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Seaweed Could Make Cows Burp Less Methane and Cut Their Carbon Hoofprint (technologyreview.com)
A diet supplemented with red algae could lessen the huge amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cows and sheep, if we can just figure out how to grow enough. From a report: In a wooden barn on the edge of campus at the University of California, Davis, cattle line up at their assigned feed slots to snatch mouthfuls of alfalfa hay. This past spring, several of these Holstein dairy cows participated in a study to test a promising path to reducing methane emissions from livestock, a huge source of the greenhouse gases driving climate change. By adding a small amount of seaweed to the animals' feed, researchers found, they could cut the cows' methane production by nearly 60%. Each year, livestock production pumps out greenhouse gases with the equivalent warming effect of more than 7 gigatons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same global impact as the transportation industry. Nearly 40% of that is produced during digestion: cattle, goats, and sheep belch and pass methane, a highly potent, albeit relatively short-lived, greenhouse gas.
If the reductions achieved in the UC Davis study could be applied across the worldwide livestock industry, it would eliminate nearly 2 gigatons of those emissions annually -- about a quarter of United States' total climate pollution each year. Ermias Kebreab, an animal science professor at UC Davis who leads the work, is preparing to undertake a more ambitious study in the months ahead, evaluating whether smaller amounts of a more potent form of seaweed can cut methane emissions even further. Meanwhile, some businesses have begun to explore what could be the harder challenge: Growing it on a massive scale.
If the reductions achieved in the UC Davis study could be applied across the worldwide livestock industry, it would eliminate nearly 2 gigatons of those emissions annually -- about a quarter of United States' total climate pollution each year. Ermias Kebreab, an animal science professor at UC Davis who leads the work, is preparing to undertake a more ambitious study in the months ahead, evaluating whether smaller amounts of a more potent form of seaweed can cut methane emissions even further. Meanwhile, some businesses have begun to explore what could be the harder challenge: Growing it on a massive scale.
What's the half life of methane?
If the reductions achieved in the UC Davis study could be applied across the worldwide livestock industry, ...
Applied *worldwide"? That's a pretty big undertaking - and a LOT of seaweed routinely grown and, probably, shipped as a feed additive.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
At least not naturally. Will Whole Foods but my products?
We already went over this before on Slashdot. Even if you scraped all the seaweed from the sea floor, there still wouldn't be nearly enough for all the cows. The solution is to engineer something to feed the cattle or the people (that doesn't come from cattle).
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Why isn't it better to collect the methane and use it to, oh, I dunno, heat the milking barn with it?
Cut their carbon hoofprint. Whoever wrote this must think they are fucking hilarious.
This was studied by a Canadian researcher, who later moved to Australia? See 2016 blog post here: https://blog.csiro.au/seaweed-hold-key-cutting-methane-emissions-cow-burps/ Maybe fully synthetic beef is a better idea - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWtEVbrNdI8&t=158s?
But after Thanksgiving I'm putting off an excess of methane as well.
Where exactly can I go and get some of this stuff so I can do my part for the environment?
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
So some of the most valuable real estate on the planet should be flooded as gravity storage for water? That's an astonishingly unproductive idea.
From a construction point of view, the easiest way to do it would be to damn off the entire San Francisco Bay, which would have the advantage of flooding San Francisco, Oakland, and particularly Berkeley.
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OK, well maybe, but we do have a bit of a better understanding now, and beef increases the risk of bowel cancer anyway. Maybe try watching the video and see what actually goes into that particular type - pretty much stuff you already eat...
I have lived in California for 30+ years.
Economics has nothing to do with anything.
It is: eeeeep! Nukes bad! Aaaasssssaah nukes!!
And: no blood for big oil!! You canâ(TM)t drill our beautiful coasts so you can destroy the world and make money! Nukes! Eeeeep nukes! Wait, no, I mean oil! Oil! Eeeeeeeep!
Welcome to California.
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APK
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Must be a MLP:FiM reference. Or perhaps Fallout: Equestria reference.
Well, it's at least a reference to some pop culture cartoon-like world where sapients are four-legged, and still able to manipulate items quite well.
Cows do not eat coal. Because the carbon that cows are belching now was pulled out of the atmosphere last year,â(TM)the cattle methane issue is, well, bullshit.
