Unfortunately, if you care about animal suffering then Beef starts looking much better than Chicken does and the farms that tend to treat their chickens well also tend to be "organic". So there's certainly a place for this.
And in general most land used for cattle grazing doesn't receive enough rainfall to support forests; or farming without outside water inputs. If we were to eat cattle that were exclusively fed by grazing on semi-arid land then Beef would be pretty environmentally friendly apart from the methane emissions. The problem is that we don't have enough grazing land to do that so most beef if fed with farm-produced plant matter leading to huge inefficiencies.
Regardless of their evolutionary lineage, the important ethical consideration is whether one's food has a central nervous system. Most animals have those whereas fungi and plants do not.
You can't just retreat to ethics are personal when you just implied that a group of people were irrational for being willing to eat fungus. If you didn't intend to imply that then then downvotes show you should work on your communication skills.
Or perhaps you should work on your interpersonal and maturity skills... I didn't imply anything, you lost it over nothing trying to see things where there was obviously none. I was just tongue-in-cheek by putting some scientific facts out there, which may in fact trigger a real reflection of what not eating any animal product might mean to someone (and your point was just a generalisation that does not represent all views).
It's like Reddit here. Too bad. It was a good resource.
Isn't it going to be hard to use any biological process to sequester carbon for long periods? The cycling is fairly optimal for life (without smokestacks). I would think the attempts to pull it into more stable forms[1] have more potential (but you can't eat them).
>Isn't it going to be hard to use any biological process to sequester carbon for long periods?
Based on my research, in general, yes. However if you can store biological matter like algae or the Azolla fern in an anoxic environment, you significantly increase how long you can store it.
If you go read about the Azolla event, this is what is believed to have happened roughly 49 million years ago. Azolla is believed to have been growing in the warm waters of the arctic ocean (either by having freshwater being fed to the area and floating atop the salt water, or by diluting it enough to allow the Azolla to survive, I believe the Amazon does this where it empties into the Atlantic now) and as the generations would die off, they'd sink and reach depths that were anoxic and effectively prevented the bulk of the material to decay.
One avenue I found that shows promise for doing this via another method, would be making biochar in massive quantities, Pacific Pyrolysis is a company that interests me here https://pacificpyrolysis.com/about.html. Some of this you would sell as fertilizer, tilling it into the soil, which would only lock it up relatively short term. Some of it you would store in depleted mines that you can effectively cap, basically doing reverse-coal mining.
Other options exist but nothing that will scale the way we need it, an operation in Iceland shows us that you can at least have a negative-emissions power plant by injecting CO2 into basalt where it converts to carbonates, becoming rock.
Dr. Klaus Lackner at the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions also has some promising research with a polymer. You basically make this 'plastic tree' which garbs CO2 out of the air, it gets trapped in the polymer and you then 'wash' it out with water and capture it in the washing process, of course you still have to do something with that captured gas. Here you could sell some for industrial applications and take the rest and pump it into depleted natural gas and oil operations and then cap it in a sort of reverse mining-process again.
I am far from an expert but I've spent more than 100 hours looking into options this summer and fall and I do not see a currently available solution, that even after several generations of refinement, are workable.
I think we need to get lucky and figure out fusion, and fast, I also think we need a group like Oklo Inc to get their reactor up (it should operate on waste from current fission reactors) which would scale more rapidly. These only really solve coal and natural gas though, there's over a billion passenger vehicles on the planet right now that mostly use petroleum.
I know YC is pretty damn optimistic, I believe Altman said something a few weeks ago at the wired event along the lines of 'we will figure out fusion because we have to' but man, I'm considerably more pessimistic. I think the next 10-50 years are going to be interesting and quite tense.
> The real solution to carbon is immediate reduction of fossil fuel usage with a very short-term goal of nearly absolute cessation of greenhouse gas generation.
The problem is that while this is accurate given the current state of science/technology, it's a complete political non-starter. There's always incentive for someone to be a bad actor, moreso if everyone else is behaving themselves. Unfortunately, very few nations are going to be willing to commit to massive greenhouse gas reduction while any other nation is profiting from it.
I think the comment from Altman (we will figure out fusion because we have to) has the subtext: 'or we're all dead.' It seems unlikely that killing fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas polluters will get killed by political fiat. That leaves killing them economically, which means creating a more efficient energy source.
