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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Haha. The production of methane has nothing to do with the cow, but everything with the bacteria that live in its gut and produce methane as waste product in the breakdown of plant cellulose, which makes the resulting curd digestible in the intestines of the animal. Inoculating the cow has no effect whatever on the bacteria, and if it would it would block the food intake of the cow and kill it.
You raise a good point, Ed. Inoculating a cow/steer should not affect rumen bacteria.
Gates’ people would know that. So, what would be the point of the inoculation, unless the target was the animal.
Is beef a good vehicle to transfer material to its consumers?
FK gates! and all the idiots parting with money , hope its like his other crap ideas and goes dud
They don’t want us eating meat anyway. We don’t know what’s good for us. It’ll do you all some good to skip the sirloin and have more salad.
That is, if you can find salad. When they cut off nitrogen fertilizer, there won’t be enough food to go around.
When the reduce CO2 to “acceptable” low levels, no plants will grow anyway, so we might as well have a steak or a burger while we watch the world come crashing down.
Also know as, “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we shall all die.”
There will be a market value assigned to ‘vaccine free cows’ pretty darn soon. Russia made a choice to go non-GMO as a market position. There will be plenty of Western folks that want their meat ‘certified free of Gates concoctions/anyone else’s pseudovaccine stuff’.
It really is time to say that Gates must eat this meat or else. He can’t be allowed to invest in this crap and then say he is eating organic/regenerative agriculture-produced meat.
Methane emissions from cows is already at equilibrium.
Methane reverts to CO2. CO2 grows the plants cows eat.
There is no world wide increase in cows.
The latency time for methane in the atmosphere is relatively short.
So, one has to wonder what else might be hidden in these so called fart reduction chemicals.
Why not just feed them Beano?
That does seem to be a minor flaw in the plan.
The definition of vaccine has changed again? I wasn’t aware that burps and farts were “infectious or malignant diseases”
Once again, activists are focusing on minor sources of greenhouse gas emissions. They are ignoring the major sources, such as coal burned in China for electricity. Why is that? What’s the real motivation?
You are wrong. Methane emissions are the second largest cause of global warming, after CO2. Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, but does not directly cause global warming because any increases in water vapor condense out. But as the climate warms, air can HOLD more moisture, thus water vapor acts as an amplifier of global warming caused by CO2 and methane.
So you don’t get the bit about methane only having a shelf life of around ten years in the atmosphere. Stock numbers have hit their peak, so we have hit peak methane… there is no threat to the future climate with methane, that claim is a scam purported mainly by vegans.
Just switching from beef to lamb will reduce ruminant CH4 emissions.
beef produces 1.2kg CH4/kg
mutton produces 0.55kg CH4/kg
It supposedly has fringe benefits for expatriate Scotsmen and Kiwis as well.
“The science: Methane is much more potent than is carbon dioxide, in terms of its trapping atmospheric heat, although it also dissipates down faster.”
Speaking of “The science”, what about biology?
I’m not a farmer or a biologist or a vet but I did work in wastewater (though it’s been a few decades) and I am familiar with anaerobic systems.
The methane a wastewater plant burns off is from bacteria “digesting” the waste.
If I’m not mistaken, the methane cows produce is also from bacteria digesting their food.
What will this vaccine do? Cause the immune system to kill the bacteria that digest their food?
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that if you kill that bacteria, you just killed the cow.
The Gate, (Gates) wants to control the pseudo-meat industry, end meat production and re-wild the prairie with Bison. If Bison are restored to their 1492 population, they will produce more methane than all domestic animals and humans currently residing in America. That is unless, Gates changes the Bison genome with some funky anti-fart vaccine. He is already the largest farmland owner in America. We should be alarmed. Buying up farm land to exist meat production to build a fake meat industry sounds like a anti-trust violation.