So, just because they can and will eat seaweed gives zero indication it will be any good for the cows.
Do you have any idea how far the ozone hole is (both in distance and time) from most users of chlorofluorocarbons? How far the great pacific garbage patch is from where people are improperly disposing of all that plastic? Do you have any numbers on how much dilution actually occurs in that environment? That might be more believable.
...burping and farting, same as us!
So they can get their own seaweed.
https://lachefnet.wordpress.co...
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
So some of the most valuable real estate on the planet should be flooded as gravity storage for water? That's an astonishingly unproductive idea.
So is feeding seaweed to cattle.
California is driving these ideas with laws that they believe will save the planet from global warming while they ignore far more productive means to reduce the production of global warming gasses. If they were taking this problem seriously then they'd find some smart people that know how this all works and take their advice. One that comes to mind is Dr. Patrick Moore. Dr. Moore's website: http://ecosense.me/ Here's an opinion article he wrote years ago about this: http://ecosense.me/2017/01/18/...
In the 1970s and 1980s the USA was putting nuclear power plants on line at a rate of one gigawatt of new capacity per month. This is not new technology but it is exceedingly safe, so low carbon that it produces less CO2 per kWh than "zero carbon" wind and solar, will run 24/7 for months at a time (which wind and solar could never do), and do so as cheap or cheaper than solar ever could. Maybe wind power can be cheaper but that still leaves the problems of being intermittent (which adds costs in other ways), and higher CO2. If we could build 12 nuclear power plants per year 40 years ago then I'm guessing we could build 24 per year today. And we'll have to build them that fast soon just to keep up with demand.
I hear this all the time, "but solar power is getting cheaper every day!" Well, you think it's impossible for nuclear power to get cheaper? How did solar get so cheap in the first place? My guess is it got cheap with competition, experience, economies of scale, and just generally being sold on the open market for utilities to buy. Nuclear power will get cheaper as we build them. That's because we'd gain experience, economies of scale, competition, and so on. Any complaints on nuclear power being expensive is the result of not building them for the last 40 years.
This explains why the wind and solar power advocates fear nuclear power so much. It's not because of radioactive waste or what not. They fear nuclear power because they know if anyone starts building nuclear power again then their market advantage disappears. Wind and solar cannot compete against nuclear power on price or CO2 reductions.
Oh, getting back to the hydro storage angle, storage technology cannot save wind and solar. Battery storage is not cheap. Pumped hydro storage is cheap but we'd need a lot of it to make wind and solar viable. Unless you want to see a lot of valuable land flooded then we will not have enough storage. Even if we did have storage that's cheap and plentiful then this helps nuclear power as much as wind and solar. Nuclear reactors like to run real steady, changing output on a nuclear reactor stresses the materials and so they don't like to change output if they don't have to. Put a big battery bank outside a nuclear power plant and the batteries load follow instead of the reactor. If someone builds a battery for wind and solar power then expect that to be used by the utility for managing their coal, nuclear, and natural gas power as well.
California is just full of astonishingly unproductive ideas. They will have to learn to embrace nuclear power or face blackouts.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
In addition, there isn't enough seaweed to feed all the cows and the cost is a big factor. This would have to be mandated in a big way to even make a dent.... Sure they can isolate the specifics to bring down costs and create something cheaper but without mandating it there is a snowball's chance in hell.
The reality is that we will just have to TAX meat by warming impact and only the people who can afford it will eat a lot of it. This wouldn't be different than truffles etc.
BTW, global warming is going to price more people out of products like truffles or natural coffee (which is already being padded with fillers.) To create a direct artificial cost burden on a product is a political hurdle but we are indirectly forcing price hikes on thousands of other products as supply dwindles... due to in part to us not limiting meat production... Arguably, we are subsidizing meat at the price of everything else because we aren't smart enough to see we MUST choose winners and losers. Doing nothing is a choice. You see meat prices now, adjust to your budget if it actually impacts you and bitch regardless... but you'll not think of all the other costs down the road that are staring you in the face at this moment.
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Except the ozone is in a much higher part of the atmosphere, where large stratus layers settle over time and there's actually little mixing compared to the lower zones. It's not a great comparison.
