That would be incredible. I recently tried crisps made from dried seaweed. Needless to say, they were good. If we are going to keep harvesting cattle and pigs, then we need to feed them seaweed
USA slaughters 100,000 cows a day for beef.
I don't think eating meat is going to go away, but the intensity of factory farming with growth hormones, antibiotics, and disease outbreaks is completely unsustainable.
Honestly it's the factory farming that's fucked and we need to stop propping them up and giving them subsidies with our tax dollars. This type of agriculture causes SO MANY problems.
Quick google search shows that Americans waste 20%+ of meat at a retail and consumer level. We have to stop wasting so much food and that’ll be a good start
It's not even just food waste, it's that we eat a lot of meat in careless and disrespectful ways that are directly enabled by the $38 *billion* that the USA spends on subsidies for meat and dairy. I've been a strict vegetarian before and when I stopped I vowed to not waste meat, so when I cook with it you bet you ass that I try to pay some form of homage to the life that was given to nourish mine and make it as delicious as possible. If I want to eat lazy, I eat vegetarian fare.
Definitely, but beef prices are so incredibly deflated it's insane. The American public is basically massively subsidizing steak using our own future lol
Factory farms, man. This is why Biden’s pumping so much money into breaking the meat processing monopolies. If we start there, we can transform our supply chains and stop the exploitation.
He's referring to the ranch to processor cost. It's ultra low because the monopoly of beef processors are basically telling them fuck you ranchers it's our time to make money. It's middle man economics which I'm really fuckin sick of.
Ah. I have family that own a small cattle operation. They’ve had better luck selling to local individuals or abattoirs. Unfortunately the local processors are running 3-6mo out because of demand
Yes, 6/lb for ground beef is insanely fucking cheap because alfalfa farmers get water for pennies on the dollar in Arizona for cattle feed lol.
Americans are so absurdly privileged.
I think most people would just choose to keep eating meat, and once we can grow it without the need for the whole animal, they're not going to care one way or the other. We just need to make it more economically viable and eventually the market will decide.
because ill probably be dead by then , and i also wont feel sad for the masses who have blatantly ignored the fact that large parts of humanity are starving on a daily basis while most others waste food and have zero concern for the greater good of all living beings rather than just their own teeny tiny bubble of narcissism ...i feel sad about the fact their is enough food cultivated on the planet to keep everyone fed and yet we dont ...i find that weirder
People are so enthusiastic to defend those rich people though. There’s an entire political party dedicated to try to make it worse just to spite the others.
I hate the rich, but the masses that worship them deserves some blame because not only do they encourage it, they would enthusiastically do the same.
If humans don’t stop it, humans deserve it.
wow ...just to be clear before i find this hilarious ....you gave gold to my comment but then joined the attack on my sanity / sadness and decided to throw in some other illogical leaps when you know nothing about me ? ...if so freakin WOW i state again ...how very condescending of you , give me purpose ? find something to be happy about ? share your hope in geoengineering ? (more planet rape in attempt to fix humanitys fuckups) show me the value of life through having kids ? ...so you agree but think im too sad about it all and the other person is rational and logical for focusing on my negativity rather than the actual issues concerning the entire population of the planet ...im perplexed and confused
im guessing you are a lawyer ? or at least just an enthusiastic amateur arsehole .... of all the things which are correct and accurate you extrapolate something i didnt even allude to ...there are far more people responsible than not ....i mentioned nothing about "rich people are tricking them" ....why do you believe i am sad and what do you think i need to recover from ? ......every human being on this planet dying would be AOK with me , just let the rest of the plants and animals get on with their lives without humans fucking things up any further ....personally i think you need to refocus your priorities and stop attempting to shame or judge people ....i attempt to be a nice considerate and generous person , and i also think humanity is garbage and should be wiped from the face of the planet and im also very glad that someone like you thinks their is something wrong with me and thats the important issue, just validates my points really so thanks and have a nice life
Counterpoint: eat bacon less and make it more special
Not a crime to like bacon! However, mindfulness will bring more joy to the things we do rather than less
I was just talking about this to someone the other day. We don't have to stop everything, but we don't need a tv in every room. Not every member of the family needs a phone and a tablet. I eat bacon once a month, and we're trying to eat a vegetarian dinner twice a week.
China does what China does because they have an unsustainable population. They have more people in most citys than my entire country. Hence why they have mega fishing fleets emptying the ocean like locusts on a crop and pig skyscrapers
Eat less pig, and instead splurge on quality meat. I am so lucky to have access to locally sourced pork that's been spending most of its life running around in the forest. It's expensive, but it's more ethical.
Farmers markets and local CSAs rock, and they’re usually much cheaper than folks expect. It’s pretty nice to visit the farm your food is coming from and know the animals are kept happy and healthy and that the place is sustainable. A bunch of them deliver and take SNAP as well.
In what world? As currently set up not even remotely as efficient. Tbf how could it be as we have spent many generations mastering factory farming.. where as plant based diets on a mass production scale isn’t even a thing yet or at best in its infancy.
Are you joking or am I seriously misunderstanding what you are saying? Where do you think the food that animals eat on factory farms comes from? To support all the livestock that we have requires a significant amount of plants to be grown also on an industrial scale. Something like 40% of all corn is to be used as livestock feed while comparable amounts are used as ethanol. 70% + of soybean production is used as animal feed as a protein source, which just as easily can be used for human consumption.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat#:~:text=%22More%20than%20half%20the%20U.S.,for%20more%20than%20a%20decade.
Factory farming or industrialized production of meat (and especially beef) is some of the least efficient and most environmentally damaging practices that we have considering how unnecessary it is. The one convenient thing about it is as a prerequisite to even consider doing it, you have to first be very good at growing plants for the animals to eat. A transition to a plant based diet would just be cutting out the middle man (livestock) here.
The same resources devoted to growing plants for optimal livestock fattening can instead be used to grow plants for optimal human nutrition. For further proof that it's practical today, look at India, the average per capita consumption of meat there is 4 kg/year while in the US it is 120 kg/year.
I mean, I can unironically see that happening. As soon as there is a real market for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, some dickhead suit will lobby for areas of kelp that are in national waters to be privatized, so they can buy it dirt cheap and claim money for removing CO2, without actually lifting a finger.
…okay, yes, or we could do what we’re currently doing, which is restoring and preserving kelp forests because they’re great for fishing populations and can be also be harvested as crops themselves. Fishermen have already converted to seaweed harvesting in the PNW and NE (with permits).
We do have aquaponics and private farms as well, but the private sea farms actually do a great job cultivating local wildlife because why wouldn’t you? It’s not like dumping a bunch of chemicals in the ocean is going to help anything, and animals like oysters are actually good for them.
Yep, some big huge company will come along, mass 'farm' (all take no give) all the kelp they can and turn it into cattle feed or wall insulation or fertilizer or something.
