Cows That Burp Less Methane to Be Bred 366
Canadian scientists are breeding a type of cow that burps less, in an attempt to reduce greenhouse gases. Cows are responsible for almost 75% of total methane emissions, mostly coming from burps. Stephen Moore, professor of agricultural, food and nutritional science at the University of Alberta, hopes the refined bovines will produce 25 per cent less methane. Nancy Hirshberg, spokesman for Stonyfield Farm says, "If every US dairy farmer reduced emissions by 12 per cent it would be equal to about half a million cars being taken off the road."
More cowbell (Score:3, Funny)
More cowbell [wikipedia.org], less cow-burp.
Easy alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
Eat Mor Chikin? (Score:4, Funny)
Or perhaps we should pig out on pork, the other white meat.
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Attention grammar nazis: In case you're not from the U.S., or don't have one located near you, "Eat Mor Chikin" is an advertising slogan [chick-fil-a.com] used by Chick-Fil-A, a chain of quick-service restaurants that specialize in chicken sandwiches, in their advertising and commercials, which feature cows, who, of course, can't spell.
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The original LOL-cows?
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I'm not to worried about the cows anyway.
There have been animals around on earth a long time, and the cows are likely to be pushing away some other species, but overall the methane release into the atmosphere wouldn't be that different throughout history.
An attack on animals farting seems to be plain stupid related to so many other factors involved.
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Yeah, but the giant herds of buffalo and other large mammals has decreased by the billions over the last few thousand years. So it equals out in the end.
We need less people, not less cows.
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We need less people, not less cows.
That's the spirit! We've been attacking this problem from the wrong angle. Since it is obvious that Man is responsible for climate change, we can just eliminate the species from the Earth and solve all our climate change problems.
Now, who to inherit the Earth once Homo sapien has been removed?
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, but the giant herds of buffalo and other large mammals has decreased by the billions over the last few thousand years. So it equals out in the end.
The historic buffalo population is estimated at 60 million [americanwest.com]. So your estimate for the current bison population is several billion negative buffalo?
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Furthermore. Most animals don't have the 4 stomach system using anaerobic bacterial digestion. That's what makes the methane.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless of how we want to spin it, our world is changing. Managing those changes before they overwhelm us is important too.
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How do you know that this will produce an overall benefit? What if, by making cows produce less methane, we upset the balance of our atmosphere such that we induce global warming, or a new ice age?
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That's a very tough stretch, are you suggesting the cows would produce something else instead, or that methane reduces global warming.
and a side note, related to your sig, FLACs aren't portable?
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It's a stretch of sorts. On the other hand there's a possibility that methane would stop other polluting effects.
FLAC doesn't have a marketing campaign, so most mobile media players don't play them. The other motivation to "squish" FLACs is size; a set of earbuds isn't capable of reproducing the complete quality of a lossless file, at the same time smaller files allow for more of your collection to be portable.
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What I'm saying is that doing any specific action "to stop global warming" could have unforeseen consequences. Nature has a way of balancing things, and a sudden drop in methane production could have an effect on our climate besides "stopping global warming".
As for FLACs, they're portable in the sense of different platforms, but I meant in the sense that they take up huge amounts of space. I have a 2GB Sansa running Rockbox, and the FLAC folder on my computer is over 30GB. I can only fit about 4 albums' wor
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Thing is that cows are carbon neutral. And carbon methane only has a half-life in the atmosphere of about 7 years, so the whole "carbon methane is more damaging than CO2" stuff is just complete nonsense.
The real question we need to ask ourselves is this:
Why is that we seem to have such a hard time divorcing the science from the politics and pseudoscience? I'm not one of those "global warming is BS" freaks, but as someone concerened about pollution and the effects of human activities on the ecosphere, I wi
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Thing is that cows are carbon neutral.
Not when they're fed corn that was shipped, using fossil fuels, halfway across the country to get there. (Let's not even go into the fact that this corn was produced using artificial fertilizer, derived from petroleum, and sprayed with pesticide--you guessed it, more petroleum. And the fact that the cow itself, after being processed, will be shipped halfway across the country again to reach your dinner plate--fossil fuels.) Also, cows are ruminants: they're supposed to eat grass. Grass is free, and its energy comes from the sun--not long-dead dinosaurs.
If all farmers farmed more locally and closer to organic practices, cows would be a lot closer to being carbon-neutral.
