Much has been made from the recent Bill Gates memo in which he backs off the “climate disaster” part of his messaging. OK, but that is not the whole story. He still clings to the core claim about CO2, CH4, and N2O as harmful, and is just polishing the outside of a bucket of slop when he deletes the crisis language.
I went to the Gates memo a few days ago and read a lot of it. He is still pushing feed additives and a vaccine to reduce methane from cattle.
No, a thousand times NO. Leave the cows alone! And stop blaming the farmers!
Here is a copy-and-paste quote of the agriculture section of his memo.
===========
Agriculture (19 percent of global emissions)
Much of the emissions from agriculture comes from just two sources: the production and use of fertilizer, and grazing livestock that release methane.
Farmers can already buy one replacement for synthetic fertilizer that’s made without any emissions, and another that turns the methane in manure into organic fertilizer. Both are selling at a negative Green Premium. Now the challenge is to produce them in large quantities and persuade farmers to use them. (Pivot Bio, Windfall Bio)
Additives to cattle feed that keep livestock from producing methane are nearly cheap enough to be economical for farmers, and a vaccine that does the same thing has been shown to work. It’s now moving into the next stage of development. (Rumin8, ArkeaBio)
Another source of methane is the cultivation of rice, one of the world’s most important staple foods. Companies are helping rice farmers around the world adopt new methods that both reduce methane emissions and increase crop yields. (Rize)
One stubborn problem is that some of the nitrogen in fertilizer seeps into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. It’s very dilute, which makes it hard to capture.
================
That said, I have no problem with Gates’ promotion of advanced nuclear fission power generation systems. But not because “climate change is serious” in the sense of the claimed impact of emissions of CO2 and other IR-active trace gases.