Oh, I unfortunately agree. We can't even get everyone to acknowledge global warming or even to stop using CFCs ( https://www.newsweek.com/mystery-source-ozone-depleting-subs... ) so yeah it's highly unrealistic to get people to abandon fossil fuels even if a fleet of alien ships showed up in the sky this afternoon and said "Dammit! Stop it! We will give you enough fusion reactors and have them set up by the end of the week!"
What's the areal efficiency of this process? The primary input to the growth reactor is hydrogen gas. The primary input to producing renewable hydrogen is electricity. A solar farm in a good location, like Desert Sunlight, achieves an annualized power density of about 10 megawatts per km^2 (0.1 megawatts (100 kW) per hectare).
It takes about 50 kWh of electricity to produce a kilogram of hydrogen via electrolysis:
According to this paper by some of the people behind Solar Foods, "Carbon emission avoidance and capture by producing in-reactor microbial biomass based food, feed and slow release fertilizer: Potentials and limitations" ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326571432_Carbon_em... ), it takes about 560 kg of hydrogen to produce 1000 kg of dry microbial based biomass with a protein content of 70% [1].
At 100 kW/ha, a solar farm in a good location can produce
(100 / 50) * 24 * 365 = 17,520 kg of H2 per hectare, per year.
That in turn can produce
17520 / 0.56 = 31,286 kg of dry microbial biomass per year, containing
31286 * 0.7 = 21,900 kg of protein per hectare per year.
According to some (admittedly quite dated, circa-1972) data collected on this page, the crop with the best areal productivity of edible protein is soybeans at 400 kg/hectare/year.
According to table 2 in the article, the essential amino acid profile of this bacterial protein is equal or superior to soy in all respects. The areal protein productivity of a solar farm coupled to microbial reactors may be more than 50 times that of growing conventional crops. If the bacterial protein is used as animal feed for animals with a good feed conversion ratio (e.g. farmed salmon), it even looks like you could get more animal protein per hectare this way than a vegetarian diet can achieve with conventional farming. And the water requirements are reduced even more drastically than the area requirements. And the electricity production can take place on non-arable land. I would be interested to see more modern areal productivity figures for soy; presumably there has been some additional intensification since the early 1970s, though not 50x improvement.
[1] Hydrogen consumption is not stated directly, but they say that hydrogen at $3/kg makes up 60% of the $2800 cost to produce a dry tonne of bacterial biomass. (0.6 * 2800) / 3 = 560 kg of hydrogen.
and hydrogen feed rate and hence production can be temporarily throttled on the time scales of the microbe feeding patterns so that it can absorb fluctuations in grid energy consumption!
Speculating that they plan to use hydrogen-reducing bacteria: This will require substantial post-processing since bacteria have too much RNA and DNA to safely be a major dietary component for humans.
Since the website mentions a Mars play, it's relevant that this drawback has been known in the space habitation literature since at least the 1970s.
What is the dietary danger of excessive nucleic acids? What happens if you eat too much of them? Could it be alleviated by cooking the food before eating it?
I'd say for total transparency, you need to go even further back and calculate the energy and materials cost for making the solar panel. Plants reproduce themselves, and solar panels do not.
24 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 62.7 ms ] threadAnd in general most land used for cattle grazing doesn't receive enough rainfall to support forests; or farming without outside water inputs. If we were to eat cattle that were exclusively fed by grazing on semi-arid land then Beef would be pretty environmentally friendly apart from the methane emissions. The problem is that we don't have enough grazing land to do that so most beef if fed with farm-produced plant matter leading to huge inefficiencies.
Finally, something we can eat when the robots take over
In any case, I note that tongue-in-cheek comments are not appreciated. Sad.
It's like Reddit here. Too bad. It was a good resource.
"Tongue-in-cheek" comments are more popular on reddit.
1: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540706/researcher-demonst...
Based on my research, in general, yes. However if you can store biological matter like algae or the Azolla fern in an anoxic environment, you significantly increase how long you can store it.
If you go read about the Azolla event, this is what is believed to have happened roughly 49 million years ago. Azolla is believed to have been growing in the warm waters of the arctic ocean (either by having freshwater being fed to the area and floating atop the salt water, or by diluting it enough to allow the Azolla to survive, I believe the Amazon does this where it empties into the Atlantic now) and as the generations would die off, they'd sink and reach depths that were anoxic and effectively prevented the bulk of the material to decay.
One avenue I found that shows promise for doing this via another method, would be making biochar in massive quantities, Pacific Pyrolysis is a company that interests me here https://pacificpyrolysis.com/about.html. Some of this you would sell as fertilizer, tilling it into the soil, which would only lock it up relatively short term. Some of it you would store in depleted mines that you can effectively cap, basically doing reverse-coal mining.
