https://www.axios.com/2024/05/10/arkeabio-cow-emissions-bill-gates
May 10, 2024 –
By Dan Primack & Ben Geman
ArkeaBio, a Boston developer of a vaccine to reduce livestock methane emissions, raised a $26.5 million in venture capital funding led by an investment fund founded by Bill Gates.
Why it matters: Caring about cow farts (or burps) has become a political punchline, but they’re estimated to create more than 5% of global greenhouse gasses.
Vaccines could be a relatively low-cost, scalable solution, particularly as food demand increases.
The science: Methane is much more potent than is carbon dioxide, in terms of its trapping atmospheric heat, although it also dissipates down faster.
The deal: Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the Series A round, and was joined by Grantham Foundation, AgriZeroNZ, Rabo Ventures, Overview Capital and The51 Food & AgTech Fund.
BEV previously funded ArkeaBio’s $12 million seed round.
The bottom line: The whole thing feels a little dystopian — giving animals injections so they cook the planet a little less before we cook some of them — but agribusiness sailed over the dystopian hurdle long ago.
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Methane pretty much only has an effect in dry air, as its absorbtion spectrum totally overlaps water vapor. Solving a non problem. Politicians building bridges where there are no rivers.
True enough in my understanding, yet the head article confidently states that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 . Also, since methane is exothermic with O2, it will not accummulate persistently in any case. So, why do some perpetrate this?
Oxygen will not oxidize methane unless there is spark to initiate combustion. See my post below.
I’m going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and give Bill a quick lesson on methane combustion by lightning.
Melinda already just
left, with 12.5 billion.
the spark is UV
Incorrect. Methane is oxidized in air over about 10days by ozone in the troposphere ground level to ~14ķm. It averages 20-30ppm. Methane is only 2ppm.
Vegans. Methane is only potent in a dry lab atmosphere, not in the real world. That this scientific canard keeps get ting propagated shows only increasing warmunist desparation. The Alarm ain’t working. As here.
“…the head article confidently states that methane
is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2″
_________________________________________________________
The head article doesn’t say a f*****g thing about how much temperature rise methane will cause by 2100 or in 100 years or if it doubles in concentration. The reason for that is the increase is so small as to be unmeasurable. If methane causes any more thane 0.05°C of warming by 2100 please pipe up and say so, and include your source or show your work.
Methane, with a short residence time and whose absorption bands are completely overlapped by water vapor, will cause NOTHING.
This is based on the IPCC’s junk science “Global Warming Potential” nonsense, which is calculated in a MYTHICAL DRY ATMOSPHERE.
“So, why do some perpetrate this?“
______________________________
Because they are getting away with it.
They get paid to get away with it.
Why? Money and power.
Since my brief post above, I’ve tried searching the internet, without much success generally speaking, for some sort of actual *experimental* verification as to whether methane processes any more or less IR per molecule than CO2 or H2O tends to do. On Google, Duckduckgo and almost anywhere else, all hits are dominated by the presumption, maybe from someone’s theory somehow, that methane just is ever so powerful this way, compared to most molecules in nature? It’s just superficially a ‘dominant’ concern, you cannot easily get anywhere toward finding out what a real experiment would have to say about this.
Anyway, my best source of readily findable data for beginners is from 10 years ago here on WUWT, at:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/methane-the-irrelevant-greenhouse-gas/
The above article has graphs that I’m sure represent absorption profiles from experiments, indicating *no* super enhanced effect for methane whatsoever. So the bulk of the publicly accessible internet is dominated by a complete fraud or scam on methane — and such a transparently exposable scam it should have been too, for anyone the least bit skeptical as to why one small molecule should be considered to have such an outsized effect.
I wonder what problems ir will create for the health of the cow and the quality of dairy and meat (and price). You can be sure this hasn’t been investigated. These animals evolved these systems. It’s like developing medicine for healthy children so they won’t ask difficult questions.
any excuse to get more Rna vax into anything
Did you mean that; Methane pretty much only has an effect in dry air, as its absorption spectrum is totally overlapped by water vapor?
Exactly.
And the methane produced by livestock is a wash at best. The methane is produced by bacteria in their gut, which digest the grass that they eat. If that grass were not eaten, it would be broken down by bacteria in the soil, producing CO2 and methane. The grass was created by extracting CO2 from the air, mere months earlier and the methane that is produced degrades into water and CO2 fairly rapidly in the atmosphere. Regardless of this, the warming effect of <2ppm of methane in an atmosphere with an average of something like 20000ppm H2O is so small as to be immeasurable in any practical sense (i.e. it can only really be measured in models, which are not real).
