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Beef production (as well as meat produced from sheep and goats) is one of the most environmentally costly ways of producing food, because of methane emissions [

Beef production (as well as meat produced from sheep and goats) is one of the most environmentally costly ways of producing food, because of methane emissions [0]. I don't imagine substituting bugs for grass would make much of a difference there. I myself would quite happily try a bug-derived Beyond Meat burger or similar. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221214-what-is-the-lowest-carbon-protein https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221214-what-is-the-lowe...

Detrytus 3y ago
I thought that this methane emission was easily counteracted by some food additive, was it seaweed? EDIT: yes, it was: https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/case-studies/seaweed-supplements-reducing-methane-emissions.html https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/case-studies/seaweed-suppleme...
- jplrssn 3y ago
  Good point. But there are questions around the long-term safety of seaweed additives. And how many farmers would pay for seaweed while methane is free to emit?
  - Detrytus 3y ago
    Well, you can make it mandatory, the same way some countries require cattle vaccination, and other things. In the end it should be more acceptable to general public than just forbidding them to eat beef. And the seaweed shouldn't be too expensive, after all it is "weed". And with more research they possibly could isolate that one tiny chemical substance from seaweed that does all the work here, and synthesize it, so we can produce it cheaply?
- peterpost2 3y ago
  >easily counteracted No, it's not easy. This requires specific kinds of seaweeds to be effective, the species grows only in warm places(so not close to where we tend to keep cows) and it is not grown in large quantities yet, nor is the impact of doing that known. We are quite some time away from doing this large scale.
wyager 3y ago
All of these "beef is bad for the environment" articles are written by vegan activists, seventh day adventists, or other extremist groups who have a political agenda against meat. The amount of methane emissions from all beef agriculture today is within a factor of like 3 of the natural methane emissions from American bison prior to colonization of the Americas. All of these analyses completely ignore the base rate of methane emissions in the absence of cattle, whether from preexisting natural ruminants, from e.g. the fungal decomposition of plant matter that would have occurred on grasslands anyway, or from "meat substitutes". Even if the methane emission was 10x the absurdly inflated figures that anti-meat extremists try to claim, it would still be overwhelmingly worth it for me to consume it for the health benefits. It would be better for society to spend Manhattan-Project-plus-NASA levels of our GDP on methane catalysis/capture technology, if it were actually necessary, than to stop eating ruminant meat.
- Shekelphile 3y ago
  The methane emissions from farming do not matter in the slightest anyway. They can only release what they already absorbed from their feed. We should stop adding more ghg to the atmosphere that hasn't been there for millions of years, allowing the carbon cycle to continue with that ghg currently in atmosphere does no harm. The people crying about this are simply serving an agenda of people who want to force the average citizen to eat bugs to make literal pennies more in profit for them and their family. It's absurd. We won't do anything about climate change by stopping agriculture, it will simply ruin food supply.
  - peterpost2 3y ago
    But if the cows were not there, what they eat would not be cultivated in dire circumstances. Instead that place would sequester carbon. And even if it would not be allowed to sequester it would largely be emitted as co2 and not methane which is a lot less potent greenhouse gas.
    - Shekelphile 3y ago
      None of that matters. Plants only sequester carbon that was already in the atmosphere and it goes right back into it when they die. Methane breaks down to CO2 in a number of months/years and has no effect on geologic timescales. The only solution to climate change is to stop introducing carbon that was sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago. Championing causes like 'you need to eat the bugs' is not a productive use of time and does nothing to change the status quo in the end.

Detrytus 3y ago

I thought that this methane emission was easily counteracted by some food additive, was it seaweed? EDIT: yes, it was: https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/case-studies/seaweed-supplements-reducing-methane-emissions.html https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/case-studies/seaweed-suppleme...

jplrssn 3y ago
Good point. But there are questions around the long-term safety of seaweed additives. And how many farmers would pay for seaweed while methane is free to emit?
- Detrytus 3y ago
  Well, you can make it mandatory, the same way some countries require cattle vaccination, and other things. In the end it should be more acceptable to general public than just forbidding them to eat beef. And the seaweed shouldn't be too expensive, after all it is "weed". And with more research they possibly could isolate that one tiny chemical substance from seaweed that does all the work here, and synthesize it, so we can produce it cheaply?
peterpost2 3y ago
>easily counteracted No, it's not easy. This requires specific kinds of seaweeds to be effective, the species grows only in warm places(so not close to where we tend to keep cows) and it is not grown in large quantities yet, nor is the impact of doing that known. We are quite some time away from doing this large scale.

wyager 3y ago

All of these "beef is bad for the environment" articles are written by vegan activists, seventh day adventists, or other extremist groups who have a political agenda against meat. The amount of methane emissions from all beef agriculture today is within a factor of like 3 of the natural methane emissions from American bison prior to colonization of the Americas. All of these analyses completely ignore the base rate of methane emissions in the absence of cattle, whether from preexisting natural ruminants, from e.g. the fungal decomposition of plant matter that would have occurred on grasslands anyway, or from "meat substitutes". Even if the methane emission was 10x the absurdly inflated figures that anti-meat extremists try to claim, it would still be overwhelmingly worth it for me to consume it for the health benefits. It would be better for society to spend Manhattan-Project-plus-NASA levels of our GDP on methane catalysis/capture technology, if it were actually necessary, than to stop eating ruminant meat.

Shekelphile 3y ago
The methane emissions from farming do not matter in the slightest anyway. They can only release what they already absorbed from their feed. We should stop adding more ghg to the atmosphere that hasn't been there for millions of years, allowing the carbon cycle to continue with that ghg currently in atmosphere does no harm. The people crying about this are simply serving an agenda of people who want to force the average citizen to eat bugs to make literal pennies more in profit for them and their family. It's absurd. We won't do anything about climate change by stopping agriculture, it will simply ruin food supply.
- peterpost2 3y ago
  But if the cows were not there, what they eat would not be cultivated in dire circumstances. Instead that place would sequester carbon. And even if it would not be allowed to sequester it would largely be emitted as co2 and not methane which is a lot less potent greenhouse gas.
  - Shekelphile 3y ago
    None of that matters. Plants only sequester carbon that was already in the atmosphere and it goes right back into it when they die. Methane breaks down to CO2 in a number of months/years and has no effect on geologic timescales. The only solution to climate change is to stop introducing carbon that was sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago. Championing causes like 'you need to eat the bugs' is not a productive use of time and does nothing to change the status quo in the end.