech" is almost universally more valuable to humanity, per unit, that something low tech like farming.
If you're already in tech and you want to "help the world", giving money is almost always the best choice.
OP here. Your assuming I'd stay in tech to arbitrage the wage gap to give altruistically. You discount that maybe working in tech isn't what makes me happy (disclaimer: I like my current gig because of the people I get to work with, but nothing is forever), farming seaweed from my 41 foot catamaran (now depreciable as a business expense if commercially farming seaweed) might make me happier after working in tech for 15 years, and that I'm saving up to eventually leave the tech industry for living on a sailboat with my family.
> but the typical conclusion would be "effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming."
Don't make assumptions. Life is meant to be enjoyed, and we work for a third of our lives. Perhaps some of us don't want to do the same work for our entire lives.
Lastly, tech isn't how I would give altruistically. I'd trade options and futures and donate the profits. The impact would be orders of magnitude higher than donating my hourly/salary wages.
I'm not who you were replying to, but he wasn't necessarily making an assumption. There is a philosophical theory named "effective altruism" which includes tenets such as cause prioritization, cost effectiveness and comparative wealth to (hopefully) allow the most good to be done the most efficiently.
In amongst those tenets is the precept of comparative wealth, quoted here:
> Many effective altruists believe that, as formulated by Peter Singer, "if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it".[18] Anyone with an income of above $52,000 PPP is in the 1% richest people globally.[19] Therefore, many effective altruists donate a significant portion of their income to highly effective charities, since doing so would not cause them to give up important purchases.
In short, if you're making six figures in tech, it is generally more charitable to keep doing the tech that you're doing and donate more, and if the tech work you're doing isn't a net negative, you'll be doing more good by donating your tech largesse to a seaweed farmer instead.
You assumed OP wanted to be an optimally efficient altruist - but this wasn't suggested anywhere. If you read his above reply he explains briefly why he is still in tech and elaborates a bit on his goals.
The only assumption that I made was that when erichocean said something that began with a social buzzword and ended parroting the theory that reflects the definition of that social buzzword, that he was referring to the actual theory defined as "effective altruism":
> effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming
Offtopic, but since when did contextual assumption become something people weren't supposed to do?
Large scale farming is not low-tech. Presumably someone moving in to farming from a tech discipline would seek to optimise their tech use as a competitive advantage over incumbents.
Note that this study is about "in vitro" analysis. High iodine contents and toxic compounds might make this algae not suitable as bovine fodder.
Furthermore this is tropical algae and it traditionally hand harvested making it very expensive to produce. I don't know if it could be mass produced in sea farms.
At first I was confused... thanks for pointing out that this study is totally impractical.
Cattle, like most ruminants, rely on the fermentation of cellulose for most of their energy needs. Any feed additive that shuts down this process will result in malnourished cattle, and is unlikely to see broad adoption in the industry. Luckily for the PEI farmer, the seaweed he used didn't have this effect.
That's covered in the paper. The in vitro test was on bacterial samples that do that very fermentation and measured the output of nutrients (fatty acids) that can be absorbed by the animals.
I.e. shutting down the methanogenesis does not shut down all fermentation, it just takes other pathways. It is not an essential component.
Wow I guess this is why I'm not a biochemist; I wouldn't have thought that was possible. This might be something to look for at the feed store in another decade or so...
There probably isn't an incentive to reduce methane emissions for farmers right now though, right? We'd have to pass regulations mandating a reduction, or an emissions tax or something.
No, and that's not going to happen soon. But companies can start marketing their products as carbon neutral and selling them at a premium at retailers like Whole Foods.
The biggest producers are and will always be the mass market stuff, though. Who cares if 1% of beef is produced carbon neutral? It's nice, but it makes no tangible difference. Sadly this method of encouraging better behaviour won't work unless a costco or a mcdonalds, for some insane reason, wants to cut their profit margin and buy more expensive beef.
I agree with you. I'd rather see faster, broader action. But it's not happening soon. But instead of waiting around ask your butcher if they can purchase a "zero carbon" cow (or better yet go vegan/vegetarian :)), don't buy mass market stuff with huge carbon footprints (this Christmas I'm mostly giving food or other things). I used to think the "your wallet can change corporate behavior" line of reasoning at the end of Big Corp exposé-style documentaries (e.g. Fast Food Nation) was a little naïve. But look at how many smaller ethical businesses are out there. Yeah people might make fun of the "small batch artisanal" shops out there, but we're making progress because it is popular enough to be a common punch line.
Asking your butcher for "zero carbon" cow is pointless, I agree, it is also the equivalent of attempting to avoid buying things with "huge" carbon footprints (like everything that has plastic on it which is pretty much everything useful), much like buying in artisanal shops, or asking for "grass fed beef" or "free range eggs", it is all highly inefficient which is a problem with our growing population. They are all labels often as meaningless as "organic". The vegan and vegetarian options are rather more efficient and simple ways to achieve the same thing with the added benefit of not torturing animals for no good reason other than a particular taste. Once meat is gone from your diet that's it, no debating whether this you're buying has a huge carbon footprint or not, or simply lying to yourself with the zero carbon, dolphin friendly, free range, organic or grass fed labels. I know the usual argument, you're never going to get people to stop eating meat, but then again how are you going to get everyone to care for these labels (which usually carry a higher price in them)? and more over, policing that these labels are actually true?. Think about it, even in the futuristic scenario of populating Mars, are we really going to carry cattle with us, I think it is time to leave it behind.
