Livestock isn't actually that big of a contributer as is often claimed. The reason is they don't add any new carbon. They get it from plants which get it from the atmosphere, where it later returns. While methane is a part of this cycle and produced from a variety of sources undergoing biological decay or gut microbiome digestion, cows do produce a lot of it.

Methane decays over 20 years back into CO2 and water, but during its life as methane it's an 80x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and that's the issue, not because it dosen't balance in the end, but because we breed a lot of cows. People gotta eat though and it's gonna come from somewhere in order to sustain the population even if it wasn't cows.

The reason this is a climate win is because we're not adding new carbon, we're capturing methane that exists anyways from waste, converting it back to CO2 and water in order to produce energy, and thereby skipping its life having 80x the warming effect, essentially making it not only carbon neutral, but beneficial to reducing warming. The article might be about a fueling station that's new, but we've been doing this for awhile, not just with manure, but with landfills as well.

Continuing to use fossil sourced natural gas though, that's as we say, no good.

Longer trips and heavy duty applications like shipping would be the main benefit. As far as efficiency, burning it in a large scale power plant to make electricity to power an EV is more efficient than burning it to directly power a vehicle. But certainly there are applications that make sense.

Keep in mind though methane capture from waste can only scale so much and trying to produce more would defeat the purpose. We won't be in danger of running out of lithium anytime soon, it is one of the most common elements in the planet's crust and there is a lot of it in the ocean. Any shortage is going to be market driven which, while lithium is abundant, accessing much of it can be difficult and expensive. Remember that batteries are almost entirely recyclable though so you get a really long life out of it once you've mined it.

>Uh..... ok? We are talking about the meat industry.... why are you talking about landfills....

No, we're talking about capturing methane from waste to burn as fuel, thereby preventing it's otherwise release into the atmosphere and it is carbon neutral despite emitting CO2 because that carbon came from and would decay back into CO2 anyways, so no new carbon is being produced.

>You are insane, you know that?

What do you call yourself repeating the same nonsense in total denial of any scientific reality?

>I also never said cows add new carbon to the world.

Yes you did, multiple times, it's all there in the scrollback.

Your responses have been nothing but batshit and literally advocating for more harm simply because you don't understand the biochemistry here.

You couldn't be more wrong lol. You realize a lot of this methane capture we do is from landfills right? bacteria in tons of organisms and the decay there of, produce methane. It isn't unique to cows. How do you think all that natural gas was produced before there were cows exactly?

And I will once again point out that, concern about an increase in methane that exists at the same time, although it will also decay back into CO2 at the same rate, is an argument for not against burning it to convert it back to the CO2 it was and will reenter the atmosphere as even if we didn't do anything. However, this will skip the 20 years it would take to naturally decay to CO2 and H2O.

> Also "carbon conjured from nothing"???? What on earth are you talking about????

You keep insisting cows somehow add carbon but they don't. They, like all other animals, get their carbon from plant or other animal sources which, ultimately, get it from the atmosphere. No new carbon is introduced in this process yet you insist otherwise as if it just spawns into existence.

Do I need to draw you a diagram?

You're the one arguing that new carbon is somehow conjured into existence, and also somehow that not converting methane into the CO2 it will eventually become anyways is somehow better than letting it exist as an 80x more potent greenhouse gas for the 20 years it takes to decay.

>If you use, ie, plant based substitutes, then all that extra methane from the cows is gone.

No, it isn't, decay from the waste products still happens, you still produce methane and CO2 as waste from metabolizing. That carbon doesn't just cease to exist.

>How are you this dumb. You aren't using science you are making absolutely herculean acts of moon logic.

You, expect no logic can be found.

> If you don't breed the cows they don't produce methane.

Right, but that methane still gets produced from the biomatter decay that otherwise still occurs, or if you want to go the route of crops we raise to feed the cattle, the CO2 is still in the atmosphere in the first place.

> The two choices aren't in the atmosphere or in the cows.