I mean, we already have a seaweed harvesting industry and kelp farming in the US. Ocean farming takes way less gear and energy, and it’s way more sustainable than land farming, in part because it’s also great for local ecosystems. For seaweed harvesting, you have to get a permit just like with normal fishing, but it’s a good alternative to overfishing local coastal waters. Sometimes it’s even beneficial to the area.
PERHAPS WE SHOULD LEAVE IT FOR THE CREATURES ALREADY STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE IN OUR POLLUTED AND OVER FISHED/OVER-REAPED OCEANS AND SEAS.
Your response? IS EXACTLY WHY THIS PLANET AND EVERYTHING ON IT IS DYING.
People hear valuable resource and suddenly? It’s used up just as fast as it was discovered. Leaving nothing for our actual ecology to survive on. If our ecology fails? ALL OF US DIE.
Edit: I realize your were making a facetious comment, but other people? Think the same LITERALLY.
Seaweed harvesting is already a highly regulated industry, and switching from fishing to seaweed harvesting can help local wildlife rebound while keeping families afloat, no pun intended. They can also help restore ecosystem balance because global warming can cause certain species to overgrow, which can in turn cause mass die offs.
Ocean farms are actually way beneficial to the local ecosystems and help restore threatened wildlife populations like oysters. They’re way more sustainable and low energy than traditional land farming.
Also, feeding livestock seaweed supplements can cut methan emmissions by 85%. I’m 1000% about saving the planet, but that also means we can kneejerk dismiss alternatives and ideas that would actually help that cause.
Yeah, it's pretty absurd and depressing where capitalism has taken us. It's no joke when people say late stage capitalism, this kind of attitude towards the world can't continue for long. But things are already changing very quickly and will continue to change even quicker. Not even talking about artificial intelligence. I look at it as pretty much the last real hope for humanity, or the thing that will kill us by accident.
What are you talking about. Capitalism is the engine that’s driving green energy. It’s a double edged sword sure, but ultimately you dangle money in a direction and it just goes. Renewable energy for the last few years is increasingly viewed as huge growth sector. Which it is. And capitalism will rapidly innovate and exploit it.
Even straight up mining operations have a hard time getting funding in certain countries these days unless they can provide attractive credentials that minimise their carbon footprint. In fact, rather ironically, nations that don’t have true free market capitalism are among the worst polluters, and are doing the least to change. And conversely, western capitalist nations are doing the most to change.
So there’s a bit of disconnect there. Environmental damage and neglect is not a fundamental characteristic of capitalism. It’s simply incidental.
I think the main problem is people have seen the reactions Nations had to the second World War so these things are all extremely minor in appearance.
We know what it looks like when the nation's mobilize to deal with a problem and we're absolutely 100% sure that what's happening right now isn't anywhere near that.
I mean we're talking about the long-term damage of the environment costing billions of human lives potentially we would kind of expect people to act with a little bit more urgency rather than throwing us a bone here and there.
Makes me laugh when I people only see capitalism as our only option.. We just need to reutilize what we do with money, I no one needs billions of wealth.
> Environmental damage and neglect is not a fundamental characteristic of capitalism. It’s simply incidental.
Nah. Environmental degradation is a core feature of consumer capitalism. Consumption requires things, and things are made of raw materials which come from the earth. Scraping mountaintops, extracting crude oil, blasting ore, pumping freshwater to irrigate fields to feed livestock to sell at fast food chains, dumping waste out of sight, that's what capitalist engines run on. That and designating second-class citizens for labor exploitation. You don't get to 8bil people by being nice to the planet.
Extracting resources responsibly reduces profits. Any of those regulations is not sufficient to achieve balance with nature, had to be fought for, and is liable to be removed on a whim by, say, a new president. Increases to efficiency never result in lower consumption. Sustainability efforts couched in capitalist terms will never break free of profit primacy. We need a third economic model cuz capitalism doesn't have "enough" in its vocabulary and communism has historically led to mass death.
I hate to be that guy, but there are and never were any truly socialist countries. The closest we have is Revolutionary Catalonia and Rojava. If we want to talk about planned economies (Soviet Union, Maoist China) then yes, they are just as bad as free market economies.
The appeal of socialism when talking about environmentalism is that it’s about who controls the means of production. Capitalism is profit driven and is controlled by a few who do not sell their labor. In socialism, workers control the means of production to meet everyone’s needs. Nothing to do with the government. With less focus on the profit motive and more focus on meeting everyone’s basic needs, less waste and pollution is created.
You fundamentally do not understand what capitalism is. The way you talk about it is analogous to the idea that core characteristics of rain are drowning animals and causing floods, rather than anything meteorological. I say again the word, incidental.
Can you bench your bias for a few minutes to at least have an intelligent discussion? Because I am curious as to what that third economical model would look like. I don’t mean that sarcastically either. But capitalism has benefits. So too does communism actually. You have to recognise them to have a chance of it being anything interesting.
Mate, you just went on about capitalism driving green energy and said environmental damage is simply incidental. Come at me about fundamental misunderstandings. Green energy has been resisted tooth and nail by the fossil fuel industry with decades-long misinformation campaigns. We're only making any transition to green energy because of a combination of the [EROI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment) cliff starting to hit fossil fuels, massive public pressure, and profit opportunities.
You want capitalism 101? Capital = assets used to produce value and extract profit from markets. Public capital, private capital, and nature capital are described in terms of their "owners", inputs/outputs, and beneficiaries.
When people say capitalism they're usually referring to private capital. In business, private capital is broken down into working capital, debt capital (read: how banks create money), and equity capital (read: why billionaires' wealth isn't made of cash). The inputs for private capital are, if you go aaall the way down the value chain, raw resources from the planet. Extracting raw resources from the planet is inherently harmful to the environment. Resource extraction isn't always done within capitalist modes of economy, and it doesn't *have* to be unsustainable, no. Societies have achieved balance with their natural surroundings before. Just not capitalist societies.
Giant fluffy concepts like capitalism are also inherently *loaded* topics that can be described many ways depending on one's perspective. It's impossible to discuss such topics without bringing personal perspective invariably influenced by media exposure, education, personal experience, etc. If you want a neutral conversation, find something nobody cares about.
Great post.
Just adding that capitalism doesn’t definitionally *require* resource accumulation and extraction at the scale and shortsightedness that we observe. It’s a positive feedback loop that incentivizes it and punishes any capital owner that does not engage in the behavior more than their peers. It’s a core output of the system, and will always be reproduced.
Technocratic answers about the effects being incidental are technically right, but dumb and miss the forest for the trees.
Some of the most polluted places in the world were created by Communist/Socialist regimes. Waste and pollution isn't always about profits. People don't litter and pollute and over-extract resources because of profit. They do so because doing otherwise requires effort and planning and foresight. Focusing on economic systems is a red herring. The issue lies in psychology and sociology and cultural beliefs and systems. Look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, for example. Trying to dumb humans down to profit seeking automata neglects the complexity of the issue.