Except that meat has been part of the human diet before we were even human, and evolution has adapted us to be omnivores. The human body can't produce a number of amino acids any more, a number of which are most easily sourced from the bodies of animals that can produce them (most of which are herbivores). For example Lysine and Methionine are easier to acquire from meat than vegetables; especially if you aren't burning lots of energy (exercise etc) or intake of lots of calories is a health issue.
You can live on a vegan diet, but it is easier to live on an omnivore diet. And since for most people easier is preferable, and when talking about the population of the world as a whole, you'll still find that a large percentage of the world's population will eat meat if it is easily available.
It is easier for moat people to live with fossil fuel so it is preferable right? I'm going to pass on the tired discussion of meat is what we're meant to eat because we've been going it forever. Bottom line is you CAN live without meat, it is perfectly healthy so it comes down to a choice. Now my original point was that having this half measures that require constant policing from both the consumer and industries is harder than cutting down something you don't need for good. Both routes require an equal amount of convincing of people, from eating less meat to using your car less or buying particular types of products over others are changes that most people are not ready or willing to accept and most likely won't come to full fruition until a couple generations down the line (regardless of the route) but you can start one yourself that requires no action from increasingly hostile politicians or corporation whose sole purpose of existence is in direct contradiction with the objective. As it is said, you vote with your money. Also if a tax was to be put on hugely polluting industries it'd be self-defeating to not tax meat and dairy.
My point is this, short of banning eating meat people will continue to do so; even if you made vegetables 1/100 of the cost of meat and fixed the calories / Lysine / Methionine issue (which would probably mean post processing the vegetables which increases costs). Banning means legislation, that means politics.
So seguing into climate change issues, this took politics too. It started with grassroots taking hold in the 60's counter culture, then the start of political pressure in the 70's. The first big political move was Reagan coming on board during the 80's; and also some lucky technology hook ups like solar powered calculators (never underestimate the power of logistical growth from a low end but widely used product).
The 90's brought us government sponsored research and industry backed development and product roll outs; this led to massive improvements in cost mainly though scale. The last 15 years have led to product refinements, financing options, and a greater society wide understanding of just how bad climate change could be.
And now we are at a situation of solar becoming cheaper than coal for producing electricity. 50 years!
So if you want to achieve the same with meat vs vegetables there is an enormous amount to achieve, above all you'll need to convince people at least as well as climate change issues, get government backing, make it as enjoyable as eating meat, and drive down the cost of Lysine and Methionine extraction.
In fact Canola (low erucic acid rapeseed) meal (what's left over after oil extraction) is currently used as livestock feed, this could be used for human consumption but would require further post-processing and possibly protein profile adjustment.
The problem with "you vote with your money" is how unequal money is distributed.
To accept it you must either be against democracy as a concept of equal rights to vote, or for an almost equal distribution of income. Neither of which is particular mainstream ideologies today.
If we stopped all fishing, you would end up with quite a lot of decreased biodiversity in lakes from eutrophication, cause by those farms that supply that vegan diet. I know, because I know fishermen who got paid by the Swedish state to do just that.
We could demand that farms had zero carbon footprint, zero water usage/drainage, a new tree for every cut one, and no pesticides. It is expensive, and food labeled under a mission which try to cover some of those aspects do demand a much higher price. At best it can be said is that its has a lower environmental impact that cows, even through my government (Sweden) explicitly says that if we don't get more farmers, most of the open field and bio diversity that comes from open fields will be lost.
Personally, I would go with a omnivore diet that pay a little extra (ie about double vs the cheapest) for products under environmental focused labels, and then just eat less of it. Even better, skip that car and you will end up having a much lower carbon footprint than any car owner has, regardless of diet.
The worst move the environmental movement did is let the environmentally sensitive product be associated with consumption by a rich liberal urban elite.
Until someone can fix this and disassociate ecological efficiency from the limousine liberal, these programs are unfortunately going to only be marginal. Minimizing environmental externalities can't be seen as optional.
Lots of reasonable things increase cost - such as refrigerated storage and inspection. We don't tier the product market like this though, "oh you want your meat to be free of disease? Well then mr fancy pants... Here's the luxury product."
Yes agree, just look at canned tuna. How is it acceptable to sell products that kill dolphines? Yet "dophin friendly" is treated as a marketing thing. It is like having a note saying "no kittens strangled" on a bottle of milk. It would be better to require objective ethical discolsure upfront on products. So you have "child labour may have been used" alongside the fat content and ingredients.
Consumer product prices will always race to the bottom. Environmental protections with non-zero costs will therefore always take a back seat to a more competitive price.
I agree in principle with your sentiment; however, I have yet to come up with an alternative which does not involve strong environmental legislation. Which, in the US at least, is only likely to happen after it's too late, if ever.