The idea that livestock emissions are some sort of net “pollution” is absurd as it only looks at one stage in a complex cycle of nutrients. The people pushing the methane scare cannot not know this. They willfully ignore every aspect of the cycle that doesn’t support their alarmist narrative. That is scientifically dishonest, if not fraudulent.
In regards to a “vaccine” to reduce methane emissions in ruminants. One would wonder what the possible side effects of such a treatment are. The bacteria that inhabit ruminant stomachs are there for a reason, messing with the balance of bacteria or how they work is unlikely to be without consequences and the consequences are usually not beneficial, particularly to the ruminant host, otherwise they would have likely already evolved.
I agree with Rud Istvan that it is at least partially being pushed by vegans. The Green Blob despises people, and vegans act like PETA, and rate people no higher than rats.
And we know that no chemistry is 100% efficient, so less methane and CO2 out than what went in.
Isn’t all the methane from cows (burps, not farts) neutral anyway? It comes from the feedstock, or the grass, they eat. It’s not produced in a vacuum.
It’s like the Drax power station in UK only much more benevolent to the environment. They cut trees in N Carolina, chip, pelletiźe, ship by sea and truck to burn! With cows, they graze, fertilize the pasture and the grass grows back in a couple of weeks taking CO2 back out of the atmosphere .
What happened to milk from contented cows?
Now it will come from bloated cows.
Vegans oppose using milk, too. Exploiting the poor cows (and benefiting people) gives Ingrid Newkirk severe anthropomorphism fantasies.
Tofu is also giving her husband man tits, erectile dysfunction and lost libido.
She might think that is preferable. It probably makes him more compliant to her orders.
Story Tip..
This will make the greenies squirm 🙂
Contradicting Doomsters, Research Shows Cattle May Actually Decrease Emissions – Climate Change Dispatch
Unfortunately, they still buy into the nonsense that methane can cause warming 🙁
In the beginning of the 19th century there were tens million bison belching methane well as millions of other ruminants. They were nearly exterminated. There was also vast tracts of wetlands emitting vast quantifies of methane. Much of that filled in.
Credit needs to be give for swamps drained both historical and current
I know one big swamp that needs to be drained…corrupt Washington DC and its surrounding environs and its Deep DEEP STATE.
I live in a drained marsh but the smell from the farmers muck spreading yesterday was almost too much. But hey, I like beef.
Story tips:
1) https://www.yahoo.com/news/chiles-capital-faces-fiercest-cold-194724758.html
2) As in January, March and recent years at this point, Arctic sea ice extent is not only well above average for 2011-20 (as for the whole current decade so far), but at or above 2001-10. What “climate scientist” predicted these developments?
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
The 2012 summer record low extent is not likely to be broken this year. Twelve years without a new low is unprecedented in the satellite record! Indeed, every year since 2017 has been unprecedented, as from 1979 to 2012, a new record low was set every five years or sooner.
It’s not as if the conditions for new lows haven’t existed. In 2016, not just one, but two summer cyclones hit the Arctic Ocean. And another in 2020, as in 2007 and 2012.
On June 5 at the MLO, the concentration of methane was 1.9 ppm. The reason the concentration of methane is so low is due to lightning, a discharge of which initiates the rapid combustion of the methane. A discharge of lightning generates ozone which would also oxidize the methane.
Cold ocean water at about 0 deg C can hold 170 ml of methane per liter.
We don’t have to worry about methane. It will always remain at a low level in the atmosphere.
Martian methane mystery:
https://www.universetoday.com/167003/new-answers-for-mars-methane-mystery/
Well they seem to have discounted subterranean herds of cattle that only burp and fart at night, (like all well trained herbivores 🙂 I also like the name of the crater that produces methane on Mars, Gale Crater. No doubt new exploration will reveal emission from Windy Hill….
Bovine fluctuance vaccine, sounds like a Babylon Bee story.
Gates might try and do something meaningful for a change,
but i doubt that would be possible.
It biologically isn’t. See comment below.
It will never come to market. Some people will pay themselves, friends and relatives for working on it, and then shut down. Or ask for more money.
On the off chance it does work, can I get a shot? Not having to worry about farting during an all day meeting would be awesome. It should be mandatory for anyone who wants to fly on an airplane.