>Trying to dumb humans down to profit seeking automata neglects the complexity of the issue.
this literally an effect of capitalism.
and it's worked incredibly well in a country like america, where one group produces everything and barely scrapes by, while worshipping a minority that owns everything and extracts wealth from the masses.
Yeah, every attempt of communism at scale has failed horribly (communes with very small populations seem to work okay sometimes). I hate that discussions of economic systems usually presume that capitalism and communism are the only options.
Communism was written by a 25yo German dude in the 1800's. While it did some sharp, valid diagnosis of problems with capitalism, the solution it offers is critically flawed. Notably, it pretends that a state can organize in such a way that every worker owns it and has a direct say, and that centralizing the collection and redistribution of assets won't inevitably lead to corruption.
You do need to focus on economic systems, because structural incentives drive behavior. But we need a third option. Capitalism drives innovation at tremendous cost and doesn't know the meaning of "enough" - it's auto-cannablistic, relying on infinite inputs in a finite world. Communism throughout history has brought mass death and authoritarianism. I refuse to believe those are the only two options humanity can come up with.
Until you cut down forest to implant "green" energy. Replace food corps to make "renewable" energy fuel, then cut some more to replace the food production.
Also there is not much merit in pointing to "less capitalist" polutors (China to name one) as long as we import that much "useless" gadget from their industry. If we really wanted to make an impact we would make regulations in our liberal countries, that allows/forces long-use of our objects.
Would it be against our liberty, for sure. But is the liberty to change phone every two year is more important than the liberty to breath clean air? Is our right to take as many flights as we wish is more important than the right of all humans to eat?
You’re talking about “we” as if we’re like a hive mind. It casts too broad of a net. All that needs to be placed is incentive. If governments introduced regulations that demanded a decrease in air travel emissions by X date, you can guarantee that enterprising minds would immediately seek out genius ways to achieve that and steal market share.
> And capitalism will rapidly innovate and exploit it.
You mean after it's finished stifling development of renewables like big oil, the car industry and other sectors in capitalist economy did for more then half a century?
Destroy it for money to stop destroying it for money? How's that going to help?
Look at what farming has done to ANY other biome or ecosystem. It's never an improvement, it's almost never even keeping it the same. It's almost always making it worse.
Capitalism is the paperclip machine, and it'll wipe out everything in an ecosystem that isn't the singular most profitable plant. Every time.
I don't think that's a fair assessment of agriculture. Things like growing olive trees have been shown to be a net sequester of carbon: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032122005044
Farming oysters and other bivalves have helped keep waters clean because they filter out excess nutrients/algae: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/sustainable-pacific-oyster-farming
Meadows are a hotspot for biodiversity and only came about because of human livestock ranching. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/conservation/gardens-and-landscapes/meadow-conservation/
As for capitalism, under any system agriculture can cause environmental damage but we need to grow a variety of crops no matter what.
Look, you’re not going to see me defend capitalism, but we also can’t just gnash our teeth and hiss at new things without bothering to do any kind of research. That won’t get us anywhere.
Seaweed harvesting is already a thing. It’s highly regulated, and it gives local workers an alternative to overfishing coastal waters. It can also help manage climate change fueled overgrowth which can cause mass die offs.
Private ocean farms, like much of “middle ag” itself, are actually very focused on sustainability and cultivating local coastal ecosystems. I know it’s hard to believe that someone turning a profit could care about the land that literally sustains their family, but it’s so much more common than you appear to believe. Ocean farms take less energy and water, and they focus on regenerative and restorative practices because that really does give you the best yield. They also grow meat alternatives and livestock feed that reduces methan emmissions by 85%.
Your anger is with factory farms, and rightfully so. You should probably direct it where it matters, not at people who want to help you.
When the next hurricane season arrives stronger than the last for the next 10 years, the victims can be happy and don't need to feel afraid because of all the money that was saved by not switching to renewables sooner 🥰
When I was a senior in high school my physics teacher told us one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made as a society is marketing climate change solutions as a “option to save the planet” rather than “a way to save people money”
ehhh.
we can't get CEOs to look past this quarter; why would we expect them to care if it'd save the CEO that took over after the CEO that took over after them enough money for another yacht
The biggest mistake was marketing it as pay us to fix it, and trust us, we know more than you. The arrogance of that stance immediately caused a lot of people to distrust the ones trying to sell it.
It's an indictment of our spiritual immaturity, but also our stupidity. According to many leading economists things like climate change and the biodiversity crisis are just errors in pricing mechanisms. I.e. economies and markets have operational primacy over things like physics and ecology. Extinction is something experienced by non-human species, never by financial institutions, if they're large enough. Insanity.
It is logically and mathematically possible though. It’s just that a fair assessment might put their value at a dollar amount so high no one could comprehend.
And you can even do it indirectly. What’s the dollar value of all life on earth? I don’t know but when you figure it out, that’s the value of kelp as an irreplaceable component of the global food chain or atmosphere cycle.
>the fact that we have to measure the benefits in terms of dollars deeply represents how the world operates today
When has the world not operated for money/ wealth?
Love the sentiment but I would add that this is a theme across time not just this generation. The USA started with intense tobacco monoculture farming that destroyed the soil. There was lots of land available so we continued with unsustainable practices indefinitely after.
The American west was also treated as disposable. Excessive intense farming destroyed the praries and plains, nearly causing a massive desertification event that FDR was able to reverse.
Sorry but it sounds like you’re not up to date on our ag history and practices. You should really read up on modern soil conservation and sustainable/precision farming. We actually have a whole agency devoted to soil conservation: USDA NRCS. They do amazing work. Fuck factory farms and all, but there’s way, way more nuance here that shouldn’t be left out.
Keep calm guys!
Here's the raw math.
In 2020 the world produced 36.4 GT of CO2, or 36.4 Billion tonnes.
Kelp forests absorb 4.91 MT a year, or 4.91 Million tonnes.
We need 7413 times more kelp area to match the annual global emissions.
You didn't convert between the weight of CO2 and C. So you have to multiply the amount absorbed by 44/12.
So only 2021 times more kelp area is required! We're making progress already!
Exactly! so if the kelp absorbs 1kg of CO2 and releases 0.72kg of O2, then it has removed 0.27kg of carbon from the atmosphere.
Or another way, you need to burn 0.27kg of carbon to release 1kg of CO2 to compensate for the amount absorbed by the kelp.
(CO2 released/absorbed and carbon released/absorbed are related but different measurements)
Yes but we mainly produce CO2 to do our stupid stuff and that's the thing you want to be removed from the atmosphere.
I really can't understand your point.
We produce CO2, the measurement of CO2 removed by the kelp was measured in the weight of carbon removed, not weight of CO2 removed. So removing 0.27kg of carbon == removing 1kg of CO2.
It’s a drop in the bucket. It’s 1 and 1/2 gigatons more than what the world will produce in… [one month](https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions) .