One of the choices isn't doesn't exist though. That carbon is going to still be in the atmosphere, be sequestered by plants, that goes into other food sources for humans, because people still gotta eat and you need to replace the cows with something, and that's still going to end up back in the atmosphere.

> The actual fuck is going on inside your brain.

Uh, Science, reality, What's going on in yours? blind hatred of cows?

Also that mining can actually be done better, and batteries are recyclable so you get a really long life out of those metals, while you're never going to make fossil fuels not pollute in extraction, production, and consumption.

Earlier I said no one was suggesting Methane to run all vehicles on, but you found the idiot arguing against EVs so maybe I shouldn't say that lol.

Even better is using EVs and burning the methane in a powerplant, that's much more efficient. But anything that gets us off of fossil fuels faster at this point, no need to fret over a perfect solution, we just need a working system of solutions.

WHERE DO COWS GET THAT CARBON THEN HOOVER? HUH? Do you think because we farm them they magically make more?

No of course not, that's ridiculous, they get it from the plants they eat, which get it from the atmosphere. Why can't you wrap your head around that? You want to argue about our unsustainable farming practices and our need to address that? yeah okay, I agree, does that magically make cows make more carbon atoms? No, so stop being ridiculous.

That CO2 existed, in the atmosphere already, it was sequestered by plants, and would have, in one way or another, through biological decay, ended up back in the atmosphere as carbon after spending some time as methane.

All we're doing here is capturing some of that methane from waste, skipping the 20 years it would have spent as an 80x more potent greenhouse gas than the CO2 it will end up as in the atmosphere anyways.

No new carbon is added here. If you think there is, you think somewhere along this process new carbon atoms came into existence, they did not.

Pretending otherwise, and that converting it back into CO2 sooner isn't better than leaving it as methane releasing into the atmosphere at 80x potency, and burning a fossil fuel that is adding new carbon, is simply science denial.

You CANNOT eliminate that CO2 or methane, which is already in the environment, simply by not raising cattle. It's still there, you didn't eliminate squat. The source IS THE ATMOSPHERE.

Is that spelled out enough for you, or are you going to keep repeating the same nonsense, learn nothing, and angrily shake your fist at the sky because the real world isn't what you think it should be?

So, to sum it up, you are just unable to admit that you have zero understanding of biochemistry and the carbon cycle and are going to continue insisting that cows are magic matter generators because adjusting your position to the science would mean changing your worldview, so it's easier for you to maintain cognitive dissonance and call the other person stupid than to think too hard about it.

Just give it up, you were never attempting in argue in good faith or cared about having a real understanding of the process.

.... buddy.....

where do you think cows get all that carbon?

You evidently are that stupid.

Yeah we seem to mostly agree, just confusion on the exact thing we were each talking about.

>As for that, you're mostly right I think, but that dispersion is important. The greater surface area makes it easier to break down in other ways and keeps it from creating concentrated blankets. A pasture is like sticking a straw in the water and blowing bubbles rather than using a fine aerator. The aerator will get some in solution at least, rather than just jetting gobs of the less dense grass up to the top. Hell, if we had many smaller pastures rather than big industrial ones, that could even help. There are a lot of ways to tackle things that I am in no way qualified to speak on.

I completely agree with all of that.

And yeah it's also true that fossil fuel companies muddied the word "clean". And nothing is a perfect solution either, we just have several imperfect solutions that can all work together at various scale with a variety of effectiveness and drawbacks.

I'm glad we kept it going too, thanks for the actual discussion instead of the arguing and science denial I've experienced elsewhere on this post. o7

So you honestly believe that cows just conjure those atoms into existence lol?

You are stone cold stupid, no avoiding that issue.

>You said yourself that "clean" is relative unless I'm conflating conversations.

I said it was clean because it's byproducts are water and CO2, these aren't toxic pollutants and CO2 emissions are an issue because of introducing new carbon causing an increased greenhouse effect and ocean acidification. This isn't new carbon though it was, and will regardless, remain a part of the environment.