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Modern agriculture (ie Fertilisers, pesticides, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, antibiotics, posilac, et al.) is far "greener" than organic farming will ever be. I know this because I work in Agricultural
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Informative)
There have been animals around on earth a long time
Not all animals are ruminants. Ruminants release methane due to enteric fermentation. Ruminants are a relatively development on the evolutionary tree. Furthermore, our large population of them in modern times is sustained only through high density industrial agriculture. For example, probably the greatest natural landscape for large grazing herd animals today are the Serengeti and Masai Mara plains. Combined, they only support 1.5 million wildebeest. Even the massive bison herds that once spread across the entire great plains numbered at only 60 million. We raise, what, 1.3 billion cattle?
History has never seen anywhere close to as many ruminants on the surface of the earth as we have today. Thank modern industrial agriculture for that.
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You got the sixty million right, but are an order of magnitude out on the current population of cows. Here's my comment to Salon magazine 2 years ago on this subject:
Here are my calculations, with references, courtesy of google and an hour of my time. Thanks also to the USDA and PBS.
Size of national herd, all cows and calves: 106 million.
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/Catt/Catt-07-20-2007.txt [cornell.edu]
Number on feed (multiplying their GHG impact): 11 million.
(in short, they are only on feed near The En
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1) As people have already said, there weren't *nearly* as many cows around before we started making them a major part of our diet
2) The cows that *were* around ate grass. Feeding cows corn, as farmers tend to do, fattens them up but gives them much more gas.
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I heard about this a "few" years ago... Actually, the reduced methane production is sought after because it's energy wasted, instead of being converted into meat. My uncle has developed a small herd over the last 50 years that puts on 6lbs a day until they reach maturity (the average weight in his herd is over 1200 lbs). A friend of mine said they looked like giant sausages with legs. Selective breeding gave them rapid growth, strength, and a strong immune system (less expensive medications/vaccines). Less
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Or put them back on their natural grazing diet. They only output so much gas because they're not eating what they naturally would.
That would, in turn, force us to raise and eat fewer cows.
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There is nothing natural about cows. They have been bred to be unsuitable for any niche with predators in it; no gene-line descending from the current livestock breeds would have much of a chance of finding a natural niche.
However, it is true that grass-fed, open-range cattle are not only healthier, but more environmentally sustainable. In fact, it may be the least destructive form of food-production there is: it's less destructive than crop-planting.
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Only in the developed world. In areas like South America, you're constantly needing more foraging ground, which includes slashing forests for pasturage.
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Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
And then we could live with all the health consequences of high-carbohydrate diets. Which, if we take American's obesity trends after the move towards higher-carbohydrate diets since the 1970s, cost a damn sight more than global warming ever could.
Don't be fooled by the diet industry. Diets composed of almost exclusively carbohydrates are common among many the healthiest, most long-lived people in the world. Other extremely healthy people eat mostly fatty meats. Others eat mostly vegetables and fish. There are many paths to healthy eating, but all of them include a few common threads, such as eating less food.
To quote Michael Pollan, "Eat food. Note too much. Mostly plants."
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One, beef and grains are not the only foods in existence. It's not a binary choice. And two, almost any health professional would tell you that a high-carb diet is preferable to a high cholesterol diet in terms of health consequences. There's a reason that the medical community was so against the Atkins diet. Atkins himself had had a heart attack, congestive heart failure, and hypertension late in his life (which he adimantly insisted had nothing to do with his high-fat diet -- really!), and it may ulti
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Name one thing that I wrote that is incorrect. The American Heart Association says it puts you at risk for heart disease. The American Medical Association has repeatedly gone on the attack against it. So has the American Dietetic Association. And Snopes categorizes the role of Atkin's heart problems in his death as "undetermined", citing the arguments of both sides, and links to his death certificate on The Smoking Gun. What "5 minutes on Google" are you looking at?
Fix the consumers (Score:2)
Breed (or Engineer) humans that are predisposed towards the herbivore end of the omnivore scale. Such an attribute would also be better suited to space travel/living.
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Most humans are already predisposed towards the herbivore end, that's why we breed so many cows, rather than, say, bobcats.
-dZ.
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Exactly. We don't want to compete with our fellow meativores, that's just rude.
As for veggiebores, pfffft! Eating grass is just asking for trouble.