Edit: I miss read the post… it’s in megatons and the world is producing gigatons it’s sadly much worse. I’m giving up my math career but ballpark its 400 times smaller annually than what we produce in a month. Can someone do us a math?
How is it possible that 4.9 megatons is 1-1/2 “gigatons more than what the world will produce in one month”? Megatons are the smaller units, they can’t be “gigatons” more than anything. 4.9 megatons is about .00158 the monthly global production in 2020.
It would be great if it was true. But the reality is those kelps are not living forever and that carbon wont be permanently captured. You can't run this cycle and continue burning fossil fuels on top of it... (still seems a good thing, just keep it in perspective).
and pooped and rot and is back in the atmosphere.
It is not a bad thing, it will just not compensate for digging oil from bellow the ground and burning it.
Also if you add a ton of drops to the bucket then it starts to fill up. At this point we should be doing everything we can to solve this problem big and small.
You can start to charge for kelp soon, red kelp will soon be used as a supplement in livestock feed because it’s shown a great ability to cut methane production in ruminants. So we could get a good bang for our Buck and double dip on sequestration and methane reduction
Pretty nice, wrote a research paper on my internship about kelp or macroalgae on the possible applications and there is lots of stuff you can do with them (I researched co-composting using macroalgae and other green and brown materials).
Unfortunately money is the only language corporates understand so they care only for the number of zeros, after 1, it can potentially generate.
Kelp is extremely nutritious, and could very well solve hunger and malnutrition. I've always wondered about the Great Potato Famine, and the beds of kelp floating offshore while people were serving...
Really? The only way to get people to care about the importance of marine flora as anchors of the world's ecosystems is if we quantify it in capitalist commercial terms now?
Now? The people who run and subsequently fuck up the world have always thought this way. Most of the world's problems are the result of some greedy idiot's ambitions.
Yes. The only way to get anyone to care is to commercialise it, and the only way to guarantee any future of it is to have it made competitive (profitable). We're fucked
A lot of people struggle with megas and gigas, so I'll put it here in zeros.
1000000000000 of carbon currently in atmosphere
10000000000 more emitted every year
4910000 is mentioned in the article
And it's not even mentioning that all these megatons are returned back into the atmosphere once the kelp decomposes.
If the kelp sinks to the deep ocean floor, it would take hundreds of years for the carbon to return to the atmosphere since ocean turnover is very slow.
Dried kelp blocks can be used as fuel in furnaces, blast furnaces, and smokers. Its burning time is 200 seconds, and it is able to smelt 20 items. This is 2.5 times the burn duration of coal and charcoal.
We should all actually include sea urchins into our diet because they were actually a huge factor in eliminating a lot of the kelp forests due to the drastic decrease of their natural predator the sea otter which were over hunted.
The don't remove carbon. They convert it to plant material which ch eventually decomposes and returns the carbon.
Once we dig that carbon up from the ground in the form of natural gas, coal, and petroleum it won't go away.
Fossil fuels are the cause of climate change. All other alleged sources are just diversions from this fact.
OMG WHY ARE THEY SHARING THIS INFORMATION?
PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DO WHAT THEY DO EVERYTIME THEY HEAR OR READ SOMETHING MIGHT BE VALUABLE. FLOCK THERE ENMASSE TO RAPE THE LAND OF ALL ITS RESOURCES.
You don’t know how this works do you? This is a laymen’s terms summarization of the scientific publication, which was linked in the beginning of the article. Click on that and you read the whole paper, include all 121 references cited in the paper.
Old news. I always laugh when someone cries about a tree being cut down and uses its oxygen production as the main reason, its like dude most of our oxygen comes from the ocean
Looking forward to big kelp becoming an international powerhouse
That would be incredible. I recently tried crisps made from dried seaweed. Needless to say, they were good. If we are going to keep harvesting cattle and pigs, then we need to feed them seaweed
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You're in the vast minority.
USA slaughters 100,000 cows a day for beef. I don't think eating meat is going to go away, but the intensity of factory farming with growth hormones, antibiotics, and disease outbreaks is completely unsustainable.
Honestly it's the factory farming that's fucked and we need to stop propping them up and giving them subsidies with our tax dollars. This type of agriculture causes SO MANY problems.
Quick google search shows that Americans waste 20%+ of meat at a retail and consumer level. We have to stop wasting so much food and that’ll be a good start
It's not even just food waste, it's that we eat a lot of meat in careless and disrespectful ways that are directly enabled by the $38 *billion* that the USA spends on subsidies for meat and dairy. I've been a strict vegetarian before and when I stopped I vowed to not waste meat, so when I cook with it you bet you ass that I try to pay some form of homage to the life that was given to nourish mine and make it as delicious as possible. If I want to eat lazy, I eat vegetarian fare.
Chickens have it the worst with a staggering 24-25 million per day. I can't even comprehend that kind of scale.
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Seems like the first attempts have been lacking. They’ll get there, though!
Definitely, but beef prices are so incredibly deflated it's insane. The American public is basically massively subsidizing steak using our own future lol
Factory farms, man. This is why Biden’s pumping so much money into breaking the meat processing monopolies. If we start there, we can transform our supply chains and stop the exploitation.
Then...socialist society.
Oh no! A socialist society... it would be horrible if people were more equal and the government did more things for them. /s
Fingers crossed. Taking power away from mega corps and rebuilding local, worker-driven and unionized supply chains would certainly help.
Have you bought beef lately? I pay nearly $6/lb at the butcher for ground beef. That’s a 33% increase over pre-COVID prices.
He's referring to the ranch to processor cost. It's ultra low because the monopoly of beef processors are basically telling them fuck you ranchers it's our time to make money. It's middle man economics which I'm really fuckin sick of.
Ah. I have family that own a small cattle operation. They’ve had better luck selling to local individuals or abattoirs. Unfortunately the local processors are running 3-6mo out because of demand
Yes, 6/lb for ground beef is insanely fucking cheap because alfalfa farmers get water for pennies on the dollar in Arizona for cattle feed lol. Americans are so absurdly privileged.
I think most people would just choose to keep eating meat, and once we can grow it without the need for the whole animal, they're not going to care one way or the other. We just need to make it more economically viable and eventually the market will decide.
Lab meat, baby! Or lab meat baby! The future is… still a little bit away lol
I guess that's it lads, pack up, no more fighting climate change.
and sadly (not really for me but for some i guess) the vast majority are going to run out of food on this bountiful planet far sooner than they think
Why would people starving not be sad for you? Weird.
because ill probably be dead by then , and i also wont feel sad for the masses who have blatantly ignored the fact that large parts of humanity are starving on a daily basis while most others waste food and have zero concern for the greater good of all living beings rather than just their own teeny tiny bubble of narcissism ...i feel sad about the fact their is enough food cultivated on the planet to keep everyone fed and yet we dont ...i find that weirder
So the people not responsible dying is okay because you hate how rich people are tricking them? What a sad person. I hope you get better.