Who cares about environmental friendliness? Liberals. Who has the money to pay extra for environmentally friendly products? Well-to-do liberals. I don't really understand how you think things could have gone differently.
Many environmental things have left the left/right discourse such as not being exposed to nuclear radiation or reducing smog to lead to breathable air.
Conservatives are unlikely to be OK with someone knowingly and intentionally exposing people to fatal levels of radiation in the way they are OK with adverse ecological systems.
It needs to leave the intellectual space of optional or preferential discourse and enter the one of rights and crimes.
> Conservatives are unlikely to be OK with someone knowingly and intentionally exposing people to fatal levels of radiation in the way they are OK with adverse ecological systems.
I don't think that's true. They defended the cigarette industry, for example. They oppose laws and regulations protecting people in the workplace. They support and encourage law enforcement's abuse of the poor and minorities.
> It needs to leave the intellectual space of optional or preferential discourse and enter the one of rights and crimes.
That would help, but for many it's about ideology and greed and not about rational debate.
There's arguably a distinction to be made between what self identified conservatives believe and the PR campaigns which seek to align themselves with conservatives and attempt to hoodwink those people into supporting.
For instance, if a beer commercial was jingoistic and patriotic, we'd probably agree that it was a marketing tactic and not necessarily the drinking choice of nationalists.
Those are the kind of "up market" consumers you want to target new expensive products to. Eventually they'll trickle down to other people when they realize it'll save them money (after economies of scale have been reached, R&D expenses paid off, etc). For example fake meat products right now is being targeted to "elite" coastal types. But once this stuff is really good, and really cheap it might disrupt traditional meat products.
> The worst move the environmental movement did is let the environmentally sensitive product be associated with consumption by a rich liberal urban elite.
I'm pretty sure this move was made by the 'anti-environmentalists', including big industry and those fighting the ideological war against 'liberalism'. They would have found a way to discredit it among their followers - if not this way, than another.
Even these terms are from their propaganda, but lots of people repeat them as if they have meaning and represent something real.
On 1.5 billion cows with an average release of 70-120kg per year (I went with 90kg) you'll get a reduction by
1,350,000,000kg of methane. Thats a difference. A single percent drop from one of the main contributors of green house gasses is huge.
> The biggest producers are and will always be the mass market stuff, though. Who cares if 1% of beef is produced carbon neutral? It's nice, but it makes no tangible difference.
Couldn't you look at it as a vanguard thing? Like, once the public is more used to the idea because it's been on the market in some form, it's easier to mandate it?
Carbon neutral is essentially shorthand for doesn't contribute to climate change. Methane (a) contains carbon and (b) is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
Methane has a GWP (Global Warming Potential or equivalent impact compared to same amount of carbon dioxide) of 86 over 20 years; 34 over 100 years; and 7.6 over 500 years.
34 / 5 is 6.8 so most of that 500 year potential is front loaded to the first 100 years. The difference from 7.6 vs 6.8 is because it breaks down into some CO2. And in fact is less potent than C02 from year 100-400.
Add a default per-cow tax, and deduct from it for purchase of a seaweed feed, and make it bite sufficiently that it becomes substantially cheaper to include seaweed in the feed.
This is how Norway encourages bottle recycling: There's no law mandating recycling of bottles, but there's a substantial tax on beverage containers that you get a reduction of in proportion to your return rate. This has resulted in a return rate of 99%+ of recyclable bottles by making it economically beneficial for retailers and distributors to participate in fairly elaborate and expensive collection and recycling schemes.
It takes some work to get mechanisms like this in place in a way that isn't easy to exploit, but get the incentives right and you can let economic interests do most of the work.
US does the same actually. $.05 tax on all bottles, $0.05 payment for recycling. It used to get people to recycle but now the penalty is too small to be worth it. On the flip side, rooting through garbage cans for recycling deposits is now a viable source of income for urban poor.
My experience from growing up in Norway and living in the UK, is that there's far more littering related to bottles in the UK, where people will throw them all over the place, than in Norway where they almost always get returned.
In Brazil it worked out in a similar fashion: poor people would seek for aluminum cans inside garbage and then sell it for recycling companies. So it was a cheap source of aluminum, companies would get enough profit to continue in business, and some people made a living out of it.
After some while, giving more marketing about "going green" and calculating that money was being throw at the garbage, some stores like restaurants and supermarkets began to collect those aluminum cans. Profit for then, recycling still being profitable to companies, poor people lost this income they have fomented.
It's similar, but not quite the same. The above creates an incentive for people to collect bottles, but not an incentive for retailers to encourage bottle returns, which results in experiences for consumers that often makes it seem like it's not worth it. E.g. if you're forced to bring your bottles to a recycling centre instead of to the grocery store you're headed anyway, it's a lot less likely to happen.
Getting the incentives right across the whole chain is important.
E.g. I can't rememember ever seeing an automated bottle return machine like these [1] [2] in a US grocery store. It's been a few years, so it may have gotten more widespread, and I know some states have had return laws that have been more effective, so I'm sure it depends on location. In Norway the norm is for most grocery stores and shopping centres with any stores that sell bottles to have those.