Considering that it is promoted by the vile Bill Gates, it will probably be an MRNA injection.
That way the cattle and anyone that drinks the milk or eats the meat will suffer from myocarditis, pericarditis, cancer, and neurological diseases.
All part of the plan to depopulate the planet of pesky humans and their preferred food.
Gates should have stuck to computer science, even tho he ‘stole’ the UI for Windows from Apple. Lousy at biology and physics.
There will never be an effective and useful vaccine against ruminant methanogen digestion. The reason is very basic. The first ruminant stomach containing the methanogens is what breaks down otherwise indigestible grass/hay into digestible food in the se cond ‘real’ stomach. Is why cows chew first stomach cud—helps accelerate ruminant digestion by increasing methanogen active surface area.
Any vaccine preventing this would cause the ruminants to starve.
Second reason is methane is NOT a GHG in the real world, only in the lab world. Posted several times previously. For a definitive physics paper, see online:
10.1016/J.Heliyon.2019.e01145. Also available at ncbi.nim.nih.gov as PMC6351392.
I think the UI was originally invented by Xerox PARC, but point made.
Add to that the wide range of methanogens in the rumen take one out the next one replaces it
Supplements that reduce methane production soon stop working
The only reason for playing around with rumen micro flora is to attempt to increase feed conversion. Nature has been doing this for 50 million years so I doubt there are gains to be had
He also stole DOS from this guy, it was originally written by Tim Paterson…..notice a trend.
Bill ripped off DOS from this guy’s CP/M, via a cutout in Seattle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall
But, hey, they made C instead of A the main drive.
PC-DOS/MS-DOS is essentially Tim Paterson’s CPM-86, which was an x86 clone of Gary Kildall’s CP-M.
MS did buy CPM-86 from Paterson.
There is also a lot of misinformation floating around as to why IBM went with PC-DOS instead of CP-M.
I heard from a manager at IBM that they went with PC because it was more popular and they wanted to cash in on the consumer market.
It was also pointed out that while Gates was promoting his product, saying they would be doing all business computation, he was using IBM mainframes.
IBM wouldn’t have contacted MSFT about anything but for Bill’s mom Mary, who served with CEO Opel on United Way’s exec committee.
Tim Paterson wrote 86-DOS, not CP/M-86. MS bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products and also hired Tim Paterson to work on DOS.
Tim Paterson copied the “Application Programming Interface” from CP/M to allow relatively straightforward translation of Z-80 code for CP/M to 8086 code for 86-DOS. Under 86-DOS, the jump location used by CP/M for function calls contained the INT 21H software interrupt that is the native mechanism for function calls under DOS. The copy command was internal to command.com under DOS, but was an external program, PIP, under CP/M.
CP/M was written in PL/M, while DOS was originally written in SCP’s 8086 assembler.
Wow. Memories…… 🙂
My first computer was a Seattle Computer Products system, which came with 86-DOS v1.14, which was the last released by SCP. This was also the basis for PC-DOS v1.0, and MS-DOS v1.25 was the basis for PD-DOS 1.1.
The 86-DOS software package included a couple of programs to assist with porting Z-80 CP/M software to DOS. one was READCPM, which allowed reading CP/M formatted disks and another was a program to translate Z-80 assembly code to 8086 assembly code, specifically the code used by SCP’s 8086 assembler.
As long as everybody’s tracing his thefts backwards, the BASIC he was selling to the pre-Apple 8080 community was copied from a dumpster dive at college, and then he had the nerve to whine that people buying “his” BASIC program were giving copies to friends.
The guy’s a class act from start to finish.
The guy’s a class act of tyranny and evil from start to finish.
Fixed it for you.
Ruminants are mobile organic fermentation vats.
It may be possible to do something to reduce ethane emissions without suppressing the bacterial action, but there don’t seem to have been many details as yet.
Apparently the seaweed supplement trials conducted in Australia to reduce ruminant methane emissions reduced growth rates, with no net effect on methane/kg of meat.
Sheep and goats produce much less methane per kg of meat than cattle, but have far higher management requirements. That letter from the Nobel committee seems to have been lost in the mail 🙁
My first thought was that the whole thing is a PUMP and DUMP routine. One reason being that after the human vaccine disaster, very few people will accept a MRNA treated product.
Enzymes, anyone? Try Gas-X…
One wonders what else the anti-human scumbag might be putting in the “vaccine” !