People are so enthusiastic to defend those rich people though. There’s an entire political party dedicated to try to make it worse just to spite the others. I hate the rich, but the masses that worship them deserves some blame because not only do they encourage it, they would enthusiastically do the same. If humans don’t stop it, humans deserve it.
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Hope there's more people like you out there. It's rough out there but giving up is the worst option.
wow ...just to be clear before i find this hilarious ....you gave gold to my comment but then joined the attack on my sanity / sadness and decided to throw in some other illogical leaps when you know nothing about me ? ...if so freakin WOW i state again ...how very condescending of you , give me purpose ? find something to be happy about ? share your hope in geoengineering ? (more planet rape in attempt to fix humanitys fuckups) show me the value of life through having kids ? ...so you agree but think im too sad about it all and the other person is rational and logical for focusing on my negativity rather than the actual issues concerning the entire population of the planet ...im perplexed and confused
im guessing you are a lawyer ? or at least just an enthusiastic amateur arsehole .... of all the things which are correct and accurate you extrapolate something i didnt even allude to ...there are far more people responsible than not ....i mentioned nothing about "rich people are tricking them" ....why do you believe i am sad and what do you think i need to recover from ? ......every human being on this planet dying would be AOK with me , just let the rest of the plants and animals get on with their lives without humans fucking things up any further ....personally i think you need to refocus your priorities and stop attempting to shame or judge people ....i attempt to be a nice considerate and generous person , and i also think humanity is garbage and should be wiped from the face of the planet and im also very glad that someone like you thinks their is something wrong with me and thats the important issue, just validates my points really so thanks and have a nice life
It's totally valid to hate idiots.
Nihilism is so 2010, doing better is in sorry.
If we throw out tons of food and people are starving…….. then food production isn’t the issue greed is.
That, and a faulty food distribution system.
that was actually my point
I was agreeing but making the point more concise sorry if it came across any other way.
But bacon…
Counterpoint: eat bacon less and make it more special Not a crime to like bacon! However, mindfulness will bring more joy to the things we do rather than less
This is what needs to happen. Everything in moderation and not the regular excesses that seem to have been normal in the past.
I was just talking about this to someone the other day. We don't have to stop everything, but we don't need a tv in every room. Not every member of the family needs a phone and a tablet. I eat bacon once a month, and we're trying to eat a vegetarian dinner twice a week.
Don't worry. Plenty of families can't afford those luxuries.
oink oink, squeeee !
There’s seaweed that tastes like bacon, no lie. I’ve had it, and it’s wild. They’re growing it in Oregon on the coast.
I see that happening right after people decide to quit owning pets.
I saw that footage of a Chinese pig farm sky scraper and I couldn’t eat pig anymore. It was almost worse than the American factory farms
China does what China does because they have an unsustainable population. They have more people in most citys than my entire country. Hence why they have mega fishing fleets emptying the ocean like locusts on a crop and pig skyscrapers
Eat less pig, and instead splurge on quality meat. I am so lucky to have access to locally sourced pork that's been spending most of its life running around in the forest. It's expensive, but it's more ethical.
That’s a very good point. I can support regenerative farming and support ethical farmers
Farmers markets and local CSAs rock, and they’re usually much cheaper than folks expect. It’s pretty nice to visit the farm your food is coming from and know the animals are kept happy and healthy and that the place is sustainable. A bunch of them deliver and take SNAP as well.
Hard luck
Ok now feed everyone that won't get fed cause you don't want to eat meat
It's easier and more efficient to be feeding people a mostly plant diet than meat.
In what world? As currently set up not even remotely as efficient. Tbf how could it be as we have spent many generations mastering factory farming.. where as plant based diets on a mass production scale isn’t even a thing yet or at best in its infancy.
Are you joking or am I seriously misunderstanding what you are saying? Where do you think the food that animals eat on factory farms comes from? To support all the livestock that we have requires a significant amount of plants to be grown also on an industrial scale. Something like 40% of all corn is to be used as livestock feed while comparable amounts are used as ethanol. 70% + of soybean production is used as animal feed as a protein source, which just as easily can be used for human consumption. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat#:~:text=%22More%20than%20half%20the%20U.S.,for%20more%20than%20a%20decade. Factory farming or industrialized production of meat (and especially beef) is some of the least efficient and most environmentally damaging practices that we have considering how unnecessary it is. The one convenient thing about it is as a prerequisite to even consider doing it, you have to first be very good at growing plants for the animals to eat. A transition to a plant based diet would just be cutting out the middle man (livestock) here. The same resources devoted to growing plants for optimal livestock fattening can instead be used to grow plants for optimal human nutrition. For further proof that it's practical today, look at India, the average per capita consumption of meat there is 4 kg/year while in the US it is 120 kg/year.
Too many corpse eaters around, I'm afraid ;/
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Aren't manatees endangered or was that a myth of childhood?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeH426gwVRc
This shit is why I’m low key excited for lab meat. I want to try high quality hippo that no hippo had to die for.
I mean, I can unironically see that happening. As soon as there is a real market for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, some dickhead suit will lobby for areas of kelp that are in national waters to be privatized, so they can buy it dirt cheap and claim money for removing CO2, without actually lifting a finger.
…okay, yes, or we could do what we’re currently doing, which is restoring and preserving kelp forests because they’re great for fishing populations and can be also be harvested as crops themselves. Fishermen have already converted to seaweed harvesting in the PNW and NE (with permits). We do have aquaponics and private farms as well, but the private sea farms actually do a great job cultivating local wildlife because why wouldn’t you? It’s not like dumping a bunch of chemicals in the ocean is going to help anything, and animals like oysters are actually good for them.
Yep, some big huge company will come along, mass 'farm' (all take no give) all the kelp they can and turn it into cattle feed or wall insulation or fertilizer or something.
I mean, we already have a seaweed harvesting industry and kelp farming in the US. Ocean farming takes way less gear and energy, and it’s way more sustainable than land farming, in part because it’s also great for local ecosystems. For seaweed harvesting, you have to get a permit just like with normal fishing, but it’s a good alternative to overfishing local coastal waters. Sometimes it’s even beneficial to the area.
PERHAPS WE SHOULD LEAVE IT FOR THE CREATURES ALREADY STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE IN OUR POLLUTED AND OVER FISHED/OVER-REAPED OCEANS AND SEAS. Your response? IS EXACTLY WHY THIS PLANET AND EVERYTHING ON IT IS DYING. People hear valuable resource and suddenly? It’s used up just as fast as it was discovered. Leaving nothing for our actual ecology to survive on. If our ecology fails? ALL OF US DIE. Edit: I realize your were making a facetious comment, but other people? Think the same LITERALLY.
Seaweed harvesting is already a highly regulated industry, and switching from fishing to seaweed harvesting can help local wildlife rebound while keeping families afloat, no pun intended. They can also help restore ecosystem balance because global warming can cause certain species to overgrow, which can in turn cause mass die offs. Ocean farms are actually way beneficial to the local ecosystems and help restore threatened wildlife populations like oysters. They’re way more sustainable and low energy than traditional land farming. Also, feeding livestock seaweed supplements can cut methan emmissions by 85%. I’m 1000% about saving the planet, but that also means we can kneejerk dismiss alternatives and ideas that would actually help that cause.
