Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Sacha,
and how many of those things are not a matter of sufficient resolution?
Smell and touch are the obvious two.
We are impressively visual beings but not everything can be reproduced on a screen. Also even just focusing on the visual you need high speed cameras to capture images of micro-expressions, they are too fast to ever get an image of them at normal frame rates - yet we respond to those incredibly rapid expressions even if we don't "see" them consciously. Yes you could argue that it's just a matter of always using high speed cameras and display systems but that would be a stretch.
You'd be talking about huge upgrades to VC cameras and displays (at the limits of current technology) and the bandwidth required to transmit the data would be spectacular.
Personally I'd rather take an overnight airship powered by electric engines to Melbourne for a face to face meeting and lunch at a nice restaurant.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Sacha,
reliable, affordable genuine hi-resolution video will change that. We don’t have it yet.
Unlikely. Actual real world personal contact communicates things that we can't reproduce over the internet (yet). I'm only too happy to use the internet but I also recognise the very real value of a face to face meeting.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to David Haywood,
This is the of thing that will work, if and only if, we can shift governments from focussing on minimising loss from dealing with climate change and instead focus on the opportunities it create and necessitates.
Even the discussion here quickly focused on negatives, denying ourselves things, instead of figuring out how to have better things.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to David Haywood,
Bioplastics are already widely available – I use PLA probably every week in my engineering work.
I haven’t looked in-depth at the claimed agricultural problems with bioplastics.
In the early days there was a lot of work looking at using GE to modify the pathways in plants to make better and more plastic precursors. The work has languished partly because oil is still cheap and partly because the costs of getting a GE product through the regulatory system and to market are too damn high. The final nail in the coffin was that the plants we knew most about were all food crops and nobody wanted to face the risks of cross contamination between food and non-food which meant (re)developing the methods in non-food crops which added a whole other layer of cost to development.
There will almost certainly still be folks working on making plastic precursors in plants in the various universities around the world but it's unlikely anything will get to market without a change in attitudes toward the value of such products.
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For those abandoning air travel perhaps it might be worth considering the cultural and social value of travel. One of the reasons NZ is open to new ideas at all is because a significant proportion of the population have traveled and actually seen for themselves that people do things differently elsewhere.
We have a culture of acceptance of the different because many people have seen that different can also be just as good. I'd hate to see us lose that.
As for business travel, there are just times when real face to face makes enough of a difference to be worthwhile. Yeah there is wasted travel, particularly in the upper management zones, but most businesses view travel as a cost they can minimize.
Perhaps a better approach to the problem of air travel is to develop alternatives. Airships have potential but they aren't as fast, which for some purposes is just fine. Sea travel really is too slow for most human interactions, but it's worth noting that all mail is now delivered by air, which is convenient sure, but is also wasteful. There have been huge changes in aircraft engines, particularly around noise, perhaps a stronger focus on fuel efficiency could see a whole other class of aircraft that were even more fuel efficient.
With more options perhaps you could choose to take a 12 hour (efficient) flight to Melbourne, heck the travel day is usually a write off anyway.
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Just thought I should add this link from AgResearch to some of the work going on already to reduce methane emissions from ruminants. The pdfs are short summaries and give you an idea of what is already happening.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Che Tibby,
bart, what’s the need for lowering the methane output of ruminants? my layperson’s understanding says that as long as you’re not introducing fossil-carbon to the feed end then the back end is “carbon neutral”
Your lay person's understanding is quite right (but see below) CO2 to plants to cows to CH4 is carbon neutral.
BUT
CH4 is about 20 times stronger as a greenhouse gas than CO2, so it is not climate change neutral.
That's the first problem, the second problem is New Zealand specific because most of our greenhouse gas emissions are methane and since a big chunk of our export economy depends on ruminants we are faced with a very specific challenge.
The final problem is that it isn't quite carbon neutral. That's because the way we farm depends on fertiliser which requires energy input and that is usually fossil fuel energy.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to JWT1,
Rumen bacteria produce methane as an end product because of the highly reducing (anaerobic) environment in the rumen.