Part of the reason is that in Norway, if people don't return bottles, the cost for retailers and distributors go up (or more precisely, their tax does not go down) by more than the cost of the recycling, so it's not just consumers that are incentivised, but retailers and distributors too, with the result that there's a massive infrastructure targeted at making it easy to return (and as a result one of the largest manufacturers wordwide of automated return solutions is Norwegian as well).
I currently live in the UK, which is much worse than the US when it comes to bottle rturns, and really wish the above solution would become more widespread.
Here in Germany stores have to take back single-use containers with deposit. Small stores are allowed to only accept the brands they sell, larger ones have to take everything.
In Europe a country is fined if it doesn't meet it's targets. The measurement of emissions includes agriculture and is a big problem for some countries. So if they can monitor and prove that this method will reduce emissions then I think they will consider it.
The relevant part is from 13:58 (Andrieu, Eric) to (including) !4:00 (Eck, Stefan). I'm not sure if there ever existed software that worked on that site, so you probably have to skip to 1:48 in the stream mms://vod.europarl.europa.eu/wmv/nas/nasvod02/vod0910/2015/wm/VODChapter_20151028_12104300_14320200_509dc321150aee25e47-337f.wmv?wmcache=0
It's not like that voting is directly relevant in the legislative process but that's another discussion.
> There probably isn't an incentive to reduce methane emissions for farmers right now though
I think we will be able to detect methane emissions on a large scale from space sometime soon, e.g. [1]. At that point, farmers can't escape the law in any way, and they will have an incentive to reduce emissions.
I disagree. I think we need to increasingly shift to pollution taxes because 1) physical pollution is hard to hide and 2) minimising pollution both improves the environment and maximises industrial efficiency.
This new result could push things along, because it provides the solution without lowering production. There would be less lobbying and backlash against such measures if the industry has clear way of dealing with them.
I emailed an atmospheric methane professor about the NASA paper a couple of months ago, asking if it could be used for tracking permafrost thawing related methane leaks (in Siberia etc), and got this back:
"Yes, there is a lot of work on finding methane emissions by satellite. This is good as a broad guide to spotting big emissions like the huge US leak: the real problem we have is in quantifying emissions at ground level from a wide range of much smaller sources, and in placing good accurate numbers on the fluxes.
Unfortunately, the emission is from the ground into the boundary layer, at the bottom of the atmosphere, while satellite observation sees through the total column. We use wind back-trajectory analysis to identify the source of the methane (running the weather backwards), but there have been bad examples in the past where the media latched onto claims of major methane anomalies seen from space (e.g. in the Arctic or in S America) and didn’t realise that the methane was in the mid-troposphere in air that had last been in contact with the ground many thousands of miles away.
What is needed is an integrated approach at all levels, using satellite observation, wind-tracking using chemical transport models, and careful ground measurement to identify sources."
Well if it is 20% of the total green house gas effect then we should be willing to sell them carbon tax credits. Looking at how creatively Tesla used them I'm guessing you could entirely offset the cost of feeding the cattle with credits.
We check run off, waste disposal, animal welfare, and a lot of other things on farms. It's all done with spot checks, I'd imagine this will be the same.
Grass fed cows are supposed to produce greater than 40% more methane than the industry standard grain fed cows. This guy[1] seems to have thought a little about this too.
The really relevant thing is not the farts but 1. the CO_2 emissions for feedstuff production and transport, plus 2. the deforestation for said feedstuff production, plus 3. the insane ratio of agricultural surface requirements of plants-needed-to-feed-humans vs plants-needed-to-feed-cattle-to-feed-humans (which is approx. 1:10)
For these very reasons organic meat is much better for CO_2 reduction. It doesn't use fossil fuels just to feed cattle, it limits the area foodprint of cattle production and by making meat scarcer, it last not least shifts meat based nutrition towards five-a-day nutrition.
> All Smith needs to do is to invent a new cuisine based on filter feeders and seaweed
That's the problem - I'd love to eat more, but a lot of it it's just not appetising. Eating the salads you get in Korean / Japanese restaurants is like eating soft leather.
On an episode of chef Anthony Bourdain a chef in China or Japan (I forget) said the western palate doesn't consider a rubber texture mouth feel appealing like Asian countries.
They discussing and were eating a sea cucumber with a rubbery texture.
Then again dulce a seaweed is a food in the Canadian Maritimes it's not common but enough that most people have heard of it.
> Seaweed can be rich in protein, Vitamin B12, and trace minerals.
The USDA nutrient database lists 8 types of seaweed. Only one of these these ("Canadian Cultivated EMI-TSUNOMATA") contains B12, and it appears to be a proprietary land-cultivated strain of Irish moss, so hardly representative of normal seaweed. The generic Irish moss is also listed with zero B12.
They'll smell of the sea. Which to the people around could suggest, subliminally, it's time for a beach holiday. A chance for some guerrilla marketing right there...!