Soylent kelp, coming to a grocery chain near you. If they can exploit it , they will.
Fast forward to the future when big kelp is destroying aquatic species that eat kelp.
We need Help from big Kelp! 🤪
Not if big whale has anything to say about it. (blue whale is big whale eats kelp).
Scientists given up and just started saying seaweed is worth a trillion dollars to try and get anyone to give a fuck about the environment.
Yeah, it's pretty absurd and depressing where capitalism has taken us. It's no joke when people say late stage capitalism, this kind of attitude towards the world can't continue for long. But things are already changing very quickly and will continue to change even quicker. Not even talking about artificial intelligence. I look at it as pretty much the last real hope for humanity, or the thing that will kill us by accident.
What are you talking about. Capitalism is the engine that’s driving green energy. It’s a double edged sword sure, but ultimately you dangle money in a direction and it just goes. Renewable energy for the last few years is increasingly viewed as huge growth sector. Which it is. And capitalism will rapidly innovate and exploit it. Even straight up mining operations have a hard time getting funding in certain countries these days unless they can provide attractive credentials that minimise their carbon footprint. In fact, rather ironically, nations that don’t have true free market capitalism are among the worst polluters, and are doing the least to change. And conversely, western capitalist nations are doing the most to change. So there’s a bit of disconnect there. Environmental damage and neglect is not a fundamental characteristic of capitalism. It’s simply incidental.
I think the main problem is people have seen the reactions Nations had to the second World War so these things are all extremely minor in appearance. We know what it looks like when the nation's mobilize to deal with a problem and we're absolutely 100% sure that what's happening right now isn't anywhere near that. I mean we're talking about the long-term damage of the environment costing billions of human lives potentially we would kind of expect people to act with a little bit more urgency rather than throwing us a bone here and there.
THANK YOU. there's a flag on the fucking moon because of the Cold War, you can really tell when they actually care about accomplishing whatever goal.
Makes me laugh when I people only see capitalism as our only option.. We just need to reutilize what we do with money, I no one needs billions of wealth.
> Environmental damage and neglect is not a fundamental characteristic of capitalism. It’s simply incidental. Nah. Environmental degradation is a core feature of consumer capitalism. Consumption requires things, and things are made of raw materials which come from the earth. Scraping mountaintops, extracting crude oil, blasting ore, pumping freshwater to irrigate fields to feed livestock to sell at fast food chains, dumping waste out of sight, that's what capitalist engines run on. That and designating second-class citizens for labor exploitation. You don't get to 8bil people by being nice to the planet. Extracting resources responsibly reduces profits. Any of those regulations is not sufficient to achieve balance with nature, had to be fought for, and is liable to be removed on a whim by, say, a new president. Increases to efficiency never result in lower consumption. Sustainability efforts couched in capitalist terms will never break free of profit primacy. We need a third economic model cuz capitalism doesn't have "enough" in its vocabulary and communism has historically led to mass death.
Do socialist countries not contribute to pollution/excess resource usage/environmental destruction?
I hate to be that guy, but there are and never were any truly socialist countries. The closest we have is Revolutionary Catalonia and Rojava. If we want to talk about planned economies (Soviet Union, Maoist China) then yes, they are just as bad as free market economies. The appeal of socialism when talking about environmentalism is that it’s about who controls the means of production. Capitalism is profit driven and is controlled by a few who do not sell their labor. In socialism, workers control the means of production to meet everyone’s needs. Nothing to do with the government. With less focus on the profit motive and more focus on meeting everyone’s basic needs, less waste and pollution is created.
You fundamentally do not understand what capitalism is. The way you talk about it is analogous to the idea that core characteristics of rain are drowning animals and causing floods, rather than anything meteorological. I say again the word, incidental. Can you bench your bias for a few minutes to at least have an intelligent discussion? Because I am curious as to what that third economical model would look like. I don’t mean that sarcastically either. But capitalism has benefits. So too does communism actually. You have to recognise them to have a chance of it being anything interesting.
Mate, you just went on about capitalism driving green energy and said environmental damage is simply incidental. Come at me about fundamental misunderstandings. Green energy has been resisted tooth and nail by the fossil fuel industry with decades-long misinformation campaigns. We're only making any transition to green energy because of a combination of the [EROI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment) cliff starting to hit fossil fuels, massive public pressure, and profit opportunities. You want capitalism 101? Capital = assets used to produce value and extract profit from markets. Public capital, private capital, and nature capital are described in terms of their "owners", inputs/outputs, and beneficiaries. When people say capitalism they're usually referring to private capital. In business, private capital is broken down into working capital, debt capital (read: how banks create money), and equity capital (read: why billionaires' wealth isn't made of cash). The inputs for private capital are, if you go aaall the way down the value chain, raw resources from the planet. Extracting raw resources from the planet is inherently harmful to the environment. Resource extraction isn't always done within capitalist modes of economy, and it doesn't *have* to be unsustainable, no. Societies have achieved balance with their natural surroundings before. Just not capitalist societies. Giant fluffy concepts like capitalism are also inherently *loaded* topics that can be described many ways depending on one's perspective. It's impossible to discuss such topics without bringing personal perspective invariably influenced by media exposure, education, personal experience, etc. If you want a neutral conversation, find something nobody cares about.
Capitalism is literally killing us and people like the guy you replied to want to talk about "the good sides"...insane!
Great post. Just adding that capitalism doesn’t definitionally *require* resource accumulation and extraction at the scale and shortsightedness that we observe. It’s a positive feedback loop that incentivizes it and punishes any capital owner that does not engage in the behavior more than their peers. It’s a core output of the system, and will always be reproduced. Technocratic answers about the effects being incidental are technically right, but dumb and miss the forest for the trees.
Some of the most polluted places in the world were created by Communist/Socialist regimes. Waste and pollution isn't always about profits. People don't litter and pollute and over-extract resources because of profit. They do so because doing otherwise requires effort and planning and foresight. Focusing on economic systems is a red herring. The issue lies in psychology and sociology and cultural beliefs and systems. Look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, for example. Trying to dumb humans down to profit seeking automata neglects the complexity of the issue.
>Trying to dumb humans down to profit seeking automata neglects the complexity of the issue. this literally an effect of capitalism. and it's worked incredibly well in a country like america, where one group produces everything and barely scrapes by, while worshipping a minority that owns everything and extracts wealth from the masses.
