Can We Reduce Cow Methane Emissions By Breeding Low-Emission Cattle? (popsci.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Popular Science: Raising cattle contributes to global warming in a big way. The animals expel large amounts of methane when they burp and fart, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. U.S. beef production, in fact, roughly equals the annual emissions of 24 million cars, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That's a lot of methane... Researchers think there may be a better way. Rather than ask people to give up beef, they are trying to design more climate-friendly cattle.

The goal is to breed animals with digestive systems that can create less methane. One approach is to tinker with the microbes that live in the rumen, the main organ in the animals' digestive tract... Scientists in the United Kingdom last year found that a cow's genes influence the makeup of these microbial communities, which include bacteria and also Archaea, the primary producers of methane. This discovery means cattle farmers potentially could selectively breed animals that end up with a lower ratio of Archaea-to-bacteria, thus leading to less methane... "The selection to reduce methane emissions would be permanent, cumulative and sustainable over generations as with any other trait, such as growth rate, milk yield, etc. used in animal breeding." This, over time, "would have a substantial impact on methane emissions from livestock," Roehe said.
Breeding low-emission cattle would also make it cheaper to raise cattle -- and improve the quality of meat.

Comments

Be at peace instead

[Kohath]

If you’re not a religious environmentalist, your cows' methane emissions are not a sin.

it's what's for dinner

[PopeRatzo]

U.S. beef production, in fact, roughly equals the annual emissions of 24 million cars

There are about 270 million cars in the US. Better to switch to electric and continue enjoying your ribeye steak.

Re: it's what's for dinner

[ShanghaiBill]

We should tackle the worst offenders first.

No, we should not. There is no rational reason to sequentially solve independent problems. There is no reason that dealing with methane emissions from cattle should be delayed until we are "done" with transportation. That is idiotic.

Re: it's what's for dinner

[KiloByte]

How is the electricity for these electric cars generated? From coal. From oil.

A power plant can burn oil in a more efficient way, with processes that make the exhaust drastically cleaner than anything a car can do. Obviously, you still want to get rid of oil, but in the meantime we want to burn it cleanly. And coal, well, needs to die immediately.

From nuclear.

Nuclear is so much safer and less polluting than any alternative, including those holiest-of-holy "renewables" that I'd call what so-called environmentalists do outright sabotage. Hydro shuts down variations in water level that are vital to many ecosystems, and is devastating when there's a dam failure. Wind kills millions of birds and bats, and produces noise that affects humans and wildlife in a large radius. Solar is only now becoming possible without downsides, and it produces unreliable power.

On the other hand, even 60s era nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than all of the above, and its byproducts come in small nice easy-to-store barrels. Modern nuclear has no real risk of a run-away reaction.

And if we'd care the slightest about environment (rather than just political gains from claiming we do), we'd research fusion a long time ago already.

Re: it's what's for dinner

[hey!]

The usual heuristic is "low hanging fruit". You start with easy stuff and work your way up.

However the usual heuristic goes out the window when people feel there's a crisis. For example war: you don't ignore easy targets, but you don't confine yourself to them. You're much more focused on maximum value targets.

Neither of these heuristics is wrong, they're just for different situations.

Re: it's what's for dinner

[ShanghaiBill]

You start with easy stuff and work your way up.

What is easy for a biologist is not the same as what is easy for an electrochemist. How about we let the biologists work on the cow farts, while the electrochemists work on better batteries?

Raise more deer

[Khyber]

Tastier, makes better jerky, leaner, can be raised faster/reproduces quicker, requires less space, requires less food, requires less energy.

Pretty much a full-out win.

Re:Raise more deer

[blindseer]

I was just reading yesterday on how Staten Island has a deer problem so they are culling the deer. Now usually one would think this means trapping or shooting the deer but no, that would make sense. What the New York City government is doing is giving the bucks they catch a vasectomy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

Not even a castration, which would not only be easier but also avoid the rut behavior that puts them at risk of automobile collisions as they travel around the island. They are giving the bucks a vasectomy.

Don't deer fart too? What of their methane production? Not only that but the reason they want to get rid of the deer on the island is that they are effectively an invasive species spreading disease, causing property damage, and putting people's lives at risk from automobile collisions.

The inmates are running the asylum in New York City. Those deer should be hunted for their tasty meat and to remove the risks to life and property they cause. But no one wants to vote to kill Bambi, so they spend millions of taxpayer dollars to catch the deer, give them a vasectomy, and then... let them go. That way the deer can die naturally, by getting hit by a truck.

Re:Raise more deer

[Anonymous Coward]

Castrating them (since you won't get all the male deer) wouldn't actually much reduce the rate of deer breeding precisely because the castrated males won't rut. Thus the few with intact parts would simply mate with more hinds. If they are castrated then it is entirely possible for the dominant buck to be one firing blanks, with pretty much none of the hinds getting pregnant (some hinds are naughty).

The underlying problem...

[RyanFenton]

Lots of these sub-debates on cleanup miss the underlying point:

We're digging up carbon/methane to get our fuels currently, and that's the net cause of the overall warming.

Yes, cows produce CO2/Methane from their gut bacteria. Those same bacteria would still produce those same gasses without cows, just with rotting vegetation. Getting rid of cows wouldn't fix the underlying biological systems, from too much carbon in general floating around, and 'fixing' cows doesn't do much about the whole system that cattle is emblematic of.

The real (environmental) issue with cattle is that we transport everything they eat, and basically everything about them, with vehicles burning fuel dug up from previously sequestered hydrocarbons.

At every stage, we're pushing the planet VERY QUICKLY back in atmospheric time to a more carbon-heavy atmosphere, trapping more energy over time, and essentially recreating several kinds of mass extinction scenarios, like this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's cool that we're finding some ways to staunch the flow of some greehouse effects - but unless we're sequestering the carbon in some way, it's still going to cycle back around and have mostly the same effect over time - and we're going to have to work harder to 'fight' those net effects. In other words, we're fighting the symptoms, not the underlying at-large causes.

Ryan Fenton