"At room temperature and standard pressure, methane is a colorless, odorless gas. The familiar smell of natural gas as used in homes is achieved by the addition of an odorant, usually blends containing tert-butylthiol, as a safety measure."
It's not impossible. Seaweeds are rich in prebiotic polysaccharides that could theoretically alter your gut microbiome to something less odoriferous. But it could also have the opposite effect. Understanding of the human microbiome is still primitive, and most attempts to manipulate it aren't much different from hitting electronics when it's not working.
If seaweed eliminates methane it likely will affect some gut bacteria more than others. We would not blindly swallow antibiotics affecting what is happening in our gut. There will be side effects one way or another - usually the more effect the more side effect.
Seaweed is worth studying and has promise but I'm skeptical when it comes super food claims.
If i read it correctly the paper says the effect comes through bromoform contained in the algae, which inhibits the enzymes participating in the methane production.
It's only fed in sub-toxic amounts to the cows I don't think it bio-accumulates, so the meat should be safe for consumption.
in other words, it has nothing to do with antibiotics.
It's an ozone-depletant, so you want a natural source. And algae naturally soak it up from sea water, so you don't have to extract it from minerals or anything like that.
Plus I assume that it being part of the plant matters slows its release.
> It's an ozone-depletant, so you want a natural source.
I read that line several times, and I can't figure out what one has to do with the other. The depletion effect doesn't change based on the source.
> And algae naturally soak it up from sea water, so you don't have to extract it from minerals or anything like that.
It's made from bromine, it's not a hard element to get a hold of.
> Plus I assume that it being part of the plant matters slows its release.
Slows the release in the cow, or after leaving the cow? Because we care only after leaving the cow, and at that point it has to have been released (in the cow) in order to function.
The point was that many species of algae already produce and release it. Using some of them as feed does not introduce additional emission sources, unlike artificial production would.
Slow release in the cow might help to smooth out the dose so it inhibits methane generation throughout the whole digestion time. But that part is entirely speculation on my part. Something has to make this particular alga better than the others tested.
Seaweed has a long history of human consumption without adverse effects, so I don't see why it should do any harm to cows, especially at 2 to 5% of diet.
Seaweed has a long history of human consumption that may be true. But so has milk and only part of the adult human population can handle it.
We are only at the beginning of understanding how the gut micro-biome relates to human and animal health. Possibilities for complications exist e.g.
- Methane production keeps parasites in check
- Methane producing bacteria may be part of a synthesis chain for a specific nutrient.
- Recalibration of blood health indicator values
There are always risks in scaling up things to population levels. The history is full of them. Soylent recently ran into some problems. Gut biology is not an area where things are very predictable.
A good solution would be for government to offer large rebates to farmers purchasing this as feed (ideally whilst reducing some other farming subsidy like CAP). Farmers would have an incentive to use, there shouldn't be large monitoring costs and should be cost effective
Food, in general, is one of the biggest producers of global-warming gasses. If we could only tackle the world's Obesity and overeating problem we could make a big dent in Global Warming.
Yeah, this discovery has serious implications on fighting climate change, since methane emissions from cows is a large share of global co2e emissions.
Interestingly, I heard that the particular seaweed that is effective is not commonly found in large amounts and does not grow by itself in open water. This means it either has to be farmed using novel techniques on the sea (like what northseafarm.com tries to do) or a new breed of seaweed has to be created (see hortimare.com). Cool stuff.
Lab-cultured meat is fast becoming cheaper and safer than growing subsidized crops (and all the water, diesel fuel and fertilizer that entails) and slaughtering an actual animal risking vCJD. Skip most of the climate change, animal cruelty and customer risks by growing something far more ethical and responsible.
I keep trying milk substitutes. Not because I have any particular reason to switch away from milk, but because I find milk delicious and are curious about similar tasting drinks.
So far, the ones I've found range from awful, to quite ok to drink but nothing like milk. For e.g. baking, the taste may matter less if they get the consistency right.
But for drinking, I've yet to found any that I'd be willing to consider replacements for milk, though I've found a couple that I may buy now again because their quite different taste is a nice complement.
This is huge news for New Zealand, one of the challenges that we face in meeting our climate change goals is the fact that a large part of our economy is based around agriculture, it's not as easy as replacing some coal power plants for us because 80-90% of our energy generation is green as it is. And it's also not easy for us to change the type of agriculture because the world does still need food. A lot of money is being spent on solving this problem.
You can feed your goats 100 dollar bills and increase your goat production, but this plan have some gaps.
What the article forgets to mention is that seaweed is a product valued in millions of dollars. And they create fragile ecosystems also that support a lot of juvenile fish, octopus and shellfish; wich are also expensive products. The delicious sea urchins depend entirely of seaweeds for example. On the other side, Asparagopsis taxiformis is an australian invasive species; so the idea of harvest it cuts both ways. Could be good (erradicate) or a big mistake (propagate even more).
And you need to develop a selective extracion method. If you use all seaweeds to feed cattle, inland cows will have a fartastic life, but a lot of fishermen living in small coastal villages with poor soils will lost their jobs.