Other options exist but nothing that will scale the way we need it, an operation in Iceland shows us that you can at least have a negative-emissions power plant by injecting CO2 into basalt where it converts to carbonates, becoming rock.
Dr. Klaus Lackner at the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions also has some promising research with a polymer. You basically make this 'plastic tree' which garbs CO2 out of the air, it gets trapped in the polymer and you then 'wash' it out with water and capture it in the washing process, of course you still have to do something with that captured gas. Here you could sell some for industrial applications and take the rest and pump it into depleted natural gas and oil operations and then cap it in a sort of reverse mining-process again.
I am far from an expert but I've spent more than 100 hours looking into options this summer and fall and I do not see a currently available solution, that even after several generations of refinement, are workable.
I think we need to get lucky and figure out fusion, and fast, I also think we need a group like Oklo Inc to get their reactor up (it should operate on waste from current fission reactors) which would scale more rapidly. These only really solve coal and natural gas though, there's over a billion passenger vehicles on the planet right now that mostly use petroleum.
I know YC is pretty damn optimistic, I believe Altman said something a few weeks ago at the wired event along the lines of 'we will figure out fusion because we have to' but man, I'm considerably more pessimistic. I think the next 10-50 years are going to be interesting and quite tense.
The problem is that while this is accurate given the current state of science/technology, it's a complete political non-starter. There's always incentive for someone to be a bad actor, moreso if everyone else is behaving themselves. Unfortunately, very few nations are going to be willing to commit to massive greenhouse gas reduction while any other nation is profiting from it.
I think the comment from Altman (we will figure out fusion because we have to) has the subtext: 'or we're all dead.' It seems unlikely that killing fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas polluters will get killed by political fiat. That leaves killing them economically, which means creating a more efficient energy source.
Oh, I unfortunately agree. We can't even get everyone to acknowledge global warming or even to stop using CFCs ( https://www.newsweek.com/mystery-source-ozone-depleting-subs... ) so yeah it's highly unrealistic to get people to abandon fossil fuels even if a fleet of alien ships showed up in the sky this afternoon and said "Dammit! Stop it! We will give you enough fusion reactors and have them set up by the end of the week!"
It takes about 50 kWh of electricity to produce a kilogram of hydrogen via electrolysis:
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/doe-technical-targets-...
According to this paper by some of the people behind Solar Foods, "Carbon emission avoidance and capture by producing in-reactor microbial biomass based food, feed and slow release fertilizer: Potentials and limitations" ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326571432_Carbon_em... ), it takes about 560 kg of hydrogen to produce 1000 kg of dry microbial based biomass with a protein content of 70% [1].
At 100 kW/ha, a solar farm in a good location can produce
(100 / 50) * 24 * 365 = 17,520 kg of H2 per hectare, per year.
That in turn can produce
17520 / 0.56 = 31,286 kg of dry microbial biomass per year, containing
31286 * 0.7 = 21,900 kg of protein per hectare per year.
According to some (admittedly quite dated, circa-1972) data collected on this page, the crop with the best areal productivity of edible protein is soybeans at 400 kg/hectare/year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_protein_per_unit_area_o...
According to table 2 in the article, the essential amino acid profile of this bacterial protein is equal or superior to soy in all respects. The areal protein productivity of a solar farm coupled to microbial reactors may be more than 50 times that of growing conventional crops. If the bacterial protein is used as animal feed for animals with a good feed conversion ratio (e.g. farmed salmon), it even looks like you could get more animal protein per hectare this way than a vegetarian diet can achieve with conventional farming. And the water requirements are reduced even more drastically than the area requirements. And the electricity production can take place on non-arable land. I would be interested to see more modern areal productivity figures for soy; presumably there has been some additional intensification since the early 1970s, though not 50x improvement.
[1] Hydrogen consumption is not stated directly, but they say that hydrogen at $3/kg makes up 60% of the $2800 cost to produce a dry tonne of bacterial biomass. (0.6 * 2800) / 3 = 560 kg of hydrogen.
Since the website mentions a Mars play, it's relevant that this drawback has been known in the space habitation literature since at least the 1970s.
Also gluten is a composite of proteins too but it's actually harmful not only to people with celiac disease as it triggers production of zonulin.
I hope I'm completely wrong.
Is this still done in both the West and Russia?