-dZ.
Re:Fix the consumers (Score:5, Funny)
Most humans are already predisposed towards the herbivore end, that's why we breed so many cows, rather than, say, bobcats.
Well, as spokesperson for the National Bobcat Meat Council, all I can say is that you're missing out!
For the consumer, bobcat is a wonderful choice. Bobcat is delicious, naturally lean, high in vitamins and minerals, and, let's face it, a completely awesome thing to say you are eating. Imagine you're in your backyard at your grill, talking to your competitive neighbor Bill over the fence. "Hey Bill, how's it going?" you say. "Oh not bad, just grilling up some pork sausage on my new 80,000 btu propane grill. How bout you?" Bill says. "Oh, not bad, slumming it with my measly 20,000 btu grill... making bobcat burgers!" Bill is stunned. "Oh wow! You are my king! I worship you!" he says in one of those awkward vaguely homo-erotic moments that seem to happen around Bill a little too often. But he is right -- bobcat is the burger of kings.
And for the rancher, bobcat presents many exciting opportunities as well. For one, wolves and other predators will not fuck with your livestock. You can even put your pig or goat pens -- needed to feed the bobcats -- in the middle of the bobcat pens and provide the ultimate in protection for your herbivore stock as well! Also, if you're tired of complacent cows and the tedious and unexciting process of herding them for slaughter, well, you're in for a thrill! Any wannabe cowboy brand a cow, but come at a bobcat with a glowing red brand and get ready to prove your mandhood! Compare scars with other bobcatboys and see who really has what it takes! I had one rancher tell me that they were thinking of getting out of the business due to the lack of physical danger, until I took him on a tour of a bobcat ranch and one of the feisty rascals hiding in a dark corner nearly took his face off. Well I had him signed up that very day to start his own bobcat ranch!
Okay... I'm not going to lie. Bobcat ranching is hell. They're mean, ornery, antisocial, dangerous, and have no compunction about going for the junk. The only thing that rancher signed was the out-of-court settlement with the National Bobcat Meat Council for his injuries. But seriously, I need to push these bobcat ranches or I'm going to lose my job. We'll even start you out with a bunch of free livestock! We're up to our fucking necks in bobcats, come on take some off our hands. They aren't even that tasty but god damn cut me some slack I'm trying to move product here. Eat some fucking bobcat already!
- Chris Burke, spokesperson, National Bobcat Meat Council. NBMC says: "Eat some fucking bobcat already!"(tm)
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Or we could raise and eat fewer cows.
I agree. Of course I like various forms of meat and steak; but I try to balance my diet with other substances; like vegetables, fruit, salads and other relatively health articles. While I do not feel comfortable telling people what they should or shouldn't eat; the amount of meat being consumed; or even more importantly the amount of meat (and other food articles) that are simply wasted by the system; is staggering.
While I can not see a simple solution to improving the way we produce and consume food; I
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I always laugh when people suggest the 'obvious' solution.... it either equates to, over fishing, destroying rain forest, inhumane treatment of farm animals, or well too much gas. Fact is the real problem is there are too many human beings... not only that these human beings eat a lot and we mess a lot.
Bottom line is the earth simply cannot handle it. In 1950 the world population wa below 3 Billion, in less than a generation we have doubled that. projections show that we will hit 1o billion by 2010.
http://w [treehugger.com]
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You misread your graph there, buddy, They say 10 billion by 2050, not 2010. And that doesn't take in to account the trend of developed countries to have lower birth rates, so if some countries start to develop, their birth rates will fall, as well.
As for your "only solution," I find that world wars tend to have a real good impact as a means of population control.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. Obviously 12% fewer cattle is the methane equivalent of "half a million cars off the road," according to their PR lady. So if everyone ate 12% less beef/dairy...
If you eat beef twice a week, then a 12% reduction is skipping one beef meal a month. One of the biggest 'vegetarian movement' mistakes was to paint vegetarianism as a black & white issue. If one meal a month can make this kind of environmental difference, vegetarians might do more for their cause if they applauded and promoted meat in moderation.
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or do both. I decided to not buy another car (blacktop footprint, gas, etc) and will only do 2-wheeled things now (bicycles, motorcycles, etc). And, I went vegan. It may sound drastic, but in actual implementation...well, I never have to wait in traffic (legal to split lanes in California), I never ever have to worry about parking, and it's not nearly as hard to find something to eat as people would think. So long as I don't keep in mind my Bs and omegas, I've got no problem keeping up with everything e
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never understood why humans drink cow's milk. It's not natural.