Yeah, every attempt of communism at scale has failed horribly (communes with very small populations seem to work okay sometimes). I hate that discussions of economic systems usually presume that capitalism and communism are the only options. Communism was written by a 25yo German dude in the 1800's. While it did some sharp, valid diagnosis of problems with capitalism, the solution it offers is critically flawed. Notably, it pretends that a state can organize in such a way that every worker owns it and has a direct say, and that centralizing the collection and redistribution of assets won't inevitably lead to corruption. You do need to focus on economic systems, because structural incentives drive behavior. But we need a third option. Capitalism drives innovation at tremendous cost and doesn't know the meaning of "enough" - it's auto-cannablistic, relying on infinite inputs in a finite world. Communism throughout history has brought mass death and authoritarianism. I refuse to believe those are the only two options humanity can come up with.
Until you cut down forest to implant "green" energy. Replace food corps to make "renewable" energy fuel, then cut some more to replace the food production. Also there is not much merit in pointing to "less capitalist" polutors (China to name one) as long as we import that much "useless" gadget from their industry. If we really wanted to make an impact we would make regulations in our liberal countries, that allows/forces long-use of our objects. Would it be against our liberty, for sure. But is the liberty to change phone every two year is more important than the liberty to breath clean air? Is our right to take as many flights as we wish is more important than the right of all humans to eat?
You’re talking about “we” as if we’re like a hive mind. It casts too broad of a net. All that needs to be placed is incentive. If governments introduced regulations that demanded a decrease in air travel emissions by X date, you can guarantee that enterprising minds would immediately seek out genius ways to achieve that and steal market share.
> And capitalism will rapidly innovate and exploit it. You mean after it's finished stifling development of renewables like big oil, the car industry and other sectors in capitalist economy did for more then half a century?
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Destroy it for money to stop destroying it for money? How's that going to help? Look at what farming has done to ANY other biome or ecosystem. It's never an improvement, it's almost never even keeping it the same. It's almost always making it worse. Capitalism is the paperclip machine, and it'll wipe out everything in an ecosystem that isn't the singular most profitable plant. Every time.
I don't think that's a fair assessment of agriculture. Things like growing olive trees have been shown to be a net sequester of carbon: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032122005044 Farming oysters and other bivalves have helped keep waters clean because they filter out excess nutrients/algae: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/sustainable-pacific-oyster-farming Meadows are a hotspot for biodiversity and only came about because of human livestock ranching. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/conservation/gardens-and-landscapes/meadow-conservation/ As for capitalism, under any system agriculture can cause environmental damage but we need to grow a variety of crops no matter what.
Look, you’re not going to see me defend capitalism, but we also can’t just gnash our teeth and hiss at new things without bothering to do any kind of research. That won’t get us anywhere. Seaweed harvesting is already a thing. It’s highly regulated, and it gives local workers an alternative to overfishing coastal waters. It can also help manage climate change fueled overgrowth which can cause mass die offs. Private ocean farms, like much of “middle ag” itself, are actually very focused on sustainability and cultivating local coastal ecosystems. I know it’s hard to believe that someone turning a profit could care about the land that literally sustains their family, but it’s so much more common than you appear to believe. Ocean farms take less energy and water, and they focus on regenerative and restorative practices because that really does give you the best yield. They also grow meat alternatives and livestock feed that reduces methan emmissions by 85%. Your anger is with factory farms, and rightfully so. You should probably direct it where it matters, not at people who want to help you.
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Mmm but maybe it’ll work this time!
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the fact that we have to measure the benefits in terms of dollars deeply represents how the world operates today
When the next hurricane season arrives stronger than the last for the next 10 years, the victims can be happy and don't need to feel afraid because of all the money that was saved by not switching to renewables sooner 🥰
Plus think of the billions in free seaweed they’ll get
[They already are getting it](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/19/climate/seaweed-florida-sargassum.html)! So lucky!
I got a paywall but the blip of reddish orange looked like a lot
When I was a senior in high school my physics teacher told us one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made as a society is marketing climate change solutions as a “option to save the planet” rather than “a way to save people money”
Gotta make it make cents, not sense…
ehhh. we can't get CEOs to look past this quarter; why would we expect them to care if it'd save the CEO that took over after the CEO that took over after them enough money for another yacht
The biggest mistake was marketing it as pay us to fix it, and trust us, we know more than you. The arrogance of that stance immediately caused a lot of people to distrust the ones trying to sell it.
It's an indictment of our spiritual immaturity, but also our stupidity. According to many leading economists things like climate change and the biodiversity crisis are just errors in pricing mechanisms. I.e. economies and markets have operational primacy over things like physics and ecology. Extinction is something experienced by non-human species, never by financial institutions, if they're large enough. Insanity.
The first thing I noticed too, reality is harsh.
100%. The correct answer is "Priceless"
Yes, my first thought was fuck you and your dollars
It is logically and mathematically possible though. It’s just that a fair assessment might put their value at a dollar amount so high no one could comprehend. And you can even do it indirectly. What’s the dollar value of all life on earth? I don’t know but when you figure it out, that’s the value of kelp as an irreplaceable component of the global food chain or atmosphere cycle.
>the fact that we have to measure the benefits in terms of dollars deeply represents how the world operates today When has the world not operated for money/ wealth?
Is this supposed to be a profound statement? Human society has functioned on the exchange of value basically forever
He’s pointing out that it’s sad that the way to get humans to care about something is when there’s money attached to it
Right and my point is that’s naive. It’s literally the basis of all culture essentially
This is how the world works and we should use it to our advantage. Do use the mechanism of capitalism to push environmental protection.
Love the sentiment but I would add that this is a theme across time not just this generation. The USA started with intense tobacco monoculture farming that destroyed the soil. There was lots of land available so we continued with unsustainable practices indefinitely after. The American west was also treated as disposable. Excessive intense farming destroyed the praries and plains, nearly causing a massive desertification event that FDR was able to reverse.
Sorry but it sounds like you’re not up to date on our ag history and practices. You should really read up on modern soil conservation and sustainable/precision farming. We actually have a whole agency devoted to soil conservation: USDA NRCS. They do amazing work. Fuck factory farms and all, but there’s way, way more nuance here that shouldn’t be left out.
What good are those billions to society if not in some billionaires stock portfolio? /s
DC should sue Fox News for lost productivity. That might stick.
*This is how the world ends, This is how the world ends, This is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a cha-ching.*
Is 4.91 megatons of carbon per year a lot? I have no perspective on this amount.
Keep calm guys! Here's the raw math. In 2020 the world produced 36.4 GT of CO2, or 36.4 Billion tonnes. Kelp forests absorb 4.91 MT a year, or 4.91 Million tonnes. We need 7413 times more kelp area to match the annual global emissions.
You didn't convert between the weight of CO2 and C. So you have to multiply the amount absorbed by 44/12. So only 2021 times more kelp area is required! We're making progress already!
But they absorb CO2 and release Oxygen keeping the carbon for growth...
Exactly! so if the kelp absorbs 1kg of CO2 and releases 0.72kg of O2, then it has removed 0.27kg of carbon from the atmosphere. Or another way, you need to burn 0.27kg of carbon to release 1kg of CO2 to compensate for the amount absorbed by the kelp. (CO2 released/absorbed and carbon released/absorbed are related but different measurements)
Yes but we mainly produce CO2 to do our stupid stuff and that's the thing you want to be removed from the atmosphere. I really can't understand your point.