Or maybe to synthetize the seaweed metabolites. Its life cycle is complicated. They are two different algae packed in one single species (Asparagopsis taxiformis and Falkenbergia hillebrandii). This is a problem if we want to culture it. We'll need to understand the delicate interactions and chemistry of the poisons of this plants and grant that no bad collateral effects will appear; i.e. Kill the intestinal flora that the cattle needs. Do you want to know another thing that could emit lots of metane? microscopic algae blooming after macroscopic algae vanished (and maybe a bunch of dead macroscopic algae drying at the sun?).
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadhttp://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-cow-f...
Edit: found the paper: https://sci-hub.ac/10.1071/AN15576
According to figure 2 it looks like 2-10% of the feed is sufficient to achieve near-total methane reduction and <5% does not negatively affect digestibility, so 2-5% is the sweet spot.
It's very hard to pass this analysis, since "high tech" is almost universally more valuable to humanity, per unit, that something low tech like farming.
If you're already in tech and you want to "help the world", giving money is almost always the best choice.
http://www.givewell.org/ is a good resource for where to give effectively.
> but the typical conclusion would be "effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming."
Don't make assumptions. Life is meant to be enjoyed, and we work for a third of our lives. Perhaps some of us don't want to do the same work for our entire lives.
Lastly, tech isn't how I would give altruistically. I'd trade options and futures and donate the profits. The impact would be orders of magnitude higher than donating my hourly/salary wages.
http://greenwave.org/3d-ocean-farming/
In amongst those tenets is the precept of comparative wealth, quoted here:
> Many effective altruists believe that, as formulated by Peter Singer, "if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it".[18] Anyone with an income of above $52,000 PPP is in the 1% richest people globally.[19] Therefore, many effective altruists donate a significant portion of their income to highly effective charities, since doing so would not cause them to give up important purchases.
In short, if you're making six figures in tech, it is generally more charitable to keep doing the tech that you're doing and donate more, and if the tech work you're doing isn't a net negative, you'll be doing more good by donating your tech largesse to a seaweed farmer instead.
> effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming
Offtopic, but since when did contextual assumption become something people weren't supposed to do?
http://greenwave.org/3d-ocean-farming/
Large scale farming is not low-tech. Presumably someone moving in to farming from a tech discipline would seek to optimise their tech use as a competitive advantage over incumbents.
Furthermore this is tropical algae and it traditionally hand harvested making it very expensive to produce. I don't know if it could be mass produced in sea farms.
Source:
http://uses.plantnet-project.org/en/Asparagopsis_taxiformis_...
Cattle, like most ruminants, rely on the fermentation of cellulose for most of their energy needs. Any feed additive that shuts down this process will result in malnourished cattle, and is unlikely to see broad adoption in the industry. Luckily for the PEI farmer, the seaweed he used didn't have this effect.
I.e. shutting down the methanogenesis does not shut down all fermentation, it just takes other pathways. It is not an essential component.
You can live on a vegan diet, but it is easier to live on an omnivore diet. And since for most people easier is preferable, and when talking about the population of the world as a whole, you'll still find that a large percentage of the world's population will eat meat if it is easily available.
So seguing into climate change issues, this took politics too. It started with grassroots taking hold in the 60's counter culture, then the start of political pressure in the 70's. The first big political move was Reagan coming on board during the 80's; and also some lucky technology hook ups like solar powered calculators (never underestimate the power of logistical growth from a low end but widely used product).
The 90's brought us government sponsored research and industry backed development and product roll outs; this led to massive improvements in cost mainly though scale. The last 15 years have led to product refinements, financing options, and a greater society wide understanding of just how bad climate change could be.
And now we are at a situation of solar becoming cheaper than coal for producing electricity. 50 years!
So if you want to achieve the same with meat vs vegetables there is an enormous amount to achieve, above all you'll need to convince people at least as well as climate change issues, get government backing, make it as enjoyable as eating meat, and drive down the cost of Lysine and Methionine extraction.
In fact Canola (low erucic acid rapeseed) meal (what's left over after oil extraction) is currently used as livestock feed, this could be used for human consumption but would require further post-processing and possibly protein profile adjustment.
To accept it you must either be against democracy as a concept of equal rights to vote, or for an almost equal distribution of income. Neither of which is particular mainstream ideologies today.
We could demand that farms had zero carbon footprint, zero water usage/drainage, a new tree for every cut one, and no pesticides. It is expensive, and food labeled under a mission which try to cover some of those aspects do demand a much higher price. At best it can be said is that its has a lower environmental impact that cows, even through my government (Sweden) explicitly says that if we don't get more farmers, most of the open field and bio diversity that comes from open fields will be lost.
Personally, I would go with a omnivore diet that pay a little extra (ie about double vs the cheapest) for products under environmental focused labels, and then just eat less of it. Even better, skip that car and you will end up having a much lower carbon footprint than any car owner has, regardless of diet.
Until someone can fix this and disassociate ecological efficiency from the limousine liberal, these programs are unfortunately going to only be marginal. Minimizing environmental externalities can't be seen as optional.
