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Comment by simonmesmith | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is an interesting scientific development, but to pitch it as aiding deforestation is a massive stretch. Three quarters of deforestation is due to agriculture: https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation. So cultured meats would probably have a much bigger impact on deforestation than cultured trees.

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Cultured meats would not change the amount of deforestation. Deforestation happens when a landowner owns a forest, and wants to put it to productive use, and they find from available crops that perhaps the meat industry is the most profitable for them. Absent a meat industry, these landowners aren't just going to give up and pay taxes on useless land, they will find some other industry that will make use of the land they purchased for the sole purpose of exploitation, not conservation.

The issue with deforestation is in a lack of protections for forests, not because of any one industry.

Cultured meats are a competitor to the meat industry, which is a major contributor (but sure, not the sole contributor) to deforestation.

Technologies that financially out-compete those industries until the land is most valuable as a forest are each one step in a permanent, game-theory stable protection for forests. Once you've pulled something superior out of Pandora's box, there's no putting it back in, and no need to use regulation to force consumers to chose that more efficient option.

A regulatory approach is only as strong as the social capital and government enforcement that you can muster to put those protections into law, it does nothing to eliminate the old selfish incentives to exploit those natural resources. The instant that you look away, that the regime changes, or you run out of social momentum, deforestation will resume.

What I'm trying to get at is deforestation will always happen if forests are allowed to be sold. There will always be some use to be had if the land is allowed for private sale, because few people want to just sit on land and pay expenses. Many landowners of large tracts would like for some of that land to work for them. The meat industry is the major contributor today, yes, but if it was gone, there would be another industry as the major contributor. Then another and another, like snakes on Medusa's head.

We have shown its a lot faster to just set up a national park than it is to develop technology that eliminates the need for any industry at all to develop on empty land. Sure, governments demand public support in order for their ideas to be maintained, but you could just as easily come up with some hypothetical technology that isn't one of those industries affecting forest today, some new industry or technology, that now has to be stymied to protect the forests. This could happen any time in the future. It will probably happen multiple times, and require more innovation to work out its dependence on land for that one new technology. Now rinse and repeat infinitely into the future as long as you allow forests you intend to protect to be privately owned by individuals or corporations with profit motives.

if you decrease the profit of developing land then you reduce the amount of land that is developed. it's not inevitable that all lets gets developed even ignoring protected areas.

I would think on the grand scale it probably is inevitable that everything gets developed at some point. Look at Europe: there's probably not one square foot of flat land on that continent that didn't see some sort of human usage by now over history. Maybe the numbers don't pencil out today, but next week the world could change and now you are selling off parcels to people interested in improving the land.

> What I'm trying to get at is deforestation will always happen if forests are allowed to be sold

That's not really true. Most land in the world isn't developed. Just allowing it to be developed doesn't mean it will be in some manifest-destiny sort of way: there has to be some incentive to develop it. It might turn out that undeveloped, unstrategically located land simply has little economic value (and is more valuable as a carbon sink).

Making food, industry and dwelling more land efficient would push down the economic incentives to develop more land.

Other than for meat, growing plants for burning uses up a lot of space: wood for burning, biogas, bioethanol and biomethanol. Around 13% of agricultural land is used in Germany for producing biogas for instance. Photovoltaics uses 1/30th of the land.

No new research is needed for this, one would simply need to phase out mandates and subsidies. The money is better used by putting them into the alternatives: Wind and PV for electricity production, heat pumps and electric vehicles for consumption.

Biomass only makes sense if you're using waste products or if you need the carbon like in the chemical industry.

Is there anything preventing wind power from being above forests? Every wind farm I've seen has been on empty fields but it doesn't seem impossible that you could use the land for crops or even trees.

Efficiency of wind turbines increases with height above 'ground'. I expect for this purpose the top of the tree canopy would be the ground, so turbines would have to be higher by the amount of the forest canopy height, at least. I expect there are more issues with wind flow over tree canopy vs a crop field, but I suspect the height issue alone is enough to make the economics pretty bad.

Not only that, but the trees would provide habitat for all manner of birds which, to not put too fine a point on it, would end up diced by the turbine blades.

The land owner would make more money 1) cutting the trees and selling the lumber, 2) turning the land into farm land or grazing land, and then finally 3) erecting a wind farm than just doing #3 by itself.

Better to situate land-based wind turbines on hills, which usually don't have many trees.

Wait is 3% of Germany covered with photovoltaics?!

Photovoltaic uses around 1/30th of the land to produce the same energy as with energy crops.

3% of Germany covered would already be a lot. A hectare gets you around 500 MWh/a, so a square kilometer gets you around 50 GWh/a. 3% of Germany is around 10000 square kilometers, so you would get 500 TWh/a, which is around the electricity used in Germany in a year.

As a comparison agricultural land is 49%, biofuels are 6.6% of all land in Germany.

If this prevents one quarter of deforestation it would still be a massive help. Furthermore, the agriculture- lumber difference in deforestation is not that clear cut. When some disgusting criminal in Brazil cuts down a bunch of rainforest for pasture he is also taking into account the resulting lumber in his profit plans. In fact the lumber is probably a big part of the criminal enterprise because it provides an immediate profit whereas raising cows provides profit only after a couple of years. And I am sure our criminal needs the immediate cash flows to pay off Bolsonaro and other corrupt politicians and to hire thugs to chase away protesters and natives.

So having lab made wood on massive scale will definitely significantly help with deforestation even the so called agricultural one.

Cultured meats or even vegetarian meat substitutes would help as well, but one does not prevent the other and thus one should not be used as an argument against the other. Furthermore, cultured wood should be easier to make than cultured meats. Nobody has to eat the wood, so you do not have to get the taste of the wood right. You just need to get the correct mechanical properties right, which should be much easier.

Generally I am very puzzled by this type of arguments against environmental improvements: A is a bad idea because B would make a bigger difference. Well if A would make a significant difference, and A is not in conflict with B, than why not do both?

Agreed - and deforestation for lumber tends to be ery specialized woods in less developed parts of the world, not something this approach is going to target. In NA and Europe we do a pretty decent job of harvesting wood grown specifically for lumber and wood products, with multi-generation plantings pretty common - efficient, without the lab and science angle.

Untrue! There are labs and science, but the labs are all outdoors! There's some really cool test forests you can visit: https://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/jericho_research_forest_and_conser... is an example.

Science doesn't just happen indoors - and that's really cool!

It's pretty clear from context the gp means "cleanroom lab". And even an outdoor lab has a degree of control that incurs costs that aren't the same as a stand of forestry trees, you don't linearly scale up forestry experiments for harvesting.

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