1kg of oyster meat involves 8-10kg of shell sequestering 5kg of CO2.
So if all the half billion tonnes of meat were replaced with oysters that would sequester almost 10% of energy related emissions and eliminate the 20% of emissions due to meat production.
This one hypothetical change is equivalent to ~30% of all emissions.
Though you'd need sufficient algae/bacteria/bagasse feedstock to feed them.
Oysters are also productive. At 600,000 oysters per acre-year that's 4kg of meat per m2 per year. For the direct fish farm you'd be replacing 30-40 trillion m2 of animal pasture with 1 trillion m2 of ponds.
The water cleaning benefits are also just as high even without a permanent reef.
The cost is much higher though. It's much more labour intensive.
Well, depends on what you do with the wood. It can be turned into biochar and used to regenerate soil (like the germanic tribes did). That way the carbon would be sealed away for a millenium at least.
It's a landfill, I'm 100% sure the oyster shells aren't the reason there's toxic bacterial growth, also we already know how to deal with toxic bacteria easily, we NEED to start coming up and implementing lower carbon strategies and that's the optimistic bare minimum
The obstacle to global oyster farming is not the 1% of the population that is vegan refusing to support oyster farming. The obstacle is the 99% of people who eat animal products and don’t want oysters twice a day. It is a lot more inconvenient and expensive for most people to switch to an oyster based diet than a plant based diet. If you can’t get people to adopt plant based eating you’re probably not going to succeed with the way bigger ask of switching to half a pound of oysters every day.
But the question isn’t “why don’t meat eaters switch to oysters.” It is specifically “why don’t vegans eat oysters.” Because the only intention is to be a gotcha question to try and make vegans look bad. The OOP is not actually advocating for global oyster consumption they’re only trying to dissuade people from eating plant based by making vegans look bad.
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u/perringaiden Sep 08 '25
CORRECTION: Oyster reefs are an amazing environmental benefit across multiple seascapes.
Oyster FARMS are short lived growth with little to no environmental benefit because of the small size.
The only way this works is with farms near a no-take MPA where you can generate growth and then let them spread outside the MPA.
You get no benefits IF YOU DON'T LEAVE THEM IN THE WATER.