[HN Gopher] We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)
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We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)
Author : hkh
Score : 90 points
Date : 2020-08-17 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gatesnotes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gatesnotes.com)
| flyGuyOnTheSly wrote:
| I wonder if changing the cow's diet could limit the amount of
| methane generated?
|
| I've noticed that changing my own diet by eliminating animal
| products has cut down significantly on methane production in my
| own gut.
|
| My farts literally don't smell like anything at all anymore, when
| a small one used to clear the room with ease.
| EGreg wrote:
| Um yes New Zealand researchers gave cows seweed and cut
| emissions 80% by adding just 2% of it
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/01/from-red-seawe...
| xnx wrote:
| Isn't methane odorless?
| abstractbarista wrote:
| That is correct. The smells come from hydrogen sulfide and
| other molecules.
| projektfu wrote:
| And the hydrogen sulfide probably comes from the metabolism
| of cysteine and methionine. A low protein diet will produce
| less smelly farts.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Did you eliminate all animal products or just some?
|
| I have some rooms I'd like to clear out.
| vikramkr wrote:
| Methane is odorless, so you might still be producing methane -
| the decrease in odor has more to do with sulfur compounds
| mattferderer wrote:
| This recent article discusses this topic -
| https://onezero.medium.com/cow-farts-are-not-the-problem-f57...
|
| My takeaway from their argument is that eliminating cows may
| not be as valuable as changing how they're raised & fed.
| fnovd wrote:
| This article misses the point entirely.
|
| It's true that most cattle farms are on the small-end, and
| have plenty of land for their cattle.
|
| It's also true that the vast majority of cows slaughtered for
| meat come from just a few industrial feedlots.
|
| Changing the way that "most" farms work might change how much
| methane truth A cows produce, but the vast majority of cows
| are truth B cows that aren't impacted by the decisions of
| small-time farmers.
|
| There is not enough land on this earth to allow for free-
| range cattle at the rate humans consume them. The solution
| isn't to do it more efficiently, but to stop and do something
| else. Ford said people would ask for faster horses, and 100
| years later we have people wanting cows that fart
| differently.
|
| It's the cheeseburger you want, not another magic chemical
| added to the lovecraftian nightmare that is factory farming.
| The way to reduce the impact cows have on the environment is
| to reduce the number of cows bred for food.
| mc32 wrote:
| One could also say people are asking for non-meat as a
| solution when maybe the answer is to make cow farts
| different.
| reillyse wrote:
| This is a good article, I would add to the key takeaway is
| that methane production from animal husbandry is mostly a
| closed system, the greenhouse gases being produced by cows
| are being absorbed from the atmosphere. atmosphere ->
| photosynthesis in grass -> cows -> atmosphere -> grass etc.
| So reducing herd sizes doesn't reduce net carbon in the
| atmosphere.
| klodolph wrote:
| A couple problems.
|
| Looking at the net carbon paints a very incomplete picture.
| The effect of methane is very different from CO2, you might
| describe methane as 30x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2
| is.
|
| The other factor here is that agriculture drives
| deforestation, which releases sequestered carbon.
| mc32 wrote:
| According to this[1] seaweed helps cut methane emissions by
| cows.
|
| [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-
| help-c...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| We're not making any progress on co2e because we've choosen not
| to.
|
| Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome here!?)
| would be pointless, civilisation would be over long before then
| anyway.
|
| I find all this really frustrating. It's like someone moaning
| they're fat and telling me about their new diet, the 1000th one
| this week, where they eat 20 cheese burgers a day and hope for
| the best. Let's get real and either do something or enjoy the
| ride to hell.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome
| here!?) would be pointless, civilisation would be over long
| before then anyway."
|
| Why?
|
| Even with every worst case szenario of continous droughts and
| floods and loss of some islands and coastal land etc.
|
| We could grow everything we need in (automated) greenhouses.
|
| Only if the transistion chaos leads to all out nuclear war, but
| that is not really a fixed thing.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Civlisation will survive, in one shape or the other, but some
| countries could be totally screwed, others badly damaged. Its
| possible to imagine that political system crumbles, liberal
| democracy is gone, and the label is somewhat justified.
|
| We are talking about most of bangladesh underwater and about
| 1 billion refugees globally in a poor scenario. Todays
| migration problems will pale in comparison. Many if them will
| die violently.
|
| Nothing we've done so far indicates to me that we can quickly
| organise global rollout of hundred million automated
| greenhouses to people that cannot posssibly pay for them. Or
| to build largest damns in human history.
|
| Even when we can afford to pay for infrastructure, in UK its
| taking us 40 years to build 1 line of rail, connecting two
| biggest cities, and its going to cost roughly as mich as the
| moon programm did.
| peteradio wrote:
| > civilisation would be over long before then anyway
|
| What are you even talking about? If you are truly worried about
| climate change then this hyperbole reflects poorly on your
| cause.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I agree that the globe doesn't have the political will to enact
| harsh enough laws to really impact climate change. It has
| become too politicized at this point. I do disagree that
| civilization will die. When there is massive drought and food
| shortages, changes will happen _then_. At that point it will be
| very real. However, we have way to much scientific knowhow and
| money for our species to be wiped out. I 'm not saying it won't
| be a very different experience and a different kind of life but
| we're too smart to die off. We may lose the ability to produce
| food at massive scale but not at small scale. I don't even
| think we'll get to this point in this century. But we likely
| will at some point. Maybe we'll do better the second time
| around with a more sustainable global population.
| cagenut wrote:
| > Let's get real and either do something or enjoy the ride to
| hell.
|
| Easy for anyone not on the Indian sub-continent to say:
| https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/3-4/3-4-11/figure...