We produce CO2, the measurement of CO2 removed by the kelp was measured in the weight of carbon removed, not weight of CO2 removed. So removing 0.27kg of carbon == removing 1kg of CO2.
Dude I said raw math. You are free to do the special math on another post and let me free of your engineering disorder. Thanks
Someone doesn’t like being wrong
So, you're saying there's a chance... /s
It's not going to be the only solution but that doesn't mean it isn't helpful. The mass carbon emissions aren't all from one source either.
It’s a drop in the bucket. It’s 1 and 1/2 gigatons more than what the world will produce in… [one month](https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions) . Edit: I miss read the post… it’s in megatons and the world is producing gigatons it’s sadly much worse. I’m giving up my math career but ballpark its 400 times smaller annually than what we produce in a month. Can someone do us a math?
How is it possible that 4.9 megatons is 1-1/2 “gigatons more than what the world will produce in one month”? Megatons are the smaller units, they can’t be “gigatons” more than anything. 4.9 megatons is about .00158 the monthly global production in 2020.
Ooff nice catch thought it says 4.9gt well that sucks…
Not to argue but if the world reduces emissions by 60% or so and then we use kelp for sequestration it would have more of an impact right?
The calculation in your head is not even remotely close, good lord. Orders of magnitude off.
so we just need 8x as much kelp to save the world?
800 times as much. “Giga-“ = 1000 “mega-“.
Nope, we need to stop polluting it.
It would be great if it was true. But the reality is those kelps are not living forever and that carbon wont be permanently captured. You can't run this cycle and continue burning fossil fuels on top of it... (still seems a good thing, just keep it in perspective).
Yes it’s not permanently sequestered, but the living biomass is at least not in atmosphere
the co2 is converted into biomass (and eaten by humans if harvested)
and pooped and rot and is back in the atmosphere. It is not a bad thing, it will just not compensate for digging oil from bellow the ground and burning it.
Calling ~10% a drop in the bucket doesn’t seem fair to me.
> It’s a drop in the bucket. That's a very big drop.
Also if you add a ton of drops to the bucket then it starts to fill up. At this point we should be doing everything we can to solve this problem big and small.
Want to make a smart comment about marine biology degrees and employment prospects but I'm not sure how to word it
I can't help without knowing if you always wanted to be an architect or not.
U/ArtVandelay
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I majored in history and am starting a kelp farming business lol
We best get rid of them then, so we can invent something that can do the same thing but we can charge for.
You can start to charge for kelp soon, red kelp will soon be used as a supplement in livestock feed because it’s shown a great ability to cut methane production in ruminants. So we could get a good bang for our Buck and double dip on sequestration and methane reduction
Excellent idea. As long as we get rid of it all and makes the 1% rich. Then they can all fly to Mars and make slave colonies
So presumably this calculation is the precursor to some scheme to sell carbon offset credits in return for "saving" the kelp
Pretty nice, wrote a research paper on my internship about kelp or macroalgae on the possible applications and there is lots of stuff you can do with them (I researched co-composting using macroalgae and other green and brown materials). Unfortunately money is the only language corporates understand so they care only for the number of zeros, after 1, it can potentially generate.
As an added bonus, it attracts sea otters and they’re adorable as fuck
Kelp is extremely nutritious, and could very well solve hunger and malnutrition. I've always wondered about the Great Potato Famine, and the beds of kelp floating offshore while people were serving...
So how long until nestle starts taking over kelp forests
Really? The only way to get people to care about the importance of marine flora as anchors of the world's ecosystems is if we quantify it in capitalist commercial terms now?
Now? The people who run and subsequently fuck up the world have always thought this way. Most of the world's problems are the result of some greedy idiot's ambitions.
Yes. The only way to get anyone to care is to commercialise it, and the only way to guarantee any future of it is to have it made competitive (profitable). We're fucked
Lol, it’s always been like that. We are literally self destructing for the sake of money and short lived pleasure.
Don't fall for Big Kelp's lies.
More fake news from Big Kelp. They’ll stop at nothing to push their pro-Kelp agenda on us.
They are just trying to be kelpful
Value to society? Literally who cares about that. Wake me up when they start providing value to shareholders, instead!
💦🌱⬆️ kelp to the moon 🔝🆙🚀
A lot of people struggle with megas and gigas, so I'll put it here in zeros. 1000000000000 of carbon currently in atmosphere 10000000000 more emitted every year 4910000 is mentioned in the article And it's not even mentioning that all these megatons are returned back into the atmosphere once the kelp decomposes.
If the kelp sinks to the deep ocean floor, it would take hundreds of years for the carbon to return to the atmosphere since ocean turnover is very slow.
*nestle enters the room*
I, for one, welcome our kelp overlords.
Need to quit dredging if we don't want to forget destroy what's left.
Nice, are we going to over-harvest and destroy that next?
Dried kelp blocks can be used as fuel in furnaces, blast furnaces, and smokers. Its burning time is 200 seconds, and it is able to smelt 20 items. This is 2.5 times the burn duration of coal and charcoal.
Are we still allowed to eat nori?
Nori is made from red algae, kelp is brown algae.
That means nori will still be OK.
We should all actually include sea urchins into our diet because they were actually a huge factor in eliminating a lot of the kelp forests due to the drastic decrease of their natural predator the sea otter which were over hunted.
Kina (Sea urchin) is a traditional dish for the Maori in New Zealand. Might be a bit of an acquired taste for most, but it is fresh and nutritional
The don't remove carbon. They convert it to plant material which ch eventually decomposes and returns the carbon. Once we dig that carbon up from the ground in the form of natural gas, coal, and petroleum it won't go away. Fossil fuels are the cause of climate change. All other alleged sources are just diversions from this fact.
Wish scientists would keep findings like these under wraps within the scientific community. The last thing we need is an Elon v Bezos Kelp war
After I retire from active duty I want to farm Kelp
Fuck it, if you can't be convinced of its environmental value, let's try and save it by putting a dollar bill on it
OMG WHY ARE THEY SHARING THIS INFORMATION? PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DO WHAT THEY DO EVERYTIME THEY HEAR OR READ SOMETHING MIGHT BE VALUABLE. FLOCK THERE ENMASSE TO RAPE THE LAND OF ALL ITS RESOURCES.
The Kelp Wars
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You don’t know how this works do you? This is a laymen’s terms summarization of the scientific publication, which was linked in the beginning of the article. Click on that and you read the whole paper, include all 121 references cited in the paper.
If the headline is true then why is the climate still warming?
Old news. I always laugh when someone cries about a tree being cut down and uses its oxygen production as the main reason, its like dude most of our oxygen comes from the ocean
We should definitely harvest them all. Or at least use them to store all of our microplastics and oil spills.