I hope they label meat that has had this crap injected….. because I won’t be buying it.
I think we can tell Bill where to stick his vaccine – and it doesn’t get any sunlight!
No, methane is not “much more potent” than carbon dioxide. Harper an Wjingarden showed very conclusively that in the earths atmosphere with normal amounts of water vapor and other such gasses, methane has a very small effect on warming.
What? You want to bring actual physics into a religious debate! Not allowed.
Two problems, number one Gates needs to keep his mitts off my dinner. Number two my understanding is that CO2 doesn’t trap long wave radiation rather it reradiates it in all directions, a portion of it radiated back to earth. We must insist that the proper language is used. I don’t know whether methane treats long wave radiation the same as CO2 or not.
Net radiative flux between points is determined by the temperature difference.
CO2 does not alter the temperature gradient.
“The temperature of the gas then rises.”
Show where this has been measured in the atmosphere.
Harold the Chemist says: Everyday, millions of times.
Before sunrise in the summertime, the air is usually cool. After sunrise the air rapidly starts to warmup and by the afternoon the air can be really hot. This is due to water molecules absorbing the IR in the sunlight. About 40% of sunlight is IR light.
Nothing to do with CO2.
CO2 can absorb ca. 10% of IR light.
Which band? CO2 absorbs IR at 3 primary and a lot of secondary frequencies.
Most of the warming of the air as the sun come up is due to ultra violet.
When a molecule absorbs a photon… a photon is a quantum of energy, not a pellet or bullet or particle.
The valence bonds get excited only if the frequency of the EM wave is in the valence band.
The vibration results in the electron promoted to a higher energy state.
The electron will return to the lower energy state with one or 2 possibilities.
First is quantum probability.
Second is the exchange of momentum occurring during a collision. The collision transfers energy from one body to another based on velocity and mass. This collision does not create energy. If the collision impacts the valence vibration, the molecule will emit a photon of energy of a quantity and frequency based on the valence bond and electron valence state.
There are probabilities than can be calculated as to how much energy is transferred as kinetic energy or valence energy and part of those calculations involved the vibrational frequency of the valence bonds in each molecule as well as the velocity vectors of each molecule and their relative orientations.
Your 11 billion collisions per second requires context. Is that per mol, the total atmosphere, per molecule?
Avogadro’s number is 6.022 × 10²³ which is the number of molecules/atoms in a mol.
11 billion is 11 x 10^9.
I am not going to calculate or look up the energy of the 14.9 micron IR photon, but is is in the low to single digit eV.
1 J = 6.242×10^18 eV
One joule (W-s) is the energy used in determining temperature rise for 1 mol of gas by 1 C.
Why isn’t this methane scam called out for what it is… a scam.
Because there a large coterie of influential climate scientist who perpetrating the greatest scientific fraud and scam in recent human history. Their motive is large amounts of “easy” money to fund their global warming and climate change research. They are in cahoots with UN whose objective is
to transfer large amounts of money from the rich countries (i.e., the polluters) to all the poor countries to help them cope with “climate change”.
y
Most all the poor countries are former colonies of the Europeans. For them, it’s payback time.
Except the money will not go to the “poor” countries.
It will go to the dictators and bureaucrats of those countries… you know, the sort of people who end up in the UN. !
Unfortunately, you are right. The poor people of these countries will only get a trickle of the money. 0ne project of merit is reforestation. Desertification is real big problem in these countries in Africa, for example. The people cut down lots of trees for firewood.
I recall that at the recent COP28 conference the rich countries promised many millions for the poor countries to combat climate change.
The fact they call methane a threat is a provable lie. Why accept ANY of the alarmist claims?
Leave the poor cows alone. They have been here much longer than humans and have a well-established right to fart as much as they like and when they like.
Bovine rights RULE !!! 🙂
We need the cows and bulls to gender identify for their on protection and social justice.
I think we all have a right to fart. Sometimes it is quite refreshing and comforting, especially if timed correctly. Ask Biden.
FJB
“Why it matters: Caring about cow farts (or burps) has become a political punchline, but they’re estimated to create more than 5% of global greenhouse gasses.”
Water vapour: variable, usually in the range of 2-4% of the atmosphere
CO2: currently 0.042%
Methane: currently 0.000019%
Somebody can’t count.