Lots of reasonable things increase cost - such as refrigerated storage and inspection. We don't tier the product market like this though, "oh you want your meat to be free of disease? Well then mr fancy pants... Here's the luxury product."
I agree in principle with your sentiment; however, I have yet to come up with an alternative which does not involve strong environmental legislation. Which, in the US at least, is only likely to happen after it's too late, if ever.
Conservatives are unlikely to be OK with someone knowingly and intentionally exposing people to fatal levels of radiation in the way they are OK with adverse ecological systems.
It needs to leave the intellectual space of optional or preferential discourse and enter the one of rights and crimes.
I don't think that's true. They defended the cigarette industry, for example. They oppose laws and regulations protecting people in the workplace. They support and encourage law enforcement's abuse of the poor and minorities.
> It needs to leave the intellectual space of optional or preferential discourse and enter the one of rights and crimes.
That would help, but for many it's about ideology and greed and not about rational debate.
For instance, if a beer commercial was jingoistic and patriotic, we'd probably agree that it was a marketing tactic and not necessarily the drinking choice of nationalists.
I agree, but many self-identified conservatives believe these things, according to polls.
I'm pretty sure this move was made by the 'anti-environmentalists', including big industry and those fighting the ideological war against 'liberalism'. They would have found a way to discredit it among their followers - if not this way, than another.
Even these terms are from their propaganda, but lots of people repeat them as if they have meaning and represent something real.
> rich liberal urban elite.
> limousine liberal
I didn't say the terms were unintentionally used, I said they were empty stereotypes from conservative propaganda.
Regarding their emptiness: Can you define the terms? Do you have some data to back up the existence of the demographic and their purported behavior?
http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/ukhome/food-quality/eggs.html#clo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQBrhfN4uYc
Couldn't you look at it as a vanguard thing? Like, once the public is more used to the idea because it's been on the market in some form, it's easier to mandate it?
Only in the short term.
Methane has a GWP (Global Warming Potential or equivalent impact compared to same amount of carbon dioxide) of 86 over 20 years; 34 over 100 years; and 7.6 over 500 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
34 / 5 is 6.8 so most of that 500 year potential is front loaded to the first 100 years. The difference from 7.6 vs 6.8 is because it breaks down into some CO2. And in fact is less potent than C02 from year 100-400.
This is how Norway encourages bottle recycling: There's no law mandating recycling of bottles, but there's a substantial tax on beverage containers that you get a reduction of in proportion to your return rate. This has resulted in a return rate of 99%+ of recyclable bottles by making it economically beneficial for retailers and distributors to participate in fairly elaborate and expensive collection and recycling schemes.
It takes some work to get mechanisms like this in place in a way that isn't easy to exploit, but get the incentives right and you can let economic interests do most of the work.
After some while, giving more marketing about "going green" and calculating that money was being throw at the garbage, some stores like restaurants and supermarkets began to collect those aluminum cans. Profit for then, recycling still being profitable to companies, poor people lost this income they have fomented.
Getting the incentives right across the whole chain is important.
E.g. I can't rememember ever seeing an automated bottle return machine like these [1] [2] in a US grocery store. It's been a few years, so it may have gotten more widespread, and I know some states have had return laws that have been more effective, so I'm sure it depends on location. In Norway the norm is for most grocery stores and shopping centres with any stores that sell bottles to have those.
Part of the reason is that in Norway, if people don't return bottles, the cost for retailers and distributors go up (or more precisely, their tax does not go down) by more than the cost of the recycling, so it's not just consumers that are incentivised, but retailers and distributors too, with the result that there's a massive infrastructure targeted at making it easy to return (and as a result one of the largest manufacturers wordwide of automated return solutions is Norwegian as well).
I currently live in the UK, which is much worse than the US when it comes to bottle rturns, and really wish the above solution would become more widespread.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_vending_machine
[2] http://www.wikiwand.com/no/Flaskepant#/Panteautomater
The relevant part is from 13:58 (Andrieu, Eric) to (including) !4:00 (Eck, Stefan). I'm not sure if there ever existed software that worked on that site, so you probably have to skip to 1:48 in the stream mms://vod.europarl.europa.eu/wmv/nas/nasvod02/vod0910/2015/wm/VODChapter_20151028_12104300_14320200_509dc321150aee25e47-337f.wmv?wmcache=0
It's not like that voting is directly relevant in the legislative process but that's another discussion.
I think we will be able to detect methane emissions on a large scale from space sometime soon, e.g. [1]. At that point, farmers can't escape the law in any way, and they will have an incentive to reduce emissions.
[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0615/NASA-detects-meth...
You don't want to make the law something they must "escape" from, but rather something they can profit from by not polluting. Like tax credits.
"Yes, there is a lot of work on finding methane emissions by satellite. This is good as a broad guide to spotting big emissions like the huge US leak: the real problem we have is in quantifying emissions at ground level from a wide range of much smaller sources, and in placing good accurate numbers on the fluxes.
Unfortunately, the emission is from the ground into the boundary layer, at the bottom of the atmosphere, while satellite observation sees through the total column. We use wind back-trajectory analysis to identify the source of the methane (running the weather backwards), but there have been bad examples in the past where the media latched onto claims of major methane anomalies seen from space (e.g. in the Arctic or in S America) and didn’t realise that the methane was in the mid-troposphere in air that had last been in contact with the ground many thousands of miles away.