If someone builds a battery for wind and solar power then expect that to be used by the utility for managing their coal, nuclear, and natural gas power as well.
Tesla's battery at Hornsdale has proven that battery storage is good enough not only for grid frequency stabilization but also for arbitrage.
From the dire threat of cow farts? People will come up with any excuse to avoid real work. Those types elect politicians to give them healthcare and everything else because they refuse to do an honest day's work.
Captcga: menial
Yes there is seawwed out there, stop looking for ways to use and abuse it so you can justify raping the sea even more.
Feeding cattle corn is one of the main problems. It screws up bovine digestion, increasing gas production and bacterial infection in cows, particularly E. coli.
Corn is great for making cows fat but bad for the environment.
>"Most bacteria are killed by the acid of stomach juice, but E. coli from grain-fed cattle are resistant to strong acids," explains James B. Russell, a USDA microbiologist and faculty member of the Cornell Section of Microbiology. "When people eat foods contaminated with acid-resistant E. coli -- including pathogenic strains like O157:H7 -- the chance of getting sick increases."
This E. coli is associated with greater gas production.
Increased corn in the bovine diet is associated with increased E. coli infection .
Now I know why Americans destroyed Buffalo herds... They was afraid of methane.... Stupid American ediots... The the stupider with his multimillion Fondation.. Bill
Cow flatulence, according to the article, is responsible for as much greenhouse gas emmissions as the transportation industry. Without changing the diets of cattle, or forcing everyone to drive electric cars, carbon dioxide emissions could be cut in half by combining these two things so that the same objectives are achieved by a single action instead of two:
RIDE COWS!
Look at the situation. We have like, billions of cows, most of them standing around doing NOTHING. We, as a society, produce X gigatons of CO2 moving stuff around, while the cows farting also produces roughly X gigatons of the same gas in the same amount of time, resulting in a total of 2 * X gigatons of CO2 per time period.
If, however, we all abandoned our cars and trucks, and just rode cows, we could ELIMINATE X gigatons of CO2, just by doing that. PLUS, as a free bonus, EVERYONE gets heated leather seats to ride around on, no more cheap, shitty vinyl or cloth seats! AND If your ride ever breaks down, instead of calling AAA or a tow service and paying hundreds of dollars, you just call your nearest friend, who rides his cow out, bringing his wife and kids, plus a BIG ‘OL BUCKET of BBQ sauce and some fire wood, and instead of your day being ruined, you get barbeque BURGERS and STEAKS! IT’S A WIN-WIN, FOLKS!
IF your cow was lactating at the time she broke down, guess what? You get milkshakes to wash those burgers down with! You know it’s the right thing to do! Write your member of congress or senator, or preferably both, and DEMAND we eliminate all gasoline and diesel-powered cars and trucks from America’s highways and bighways, and replace them with good ‘ol BESSY!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
As anybody who hunts and eats deer will tell you, the flavor of the meat of an animal is affected by what it eats; deer that steal their meals from farmer's fields taste very different from their much-less-delicious counterparts who dine amonst the pine trees.
I have certainly not run this experiment with beef and seaweed, but I'd not be surprised if the resulting cheeseburger took on a decidedly fishy flavor (ugh).
Destroying the flavor of a burger to save ther planet is problematic - life might not be worth living in such a saved world. Perhaps we could achieve the same carbon suppression by eliminateing all the global warming fanatics? After all, they are the ones who insist that the stuff they are doing is destorying the planet. We could start by just banning them from flying private jets to luxury vacation spots to hold glitsy climate change conferences.
Yes target meat production and not the larger polluter of global rice production.
"Flooded rice (Oryza sativa L.) cultivation has been identified as one of the leading global agricultural sources of anthropogenic methane (CH4) emissions. Furthermore, it has been estimated that global rice production is responsible for 11% of total anthropogenic CH4 emissions. Considering that CH4 has a global warming potential that is approximately 25 times more potent, on a mass basis, than carbon dioxide (CO2) and rice production is globally extensive "
https://www.intechopen.com/books/greenhouse-gases/methane-emissions-from-rice-production-in-the-united-states-a-review-of-controlling-factors-and-summ
Get this bullshit off Slashdot