It is now. Most mammals become lactose-interolant after infancy; it helps discourage continued breastfeeding. Humans have evolved lactose tolerance. A diet of dairy is supported by our genes. As for what's "natural", nature has evolved all sorts of crazy feeding systems that don't involve killing the animal -- dung eaters, ants farming honeydew from aphids, flesh parasites, intestinal parasites, blood feeders, etc. Why is this particular method any less unusual than them? I'd say it's far more humane than killing the animals for food -- nature's primary modus operandi.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically most animals spend 80% of their awake time foraging for food, that's why we don't need to copy "nature" and instead alter our diets to allow a lifestyle.
Show me one other animal who consumes another species' milk
well growing up on a farm, I have personally watched: cats, dogs, birds, pigs, numerous insects, and mice that drink other animals milk. basically about equal percentage do vs don't. maybe most don't require it in their diet (except many bacteria) or compose a regular portion of their diet (again similar to humans), but then again their is no single item in most animals diets they couldn't do without.
Similar arguments would make more sense with cooked/steamed foods (IE a good chunk of our diet, even a vegans diet) that no other animals follow that. Although humans don't require even meat to be cooked, just ones who haven't grown up eating raw meats. Same with processed foods, drinks, refrigerated items. Basically your argument works against most everything humans eat in the modern conviences.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed; and humans do a lot of things that other animals would do if they could.
I mean, cats didn't evolve to eat food out of tins, but if your cat could work a can opener then he'd be done with you for good.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Funny)
cat: cannot open can of food
~#
Damn.
The critical question (Score:2)
And then the question has to be asked, why not just breed them to only make big burps, fit their stomach with a methane extraction tube, and collect it for later use?
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Will burp-free cows be as tasty? Produce as much milk?
Yeah, I was thinking about this... If they select only the burp-less cows to be bred, what if that means they select the ones that also produce less meat or milk? Then they'd have to raise more cows to meet the demands and the advantage of having cows that burp less is lost.
In unrelated news... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:4, Funny)
An unexplained rash of spontaneous cow explosions has resulted in a glut in the Canadian beef market...
Actually the glut is now all around and outside the Canadian beef market...
Grass (Score:5, Informative)
Or you could have cows eat grass [google.com] which does the same thing, and has nutritional benefits for the consumer. I know, it's radical.
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But how does King Corn make money from cattle eating grass?
Or did Monsanto patent grass?
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A more relevant questions is: How does the dairy farmer make money using a lower quality, higher cost feed? Profit margins are thin in that business, and a 10% change in feed costs is enough to bankrupt an operation. Unless you are selling your milk to a customer that will pay extra for environmentally correct practices (as in TFA), it doesn't work.
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A more relevant questions is: How does the dairy farmer make money using a lower quality, higher cost feed? Profit margins are thin in that business, and a 10% change in feed costs is enough to bankrupt an operation. Unless you are selling your milk to a customer that will pay extra for environmentally correct practices (as in TFA), it doesn't work.
The grass is free, actually. The problem isn't that pastured cows cost more to feed - quite the opposite is true. The problem is that they each need an acre, so production for the same piece of land falls dramatically.
Junk science behind the grass (Score:2)
The science behind such a change is unconvincing as far as greenhouse gasses are concerned. Dairy cattle on a grass diet produce less milk over their lifetime; I know, I had a neighbor who ran a grazing herd for a while, so that has to be considered. And the indirect measures for methane emissions they use are weakly correlated. Measuring the actual methane output from a cow in a typical farm setting is not technologically feasible.
To be sure, there are other environmental benefits, chiefly involving soil
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Ridiculous (Score:5, Funny)
Just udderly ridiculous!
Less but... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Just because they burp less doesn't necessarily mean they produce less methane... "We made a cow that burps less. However, it farts more."
If you read the article it states that it's not that they just "burp less" it's that they actually produce less methane.
Eyes do funny things... (Score:3, Funny)
Did anyone else read that as taking "half a million cows ... off the road"? No? Just me, then.
Why doesn't this go away? (Score:5, Insightful)
I swear this is this most asinine thing around in the man made climate change circles. And yet it comes up again and again!
