Cows, Methane & More CowBell
A brief introduction to me, the work of CowBell Labs, and livestock methane.
Hi I’m Dr. D.R. “Doc” Brown. Welcome to my newsletter.
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That said, I want to share these five facts:
The greenhouse gas methane causes 0.5°C of global warming today. The Earth is 1.1°C too warm today.
If we stop emitting it, the earth will start cooling in just a dozen years.
Cattle (cow1) methane causes 18%2 of current global warming, mostly by burping3.
Cattle burp methane across 45% of the earth’s land and in every country.
Amazing solutions are on the horizon but showing they work is hard.
First a bit about me: over the last 10 years, I’ve thought a lot about agricultural climate emissions, solutions, and measurement. I’ve worked on these issues across public, private and nonprofit sectors. I developed a soil carbon funding program at the United States Department of Energy, developed sustainable fertilizer at Pivot Bio, and brought computer vision to agriculture at Google X. A couple of years ago, I turned my attention to the problem I work on as the CEO of the non-profit CowBell Labs: the greenhouse gas methane.
Methane is kilogram for kilogram a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Currently methane is responsible for 0.5°C of warming. But whereas carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for 10,000 years on average, the atmosphere destroys methane in about 12 years. That means if we stop emitting methane, in about 12 years we’ll start cooling the planet. And it’s a big lever, with cattle responsible for one-third of that. We need to pull that lever and pull it as soon as possible.
My experience in agriculture is what first opened my eyes to this problem. If cows were a country, they would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses on the planet. The bulk of those emissions are methane. The planet is 1.1℃ warmer today than it used to be and a full 0.2℃ (18%!) of that is livestock methane! Cattle produce more of the greenhouse gas methane than leaks from the world’s natural gas infrastructure.
If you want to change how much methane a cow produces, you have a couple of options: you can change what they eat, you can change how their bodies process what they eat with sci-fi-come-to-life tech like mRNA vaccines and even CRISPR therapies, through breeding for low-methane cattle, or by feeding them anti-methane compounds like Bovaer. But how do you know if your special diet or medical treatment or technology works on cows? First, you do a clinical trial, just like in medicine for developing anti-covid vaccines. If that clinical trial is for an anti-methane vaccine, you would compare a group of cattle vaccinated with a group of cows. Then after you start distributing the vaccine, you need to check that it’s still working over time and in the real world. In the case of anti-methane vaccines, you’d measure the amount of methane being produced by cattle before and during the treatment and check to see that it’s reduced.
But unlike oil and gas plants — which stay in one place and are designed with exacting engineering specifications and a host of technical controls — cows are, well, alive. In most of the world, they aren’t kept in tightly managed barns. They wander around. They eat what they please. They spend their lives in the wind and the rain and rolling around in the mud and pressing shoulders with their friends.
That makes it much harder to keep track of how much methane any individual animal is producing at any given moment. As an expert in developing technical measurement systems for hard problems, this challenge is catnip for me.
That’s why I am currently working on this problem at a non-profit startup called CowBell Labs. Today, the majority—literally over 50%—of the world’s cattle live in Asia and Africa. That means we need to think globally about their emissions to reduce them. Over 80% of that methane is produced by livestock grazing over 61 million km2 - 45% of the earth’s land surface. If we want to reduce emissions, we have to focus on solutions that work in the real world where cattle live and demonstrate they work by measuring them there, too.
In my next posts I’ll talk about:
Why does methane vary so much between individual animals… and between other species (including humans)? And what does that mean for methane measurement technology needs?
What are the possibilities for measuring methane at the cost and scale needed for addressing the climate crisis?
Let me know what other questions you have and I'll try to tackle them, too.
More CowBell,
Doc Brown
With gratitude to Celeste LeCompte, Dan Goodwin & Charles Brooke for their help in editing.
A cow is specifically a female that produces milk. I use cattle because it also includes heifers, steers, calves, and bulls.
Shout-out to Erika Reinhardt at Spark Climate Solution, for re-analyzing the IPCC data in this way. We also use data from this fantastic paper written by Dr. Ilissa Ocko and her collaborators at the Environmental Defense Fund.