A lot of what happens in the rumen does not involve methane producing bacteria. Nor is it clear you must have methane producing bacteria to do those things. Simply having an anaerobic environment does not necessitate the production of methane and a huge amount goes on in the rumen without methane production. I'd be really surprised if you couldn't alter the rumen bacteria to reduce (if not eliminate) methane production.
But I don't for a second think it is an easy project nor one guaranteed of success.
On the plant side alone I know very well that changing the metabolism to make more digestible carbohydrates is hard and likely to have unexpected consequences that will need to be thoroughly examined before you get to a viable product.
But Russell asked if it was feasible and I think it is, just perhaps not quickly and definitely not without a serious commitment to the effort.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to BenWilson,
Then the research could be conducted to the ridiculously high biosecurity standards we already have?
No the problem is the ridiculously high biosecurity we operate under makes it too hard to even do the research properly any more. We regulate everything, even things that have been used safely for 40 years and we are threatened with closure if we fail to keep records of everything.
At present compliance (not safety) is adding a huge cost in time and money to any research – if we seriously wanted to make cows stop burping methane we couldn’t even do the research here with current regulations and the interpretation of those.
That is NOT the fault of those doing the enforcement they are simply doing what they’ve been told to do. It needs new legislation.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Russell Brown,
How real is that right now, Bart?
There are a few different answers to that question.
The most optimistic is that yes it is totally feasible, just not right now, it would take a few years effort.
BUT
Sorry, long post follows ...It would require a few things to happen. First we'd need to change our regulatory system to make the research feasible, at present the regulations and the enforcement of those regulations would make the research almost impossible to do. That is eminently doable and without any risk at all.
Then we'd have to set aside enough money to make the project run, something like a National Science Challenge but funded fully. No pissing around with half arsed measures, as a wild guess I'd say $5 million a year for the first 3 years and then increasing to maybe $10-20 million a year for a decade after that. Hopefully towards the end of that industry would stump up some of that money.
That funding probably wouldn't cover all of the cost but I'd expect satellite projects to develop around the challenge as you went along.
Then you have to actually do the science. Bear in mind that we haven't actually tried anything like this yet so we don't know what would work and what won't work (that's what the research money is for). That said my guess (wild and speculative as it is) is that you'd want to engineer both the bacteria in the cow rumin and also engineer the grass. Yes GMOs, get over it.
You'd want to reduce the compounds in grass that are hard to digest, which is metabolic engineering and full of surprises. With a dedicated effort it is certainly possible. You'd have to make sure the grass still grows as well in the field but that is probably all doable.
We know a lot about ryegrass in this country so we wouldn't be starting from scratch but this is not something that would be easy - but it wouldn't be so much fun if it was easy.
You'd also want to see if some of the bacteria in the animal rumin can be altered to either make less methane or take the methane and turn it into something the cow can process. I know much less about the feasibility of that part but my gut feeling is that the balance of bacteria in the rumin might be quite hard to alter. That said lots of folks believe they alter their own gut bacteria with a simple dose of brewers yeast :). Seriously a lot of testing would be needed.
Then you'd have to say to everyone in NZ that yes we are going to grow GM grass here and we are going to grow GM cows here - because we believe that the incredibly low risk from GM is more than balanced by the improvement to the environment by eliminating methane.
Yeah doable. But it would take a huge amount of spine on the part of the legislators to change the laws and some considerable guts to commit the funding. On a cynical day I'd say it would be totally ruined by all the hangers on who would steal the money from the science, on an optimistic day I'd say it would be something great we could do for our economy and the world and we wouldn't let anything stop us.
Oh and as a final note - in the process of doing this we'd become the world's experts at this kind of engineering - countries would come to us to figure out how to use biological engineering to solve major problems - our kids would see the scientists doing this and all want to be a part of it, lifting the talent and skills of the next generation. So um yeah can we please let our imaginations really stretch and do this?