There are environmental issues with industrial livestock production. I just don't think this has a big enough impact on the environment to warrant the effort put into it.
As some one who lives in So. Maryland and enjoys kayaking in the Chesapeake Bay watershed I'm much more concerned with the nitrogen run-off from all of the poultry farms on the eastern shore. But Tyson, Purdue, etc. have such a large lobby (money wise at least) There won't be too much done about it.
Not to say that the Bay hasn't gotten healthier in the 25 years I've been living here. But between agricultural run-off and turning wetlands into housing developments it's not as good as it could be.
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Sure, polluted run-off and the diminishing of wetlands are important matters. Eventually, people will be more mindful of those effects. Perhaps keeping the "remember the environment" ball rolling may eventually address those matters closer to your mind.
Every little bit matters, right?
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You know solving nitrogen run-off and cow methane production are not mutually exclusive, right? There's absolutely nothing preventing them from being done in parallel.
Embargo! (Score:2)
Use it (Score:2, Interesting)
Already reducing the number of cattle in the US (Score:2)
It would seem that we've already greatly reduced the amount of cattle in the United States. From one estimate, there could have been upwards of 200million bison/buffalo: http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/tales/BISON.htm [emporia.edu]
Compare this with the 2002 Census of Cattle and Calves in 2002: http://www.nass.usda.gov/research/atlas02/Livestock/Cattle/Cattle%20and%20Calves/Cattle%20and%20Calves%20-%20Inventory.gif [usda.gov]
I actually love seeing quotes like, "If every US dairy farmer reduced emissions by 12 per cent it would be equa
Meat Vats (Score:5, Interesting)
Get rid of most of the cow/pig/chicken altogether. Use special meat vats that grow cloned tissue in a special nutrient. No more digestion means no more burps and farts. Place the meat factories in all cities to save on transport. In the long term you could even add infrastructure to pipe liquified meat product directly to restaurants and homes where it could be formed and flavored.
Welcome to the world of the future!
Soylent green! (Score:2)
It's... its'... peeeeople!
-dZ.
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OK, figure out how to do this with less energy input and at comparable cost to growing the meat on the cow. Oh, and figure out how to make the meat taste right while you're at it. And do the same for the milk.
A cow is a very complex machine which turns vegetable matter into meat. Doing the same thing artificially (even using actual bovine cells) is not likely to be easy, and doing it as efficiently as the cow does is going to be even ha
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Nuclear powered meat vats!
Lots of ketchup and deep frying.
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NASA's already done it.
Feed them what nature intended (Score:5, Informative)
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Worse than the cows (Score:2)
What really bugs me is the politicians. They produce far more methane than cows.
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The gist of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
The amount of carbon produced by the cow in its lifetime plus decomposition after death is essentially the same as if the cow had never lived and all the corn and soy it would have eaten simply decomposed. The problem is that a cow produces not just carbon in one form, it tends to produce methane (the burps referred to) and methane has a much larger impact in global warming than CO2. The reason that the cows produce large amounts of methane is because the bacteria in their rumen (first stomach) is not right for the diets of mostly corn and soy that they are typically fed and this produces the methane burps. (Incidentally that is why there is relatively little methane in cow farts, almost all of the methane is produced in the rumen.)
So one option is to feed cows mostly grass, that is not sustainable in the large industrial scale used. Another option would be to genetically engineer bacteria that produces less methane and introduce it to the cow rumen. That actually makes more sense than engineering cows with a rumen more like a stomach. Another far fetched option would be to capture the methane, then sequester or burn it outright (the green house gases then are much less harmful).
If you have ever been near an industrial cattle or dairy farm, the stench is unimaginable. In a large cattle farm you can see the methane pockets causing the horizon to wiggle.
I don't get it... (Score:4, Funny)
Why isn't this posted as "Idle"?
Why breed cows? (Score:2)
Why not USE the methane? (Score:2)
Cow-goroos? (Score:3, Interesting)
Kangaroos have a different microbe in their gut that captures the methane and makes that energy available to the 'roo. There had been talk of trying to get this microbe into cattle, which would not only reduce the methane output from the cattle but would also make more food energy available to the cow. What ever happened to that?
Bad article. This entire subject is FUD. (Score:2, Informative)
Cows do not produce 75% of total methane emissions. It goes
1. Wetlands
2. Rice fields
3. Ruminants
You don't here a lot about altering or doing away with 1 or 2. The oceans are also major contributors. Lets keep those too.