On June 5 at the MLO, the concentration of methane was 1.9 ppm. This is 0.00019% by volume. You are off by 1 zero.
At MLO, the concentration of methane is reported in ppb. Why did they do this? Because it makes methane look like a menacing molecule.
I stand corrected. Still nowhere near the claimed 5% though.
They seem to forget to count water as a greenhouse gas, probably because if they did the whole CO2 house of cards would collapse.
________________________________________________________________
The Bullshit: Methane is much more potent than is carbon dioxide, in terms of its trapping atmospheric heat…
Methane does not “trap atmospheric heat”. It absorbs mostly in coming IR from sunlight and IR emanating from the earth’s surface.
The amount in the air is so small that it does not change the heat capacity of air’
Fundamentally you are correct, but the devil’s in the details.
The bottom line is, yes, the quantity in the air makes its contribution to atmospheric warming too small to measure.
Nothing traps heat. This is a false narrative derived from a parent explaining to a young child how a blanket will keep them warm. Thermodynamics and physics are beyond the grasp of young children.
IR is not heat. IR is electro-magnetic energy.
Heat is kinetic energy.
Both transfer through the mostly empty atmosphere.
(Before objecting to “mostly empty,” consider the size of a molecule, the number of molecules in a mol, and the volume of a mol.)
Methane does interact with specific frequencies of EM energy. They are absorbed in the valence bands and re-emitted. What makes a specific gas opaque at a give frequency is the photons are emitted in an approximate spherical system; approximate due to molecules not being perfect spheres. Thus the EM wave is scattered from line of sight between the source and the detector creating the apparent opaqueness..
Electromagnetic waves are energy in motion. Momentum energy is mass times velocity. A photon has zero rest mass, but has a “virtual” mass due to its energy and velocity. This wave front momentum is sometimes called photonic pressure. There is momentum transferred between the EM wave and each molecule and that momentum transfer manifests as kinetic energy in the affected molecule. Again, very small and insignificant in terms of warming the atmosphere.
One must consider the specific heat of the molecules.
Specific heat (Cp) at 275K is 0.819 for CO2
Specific heat (Cp) at 275K is 2.191 for CH4
Both at identical conditions of constant pressure, which applies to the atmosphere at the mol level.
That means it takes nearly 2.67 x joules to raise a mol of CH4 by 1 C compared to 1 mol of CO2.
Neither “traps” heat.
On a per molecule basis, energy interacting with CH4 will raise the temperature less than energy interacting with CO2. When one multiples the effect by the 430 ppm versus 2 ppm, CO2 will have the greater effect, although it is still trivial.
Most vaccines need to be kept COLD, so if you’re worried about vaccine remnants in the meat, just be sure to thoroughly COOK your beef and chicken.
thoroughly COOK your beef
But medium is much better than well done.
I’m old enough to remember when these people were against genetically modifying organisms. But it isn’t about that. It’s about world depopulation and preparing the plebes they allow to stick around to subsist off of crickets.
Decaying grass on the ground emits the same amount of methane as if a cow eats it.
Cattle that are run correctly build soil that contains microbes that capture methane.
Add the word approximately. It is very close, but not perfect.
Surely cows are just part of the carbon cycle? They don’t create anything, they just convert the carbon in the grass into carbon in meat and gases. Perfect renewable process.
You understand!
1) Let the the cattle ranchers and the market decide.
2) Pass a law saying that beef products should be clearly labeled with a notice: This beef is from steers that have received an mRNA product to reduce methane production. Your purchase can help fight global warming(sic).
My guess: people will avoid the injected beef and purchase ‘pure beef.’ The project will fail.
Side bar: “The science:”… blah. Messrs. Dan Primack & Ben Geman are believers.
How many fools born per minute? How easy is it to separate a fool from his money?
P.T.Barnum wants to know.
I do wonder if Bill Hates is a vegan as he bangs on about methane produced by ruminants but if he was so concerned about it creating ‘huge’ problems and adding to the Planets ‘crisis’ he would, surely, be commenting on the increasing production of Rice grown in paddy fields(???)
He is looking for massive government funding so he can get richer.
Maybe the producers of the vaccine will give it an appropriate name…how about ‘Snake Oil’?
Just consider what Gates’ last attempt at a vaccine has created. Until he answers for that he should not be allowed anywhere near medicines of any type.
Injecting garbage in cows to stop a non existent problem and giving to Gates stolen billions from the population while poisoning us : what could go wrong ?