HOW NOW BURPING COW?
Steve Meller is impatient about cows. “The climate science is clear that we have less than a decade to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions and avoid a global tipping point.” The global warming potential of the world’s almost 1.5 billion cattle is an enormous challenge, he says, and until now there’s been nothing significant that farmers can do about it.
The Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and investor, who’s originally from South Australia, is hell-bent on giving farmers an option to do something about it and make more money while they’re at it. He’s formed a company with several Kiwis to grow a particular seaweed and sell it to farmers around the world. The company is called CH4 Global, CH4 being the chemical formula for methane, the planet-warming gas that cattle and sheep belch out.
A connection between seaweed and methane – or, to be precise, less methane – has been untangled over the past few years. Like scientists globally, Australian researchers had been searching for a way to block methane emissions from livestock. They found that feeding them a seaweed native to New Zealand and Australia does that substantially – in one study, almost entirely.
The quest is driven by the fact that methane from livestock accounts for about 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In New Zealand, it constitutes at least a third of emissions, which is vastly more than is emitted by our entire public sector – the sector that the government recently pledged to make carbon neutral by 2025.
That pledge supplemented a declaration of a climate emergency and drew international media attention when climate activist Greta Thunberg disdainfully tweeted that reducing emissions by less than 1% was “nothing unique”.
Thunberg says our planetary house is on fire; climate emergency declarations signify the same urgency. But although it’s possible to extinguish the vehicle emissions and coalfired boilers of the public sector, farmers at present have no way to douse methane emissions except to farm fewer animals.
Methane from livestock constitutes at least a third of