A major point that is never mentioned in these articles is that all of the methane generated by ruminants is from carbon that is already in the carbon cycle. The half a million cars that are "displaced" are generating their methane from carbon previously sequestered in fossil fuels. Addit
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Yep, appeal to ridicule isn't a logical fallacy at all, so of course any subject that people joke about isn't worthy of exploration at all. This is a research project done by a relatively small team, and not taking any resources away from other endeavours. What is such a bad idea about making cows slightly more efficient? The only reason they even exist anymore is because they're used as a food source. They're walking meat refrigerators. Since they only exist because we keep them around, we might as well tw
Why not take half a million cars out of the road? (Score:2)
Why not take half a million cars out of the road? In Brasilia (Brazil's capital, and not the largest city by a long shot), we have more than a million cars for a population of just over two million people. Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city and one of the largest in the world, had a fleet of more than 4 million automobiles in 2003; the whole country had 37 million automobiles in 2003. USA, being the strongest economy, must dwarf this number. Surely the world could live with half a million automobiles fewer in
Missing the point (Score:2, Troll)
Listen up numbskulls, cows belching/farting aren't a problem.
Even if you buy the CO2 == Global Warming theory, and the debate on that that is far from decided, cows aren't a problem. The whole carbon theory rests on the release of long sequestered carbon in the form of fossil fuels increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere. And that much has both science and common sense to back it, extracting and burning billions of tons of hydrocarbons has increased the CO2 level in the atmosphere.
Cows are eating plant (and
Cow Tech (Score:3, Funny)
United States asked to bear the burden (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem already solved (Score:3, Informative)
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/06/08/omega-3s-in-a-cows-diet-provide-a-health-boost%E2%80%94to-the-atmosphere/ [discovermagazine.com]
So other than making lots of money from selling a low-methane breed, I really don't see the point, we already have the solution to the methane problem, we were just feeding them wrong.
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But what about farts?
--
I live in my mom's basement, but I'm 15.
Ah, I see now.... :)
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You probably wondered why your cat died on that vegan diet, too, didn't you?
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Sure, but then we just rig up a setup which lights them off, converting the methane to the lesser greenhouse gas CO2. And also giving the cow a useful way to kill annoying insects.
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Personally, I think it would be a lot more effective (and it makes more sense) to genetically engineer the methane-producing bacteria in their digestive tract, solving the problem at the root of the cause.
I wonder if anyone has tried adding this [beanogas.com] {or something similar} to their feed yet...
I can't stand the stuff, personally. Produced an... interesting sensation as it worked.
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Clean air, clean water, clean earth.... Yeah, that sounds nice. What were you complaining about again?
The same folks that rail against global warming are usually the ones that are railing against letting companies dump pollutants in our water, air, etc.
And lets not forget that the largest polluter is just ordinary poeple making trash, eating food, and dumping their waste back into the water. But again, it's the greenies that tend to make the most effort to reduce their own waste.
So, really, what are you com
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Ahh, the old "Global Warming is not caused by humans, or not happening" theory.
Perhaps you'd like to explain why not one scientific organization has produced a convincing argument against the existence of global warming, while many other scientific studies have. The only possibilities I can think of that make your argument reasonable are some combination of:
1. A vast conspiracy of climatologists made the whole thing up.
2. Al Gore and some environmentalists cajoled and bullied the vast majori
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Sure. Now, go get every car made before 1990 off the roads.
Oh, and make sure to tell the people who can't afford a new car that "it's to save the environment." New cars are much better than older cars, but there's millions of old cars on the road, simply because people can't dish out a few grand just to have a car that doesn't pollute as much. They kinda need that money to not be homeless and starving. Reducing emissions from new cars isn't the issue. New cars are a small part of the problem. It's old cars
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STOP IT
this is now WAY beyond nonsense
The green movement is now nothing but grifters and snake oil men chasing after obama bucks
Are you stupid, or did you just not read the summary? Alberta is in Canada. They don't get any money from your President. In fact, no tax money is being spent on it at all. I actually work at the University of Alberta, and no government money goes to research, unless it's specifically ordered by the government. It's all endowments from Councils and Boards that disburse money based on relative merits, and that money comes from companies in the related industries.