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2024-11-11

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Bill Gates-backed startup makes ‘butter’ out of water and carbon dioxide (www.zmescience.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A California-based startup called Savor has figured out a unique way to make a butter alternative that doesn’t involve livestock, plants, or even displacing land. Their butter is produced from synthetic fat made using carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and the best part is —- it tastes just like regular butter.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Fat and oil production from animal and plant-based sources are collectively responsible for about 3.5 billion tons of CO2

You cannot be serious that animal-based and plant-based are grouped in this figure. Plant-based is likely close to carbon-neutral, and only not net-negative, because of transport, cooling etc., which will also be necessary for this artificially created fat...

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Tilling, seeding, treating, and harvesting all require machinery and therefore increase carbon output in farming.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Your comment existing has a carbon footprint, doesn't mean it should be paired with the dairy industry's

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Plus the simple effects of land conversion. Plus the emissions from the feces.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Yeah. But since farm animals are often fed from farmed plants these days, animal-based tends to be worse by quite a solid factor. This article puts butter at 4x worse than margarine, for example: https://www.forkranger.com/blog/is-margarine-a-sustainable-alternative-for-butter/

How plant-based compares to this new process still needs to be seen for sure. If it's just a machine you can plug in at the store and everyone can get their butter like out of an ice cream machine, without transport and cooling chain, then it's likely a lot better.
But at this point, I don't expect the process to be much more efficient than what plants are doing, which means you'd still need a ton of energy and particularly also land area for it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Well you see, animal sources are responsible for 3.7 billion tons and plant sources are responsible for -0.2 billion tons.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I thought that was funny.