>Science indeed does not change. Conditions do. 20 to 30 years ago, we weren't as poor off in all of our greenhouse issues and this kind of planned can-kicking would have been much more beneficial.

Right but that doesn't change the science on if it's clean or not and I already addressed how not replacing some fossil fuel usage with this sooner is actually can kicking.

>That does not mean the product should not exist for uses when fuel is needed. Having a gas station for vehicles specifically is my argument, I suppose. If using it as a fuel is viable, use it in the use cases that absolutely need combustible fuel. Vehicles don't need that.

Yeah but it's something we can do right now to add to the effort to reduce fossil fuel usage, not in place of other efforts. It dosen't come with the same limitations that batteries do in certain applications, shipping for instance. Largely I agree though batteries are a clear way to go for land vehicles (at least in most applications) and burning it in a power plant would be more efficient.

>I've been speaking of vehicle use the entire time. I've been speaking of our production of methane the whole time. Not about naturally ocurring methane. Not of use cases that are outside of a gas station on the side of the road. That's the biggest over-user of combustible fuels. If methane use in areas where combustion is absolutely needed helps? Cool! Not talking about those.

Ah well, that would be a difference in what we were talking about, because I was talking about capturing and burning methane from waste that would return to the atmosphere if we did nothing anyways.

I agree vehicles aren't the most efficient use of it with some exception and absolutely we should be getting off fossil sourced natural gas as well as every other fossil fuel as fast as possible.

>But we also need to be looking at the root and trying to stop our own methane emissions entirely. Because those vehicles are the end of a chain that need not exist. That is my entire point. This is kicking the can, not cutting our methane emissions which is what needs to happen. Because there are so many natural sources that our anthrogenic production is overloading the system.

Some disagreement here, that methane would largely exist if more dispersed in nature, this also acts as a or part of cutting those methane emissions by releasing it as the CO2 it came from and would return to anyways. I suppose if we buried and sealed it that would be removing carbon but attempts at that kind of carbon capture have been dubious and as long as we're in a capitalist framework, financially uninspired to pursue in earnest.

>That was... Kinda my point. It's what I was talking about from the start.your "why not utilize it" argument is absolutely beside that point when my entire point was to say "this is just exchanging one gas for another in vehicles."

Yeah I was at no point suggesting we should replace all vehicles with this and that we could scale capturing methane from waste alone for all our energy needs. Regardless of what we could, could not, and should do to reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere at one time as part of the carbon cycle, we might as well use what's already there especially when doing so just converts it back to what it was and out of a more harmful form faster. Not at all suggesting we try to intentionally make more of it.

That still makes it CO2 sourced from and that will return to the atmosphere anyways. I agree our farming practices are unsustainable but they don't conjure new carbon atoms into existence and not utilizing the resource that exists anyways, and in a more harmful form than the CO2 it is destined to return to regardless because of a different, tangentially related issue is ironically a whataboutism.

It does exist anyways because it's byproduct of natural biological processes which occur anyways. If nothing happened to it, it would be CO2 in the atmosphere anyways, if we did nothing it would return to the atmosphere and spend 20 years as methane before becoming CO2 again anyways.

How is that so hard for you to understand?

I did engage with what you said, I informed you of the scientific reality and you're just repeating the same thing instead of actually engaging with that information.

>A) it doesn't exist anyways, we can independently end its production.

???

>B) Methane is much worse than CO2 and you aren't shortcutting anything, you are letting the worse one into the atmosphere

So you're making the argument we should burn it rather than let it be released as is.

>C) ITS STILL NOT CARBON NEUTRAL WHY DO YOU KEEP SAYING THAT.

Because it is. It doesn't release new carbon. That CO2 came from the atmosphere and will return to the atmosphere, with a 20 year period of being methane in between, which is an 80x more potent greenhouse gas than the CO2 it starts and ends the cycle as.

>Biofuels are industry green washing. They don't solve the problem and make us continue to be reliant on their products.