| belorn wrote:
| People claim that burning biomass is a net-zero effect on the
| climate because whatever get burned had once collected the carbon
| from the air. Then we have people arguing that cows are one of
| the main contributor to global warming because we feed them
| grass. In cases with produce that get rejected for once reason or
| an other, it may either go into animal feed or biomass depending
| on who is paying the more, and thus the greenness of it changes
| drastically.
|
| So why are counting the methane from cows in isolation, while
| biomass is the sum of carbon released minus carbon extracted?
| rocqua wrote:
| > because whatever get burned had once collected the carbon
| from the air.
|
| (Not an expert, just guessing here)
|
| That is a long-term part of it. Specifically, biomass is a lot
| better than fossil fuels because you are not introducing any
| more carbon into the long-term cycle. But it is not all about
| the amount of 'above ground' carbon. In the short term, what
| matters more is 'carbon in the atmosphere'. Here, biomass is
| net-zero only if either the plants being burned are re-planted
| (i.e. wood pellets) or the biomass would have rotted away
| anyway (food remains).
|
| On the other hand, cows take up a lot of acreage that could be
| used to capture a lot more carbon if the fields weren't filled
| with just grass. Besides, the actual practice of keeping cows
| is quite resource intensive. And, as others have said, cows
| produce methane.
| idoh wrote:
| Methane is a lot more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO2.
| Turning CO2 from the atmosphere back into CO2 is net even.
| Turning CO2 into methane is net-bad.
| belorn wrote:
| How much methane do you get out of 1kg biomass vs how much
| co2 if you burned it? Methane is indeed a more potent (if
| shorter lived) greenhouse gas, but one would guess that some
| amount end up either in the cow or as manure which then act
| as a natural fertilizer. Natural fertilizer is also an object
| which commonly get classified as having zero carbon
| footprint, which again, is a bit odd. The manure has zero
| carbon if used as natural fertilizer, but the meat from the
| same cow does not.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Methane produces CO2 when it "decays" (not really decay,
| but still), so I think "shorter lived" is misleading.
| syl_sau wrote:
| > [I]t would be wrong to assume that the FAO figure is
| totally scientific. Not only does it rely on evidence which
| is acknowledged to be uncertain. It is also based on a unit,
| known as the "CO2 equivalent", which assumes that the
| emission of one tonne of methane is equivalent to the
| emission from 25 tonnes of CO2 > [S]ince methane degrades
| quickly, stable emissions of methane lead to a stable level
| of methane in the atmosphere and no increase in global
| temperature. > There is something deeply untrustworthy about
| a metric which views methane as being many times more harmful
| than CO2, when only a small reduction in methane emissions is
| required to stabilise its presence in the atmosphere, whereas
| a massive reduction in CO2 emissions is required to achieve
| the same.
|
| Source : https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/sites/default/fil
| es/Is%20...
| opo wrote:
| We should obviously be worried about other green house
| gasses, but methane is a particularly bad green house gas
| in the short term.
|
| >......The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame,
| methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to
| CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are
| approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the
| climate system, climate studies should, at the very least,
| include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon.
|
| https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-
| wa...
| reitzensteinm wrote:
| This source is trash. The 25 factor comes from the relative
| impact over the next 100 years for emitting both.
|
| It already factors in (relatively) fast breakdown, which
| the quoted text then attempts to double count.
|
| Stabilization isn't some intrinsic goal.
|
| I'm sure you can find a coal industry trade publication
| waving its hands just as well to shift the blame to
| agriculture.
| jniedrauer wrote:
| Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas and has a
| much shorter half-life in the atmosphere compared to CO2, I
| wonder if it might actually save us. We could render the
| planet inhospitable early enough to be forced to address the
| problem without shackling future generations with the fallout
| like we are doing with CO2.
| AQuantized wrote:
| When methane is oxidized it produces carbon dioxide
| neckardt wrote:
| Do you know what the half life of methane in the atmosphere
| is? I did a search for it but couldn't find it.
| wahern wrote:
| 9.1 years according to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
| nvader wrote:
| That's funny.
|
| https://www.foodsource.org.uk/building-
| blocks/agricultural-m... claims
|
| > it is a relatively short-lived GHG, with emissions
| breaking down after an average of around 10 years.
|
| Looks like someone didn't understand what half-life
| means, or is being misleading.
| projektfu wrote:
| On average, a molecule of methane breaks down in less
| than 10 years. That is a true interpretation.
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's ... not great ... but only viable if methane itself
| doesn't move the climate past a tipping point to runaway
| greenhouse effects.
|
| See "clathrate gun hypothesis", for example.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
| kickout wrote:
| Bill is correct on a lot fronts here. Soil is the big elephant in
| the room. But the problem remains an economic problem as much as
| a technical one. We need solutions that are market driven (in
| addition to the cool innovations he talks about).
| https://thinkingagriculture.io/carbon-sequestering-incentive...
| [deleted]
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Adding food storage to countries where that capability doesn't
| exist is a huge multiplier in their agronomic efficiency. There
| is some excellent discussion of this in the book "Guns, Germs,
| and Steel" which discusses how these forces shaped the changes in
| human civilizations.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Some things that do not show up in Guns, germs and steel:
|
| - Syphilis may have a new world origin.
|
| - The most productive crop is the potato, a crop of new world
| origin.
|
| - The Inca farmed guinea pigs. These are a very viable farm
| animal.
|
| - The Mapuche did not have guns, germs or steel yet, they
| defeated the Spanish.
|
| - The Inca could have defeated the Spanish. They were
| encountered after a civil war where the nobility was purged.
| The Inca nobility knew how to run the empire.
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