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Feeding Cows Seaweed Could Cut Methane Emissions and Diversify Maine’s Coastal Economy, but Can It Scale?
(insideclimatenews.org)
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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Ummm....that article says there was still a drastic methane cut, it was just ~20% after accounting for the longer life of the cattle due to unpredicted slower mass gain with the supplement. They had hoped for no changes to development of the cattle and around 80% or higher emissions cut. Article also makes it clear there were a lot of confounders in how they measured methane in the trial so this is realistically a great starting point and a strong show of the value proposition. Moreover, seaweed is good for water ecosystems so cultivating it at scale would be another value add. I don't eat farmed meat, but I don't expect that to ever be standard across the human species and this is certainly a strong improvement. You don't seem to understand what greenwashing is.
Unpredicted is wrong there, there are many substances, additives, and outright plants that can be added to ruminant diets to reduce GHG emissions and that usually has consequences. The animal farmers have known about these for a long time as it's part of the "technology"; sometimes the additives reduce weight gain, sometimes they cause harms; sometimes the plants taint the meat or milk.
Yes, it's a huge failure.
It's not. This has been going on for years.
Here's a long article: https://etcgroup.org/content/seaweed-delusion
Yeah, I think its useful to continue trialing out the technology and see if it can hold up to snuff. But at the same time banking on this idea as our only approach to decarbonizing protein (which is what the beef industry would prefer) is short sighted, imo
Yeah, decarbonizing meat without reducing consumption isn't gonna be a long term solution, but if it works, it can be a part of it. Hoo ha diverse tactics!
Absolutely. There is no single solution to our environmental situation, but that also means that individual solutions shouldn't be dismissed out of hand because they aren't themselves that non-existent magic bullet.