What is needed is an integrated approach at all levels, using satellite observation, wind-tracking using chemical transport models, and careful ground measurement to identify sources."
http://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-me...
There are about 92 million cows and calves in the U.S. today.[1] Estimates for the number of bison at their peak range from 30 million to 60 million.
[1]https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2016/01_29_2016.php
[1] http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2014/8/22/buffalo-extermination-e...
For these very reasons organic meat is much better for CO_2 reduction. It doesn't use fossil fuels just to feed cattle, it limits the area foodprint of cattle production and by making meat scarcer, it last not least shifts meat based nutrition towards five-a-day nutrition.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/02/a-new-leaf
That's the problem - I'd love to eat more, but a lot of it it's just not appetising. Eating the salads you get in Korean / Japanese restaurants is like eating soft leather.
They discussing and were eating a sea cucumber with a rubbery texture.
Then again dulce a seaweed is a food in the Canadian Maritimes it's not common but enough that most people have heard of it.
The USDA nutrient database lists 8 types of seaweed. Only one of these these ("Canadian Cultivated EMI-TSUNOMATA") contains B12, and it appears to be a proprietary land-cultivated strain of Irish moss, so hardly representative of normal seaweed. The generic Irish moss is also listed with zero B12.
So either it's a some kind of symbiosis, or they are mixing it in afterward.
"At room temperature and standard pressure, methane is a colorless, odorless gas. The familiar smell of natural gas as used in homes is achieved by the addition of an odorant, usually blends containing tert-butylthiol, as a safety measure."
Seaweed is worth studying and has promise but I'm skeptical when it comes super food claims.
It's only fed in sub-toxic amounts to the cows I don't think it bio-accumulates, so the meat should be safe for consumption.
in other words, it has nothing to do with antibiotics.
Plus I assume that it being part of the plant matters slows its release.
I read that line several times, and I can't figure out what one has to do with the other. The depletion effect doesn't change based on the source.
> And algae naturally soak it up from sea water, so you don't have to extract it from minerals or anything like that.
It's made from bromine, it's not a hard element to get a hold of.
> Plus I assume that it being part of the plant matters slows its release.
Slows the release in the cow, or after leaving the cow? Because we care only after leaving the cow, and at that point it has to have been released (in the cow) in order to function.
Slow release in the cow might help to smooth out the dose so it inhibits methane generation throughout the whole digestion time. But that part is entirely speculation on my part. Something has to make this particular alga better than the others tested.
I would not be comfortable eating products from a cow fed this without some careful safety studies first.
Otherwise you are potentially poisoning people in exchange for some methane reduction - that's not a good tradeoff.
We are only at the beginning of understanding how the gut micro-biome relates to human and animal health. Possibilities for complications exist e.g.
- Methane production keeps parasites in check
- Methane producing bacteria may be part of a synthesis chain for a specific nutrient.
- Recalibration of blood health indicator values
There are always risks in scaling up things to population levels. The history is full of them. Soylent recently ran into some problems. Gut biology is not an area where things are very predictable.
It would be great for the seaweed industry here too it used to produce Irish moss for carageenan, a thickening agent for food.
But as it is with the Irish moss it will go to Asia tropical waters produce more seaweed.
Interestingly, I heard that the particular seaweed that is effective is not commonly found in large amounts and does not grow by itself in open water. This means it either has to be farmed using novel techniques on the sea (like what northseafarm.com tries to do) or a new breed of seaweed has to be created (see hortimare.com). Cool stuff.
So far, the ones I've found range from awful, to quite ok to drink but nothing like milk. For e.g. baking, the taste may matter less if they get the consistency right.
But for drinking, I've yet to found any that I'd be willing to consider replacements for milk, though I've found a couple that I may buy now again because their quite different taste is a nice complement.
What the article forgets to mention is that seaweed is a product valued in millions of dollars. And they create fragile ecosystems also that support a lot of juvenile fish, octopus and shellfish; wich are also expensive products. The delicious sea urchins depend entirely of seaweeds for example. On the other side, Asparagopsis taxiformis is an australian invasive species; so the idea of harvest it cuts both ways. Could be good (erradicate) or a big mistake (propagate even more).
And you need to develop a selective extracion method. If you use all seaweeds to feed cattle, inland cows will have a fartastic life, but a lot of fishermen living in small coastal villages with poor soils will lost their jobs.
Or maybe to synthetize the seaweed metabolites. Its life cycle is complicated. They are two different algae packed in one single species (Asparagopsis taxiformis and Falkenbergia hillebrandii). This is a problem if we want to culture it. We'll need to understand the delicate interactions and chemistry of the poisons of this plants and grant that no bad collateral effects will appear; i.e. Kill the intestinal flora that the cattle needs. Do you want to know another thing that could emit lots of metane? microscopic algae blooming after macroscopic algae vanished (and maybe a bunch of dead macroscopic algae drying at the sun?).