You dramatically misunderstand what's going on here. This isn't growing crops to process into ethanol. This is the natural byproduct of decay of biomatter. It exists anyways, we're just capturing it from waste and burning it for energy which skips the life it would have been in the atmosphere as methane, causing 80x more warming than CO2, before decaying back into CO2 anyways. It is literally more harmful to not do this. It's not like we're manufacturing it.

>I think our disconnect is that you think I'm arguing against this... I'm not!

>I'm arguing that we need to call a kettle black and not waste time on psuedo "clean" solutions while lamenting the timing of this. 20-30 years ago i'd have agreed that this was clean. Now? Hardly.

These statements are in contradiction, but if it would have been "clean" 30 years ago it's all clean now. Science doesn't change how it works because time passed.

>And the rate of growth is not equivalant to the rate of consumption. That's the problem. We consistantly undergrow and use other wastes to make up that lack of growth.

Again, an argument for addressing unsustainable farming, which I agree with both crop and animal, but not an argument for not utilizing the methane already being released and putting it to use that also reduces it's warming impact.

>Hell, we could easily be growing meat in labs with 0 methane production if we could get over it. Just tell some muscle cells to start growing and cut off a slab whenever you're hungry for some meat.

While our technology is pushing this capability, it's not that simple or cheap, it also still has to source its composites (including carbon) from somewhere and so there isn't much of a distinction here. It's also not just from cows you know?

>That is the other point. Because of how late this has come, I feel that the resources vould have gone elsewhere.

>It's a good idea... But feels like too little too late. That was and has been my only point. We're past this kind of can kicking. That's my only point and lament.

The article is about a station that's new, but capturing methane releases from waste isn't, we've been doing that for awhile, so what resources? the methane that's literally better burned than left alone to be released as is? Every gas plant, every converted truck, every ship, running on this is one not adding carbon to the problem.

>How fast do you think grass dies and decays rather than being mowed through by cows? How fast do you think it decays into CO2that isn't then immediately absorbed by the growth around it? Clear a field and kill the grass on the regular and that is not the "natural" process you're alliding to.

You realize cows can't eat it faster than it grows and don't magically conjure more carbon into existence by doing so right? It the surrounding plants would have to wait 20 years for that CO2 to be available again and it will be available again anyways.

>Just because there is a natural parallel does not mean this is equivalant. You're comparing slow natural decay to rapid, acid and enzyme based decay due to the overpopulation of a certain animal in concentrated locations.

>I addressed that it is an acceleration of natural processes. Just because it would hapoen over time does not mean it is ok to press fast forward on the process. This is a foolish argument.

This isn't an argument against burning this methane, it's an argument against unsustainable farming practices. Which I'll certainly agree with you on.

>The parallel drawn was merely to point out that whether we are speaking fresh grass or old fossilized plant matter, it is still "carbon that existed in the environment." The fuel was trapped deep underground before we drilled and fracked for it.

No there is a big difference, the fossil carbon had been out of the environment for hundreds is millions of years, while the methane we're capturing and burning is actively part of the carbon cycle.

>This is taking methane that we are producing at an accellerated rate and turning it into CO2 that we will be releasing at an accellerated rate.

...You realize it's physically impossible to do that at a faster rate than sequestered right? Again, nothing in this process conjures more carbon atoms into existence and no new carbon atoms are introduced that weren't already in the atmosphere. If we are to feed cattle at an accelerated rate we must grow food for them at an accelerated rate which sequesteres CO2 at an accelerated rate. The only hitch is that methane naturally decays over 20 years and is 80x more potent than the CO2 it was before, this will rate match with it's production but we can increase the ratio, you are correct on that. Again however that is an argument for burning it to skip that time period

>No matter what, this is humans still releasing solid carbons from their trapped forms into the atmosphere and accellerating the process. That is the root problem.

No, it isn't, your entire argument is based around "we're doing this more than natural" but that starts with CO2 that was already in the atmosphere we are not, in any way, releasing CO2 that wasn't already there or while soon be returned there.

>It isn't "clean" it isn't a "solution." It's fine and dandy as better-than-methane but at this point in the game more can kicking isn't what we need. We need to find a way to stop releasing carbons as gasses as entirely as possible. It is, of course, going to happen... But doing it in every single vehicle is a bad idea no matter how you slice it.

It is by definition clean and a solution to reduce methane in the atmosphere while cutting fossil emissions at the same time. Not utilizing this would be kicking the can and prolonging the problem. No one is suggesting we do this for every vehicle, I doubt we can fully scale methane capture from waste to run all our energy off of it. But it is a sustainable resource we actually have a net benefit from utilizing and has uses as a niche for applications where batteries just don't get the job done.

The manure is from animals that got it from plants which got it from... the atmosphere. It is carbon neutral, it didn't conjure new carbon atoms into existence like magic. Not only that but by burning the methane we shortcut it's 20 year life as a 80x more potent as an greenhouse gas than the CO2 it was originally and will become again anyways.

Why waste the resource when that byproduct of waste exists anyways, isn't introducing new carbon, and burning it actually reduces it's natural warming effect?

You mean, like how it would be released naturally back into the atmosphere anyways? We're talking about capturing methane released from biological decay.

>But it is... It is carbon that was trapped in grass being released as gasses. The carbon was in the environment i. The exact same way fossil fuels were.

What do you think happens to grass when it dies?

>This is not a direct co2 to methane to co2 process, you are ignoring where that carbon was in the first place. In plants. Just like fossil fuels... Or have we forgotten fossil fuels are mostly from plant matter?

Not forgetting this at all, you're forgetting that most of it doesn't end up buried to eventually become fossil fuels either. Most of it is released back into the environment as methane through decay. It takes special circumstances such as pete bogs, wetlands, dense rain forest and shallow ocean basins for plant and animal matter to accumulate, be persevered and buried faster than it could decay to eventually become fossil fuels.

That is why we find fossil fuels in concentrated pockets and not as a fairly uniform distribution. Almost none of the carbon sequestered by grass on the plains grazed by cattle will end up that buried as that.

>It is absolutely more. It is taking solid carbons and releasing them as gasses producing more co2 in the atmosphere than there was before.

sigh as was already stated multiple times and as you're very last point even attempted to address, no, it is not more carbon, it is carbon that was already in the atmosphere, it is the exact amount as was there before it was captured by plants and that's where it would return or have stayed without our involvement, except it would have spent it's first 20 years after reentry as methane.

>That methane would not have been produced without human intervention. That is my entire point.

That's a stronger argument to burn it as fuel because, and I repeat, that carbon came from the atmosphere in the first place. So if you're concerned about an increased ratio of methane, you support converting it back to CO2.

>I'm not going to pretend I have a solution to methane, but putting it in cars and turning it into more CO2doesn't scream "clean" or "solution" to me. It screams delay and marketing.

It isn't "more" because that carbon was already in the environment. It is clean because it's non-polluting. It isn't "delay" because it's in place of, carbon adding fossil fuels.

My paycheck isn't reliant on a lack of understanding of science, is yours? Manufacturing opposition to fossil fuel replacements would be a natural course of action for companies reliant on their continued use.

>Because we are still producing the excess methane and then converting it into CO2.

The methane is the result of natural decay of biological matter and again, was sourced from the atmosphere

>It isn't. It's from manure we produce from our livestock to feed peoppe

Um, yeah?

>It isn't " clean" because it is still combusting something to produce CO2

That came from and would return to the atmosphere anyways. It isn't producing new carbon how is that hard to understand?

>I'm not even saying don't do it, but for heaven's sake, calling it "clean" is the same as calling coal "clean." You gotta jump through a few hoops to justify it.

No, coal is polluting several toxic and radioactive compounds in addition to releasing new carbon. There is no such thing as "clean coal". Wildly different, and I think you only perceive it to be the same through a lack of understanding of the science and the difference between fossil sourced natural gas and methane that is already part of the carbon cycle.