New study suggests that lab-grown meat produces up to 25 times more CO2
interestingengineering.com
interestingengineering.com
And that’s really what the underlying goal is here - don’t fall for the false dichotomy of “farmed” vs “lab-grown” - factory farms are essentially process development labs. How efficiently can you convert land and feedstock into salable whole-cut animal muscle? The animals are just bioreactors at this point, with experiments being done on how to optimize feedstock conversion to fatty muscle mass, which antibiotics limit contamination and yield loss the best, etc.
The only question is how animal-like will the eventual bioreactors in the cultivated meat process have to look to reproduce the real thing at scale and at lower cost? The lines will only continue to blur.
1. Optimising for the consumer means that we will be able to engineer meat to our preferred and individual tastes. Gamey or fatty, dry or falling off the bone etc.
2. Optimising for the producer means that we will get the slurry what was served as a meal in the movie Brazil.
The free-market optimist in me would like to see 1, but the realist in me knows that once corporations monopolise the fake-meat industry and eventually water it down to slurry, we'll get Brazil... and we'll be convinced this is how meat should taste.
obviously not, as in a everyday definition of cost, sticker price today. but the externalities, as in a formal definition of cost, are so much, and important enough to enough commercial stakeholders that yes, 100% makes sense to try to do this and hit under the actual cost, which has diverged from the short-term cost
Don't mess with food. We know what works, we've almost always made it worse: less nutritious (rolled oats instead of steel cut), less tasty (tomatoes, chicken), more vulnerable to die-out (bananas), or worse. Now you get Bill Gates and Monsanto advocating GMO / lab-grown foods for the masses. The market plan for the long-term on this is terrifying though.
Just... grow real food, eat real food.
The earth currently can produce enough food for everyone. The reason people go hungry in 2023 is because food rots on docks from government mismanagement, or goes into Dear Leader's kitchen and not those of his people, or a million other reasons that all boil down to selfishness, arrogance, or advanced forms of these same vices.
Apologies for the rant.
The solution is to eat more real food, which includes a higher proportion of vegetables and a much lower proportion of meat. But a lot of people are resistant to that, for a variety of reasons. If lab-grown meat can at least reduce the animal cruelty, it's an optimization I'd prefer.
One way to cut cost would be to introduce small cells that seek out and destroy pathogens. We could design a bio tank organ that creates these cells by eating some of the growth medium. Also instead of using a medicine grade medium we could use organic sacks that grow bacteria from plant matter. Then we could move said bacteria to sacks filled with acid that would extract energy to create more biomatter.
Some of the excess energy could be used for the bio-tank to locomote around in the environment and harvest plant matter for digestion. Also by using genetic code we could make these new and improved bio tanks self-replicate. We could call these new devices Clean Organic Walkers, or Cows for short.
Any comparison outside of goal-setting (if that is the case) is most likely purposefully biased or misleading.
> “The environmental impact of near-term ACBM production is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production,” concluded the study.
> The authors propose a solution, suggesting the creation of cell lines that can withstand higher amounts of endotoxins. This would decrease the necessity for energy-intensive purification procedures and ultimately reduce the environmental impact of lab-grown meat.
It’s new, “alpha” stage tech, proving that it’s possible to grow meat in a lab, without yet being optimized for efficiency/scale. Not a reason to be bearish on the tech - it’s a problem that needs to be solved, but also one that seems solvable.
Its not BS and lies either, where we live farm animals roam the grass fields or mountain pastures constantly, to the point where it may be tricky to hike some parts of mountains.
This also assumes you are sourcing all your meat. But have you ever gotten something prepackaged with meat? Or eaten out? Do you know where that meat came from?
The market incentivizes animal cruelty. The only way to really combat that is either regulations to make cruelty more expensive than cruelty free meat or a cheaper alternative to cruelty meat. Anything less, including personal choices, is peeing in the ocean to warm it up.
How about 2x, since it's projected our consumption will double by 2050?
Does the land physically exist?
I glanced through the paper and I could not find any mention indicating who funded that study.
I'm also very sceptical of single studies that support the status quo for very large industries -- even more so when there is no indication of who funded the study.
Being a preprint, this is obviously neither peer reviewed nor vetted by a journal.
In this case, I cannot deduce what journal they plan on submitting to (if they plan to at all)
This is a major issue in scientific reporting and research in general. It’s particularly damaging because of anchoring bias.
So it seems the solution would be easy; don't use fossil fuel energy.
Also it looks like the study only looks at CO2 from meat production, and turns a blind eye to methane, which is the real killer from meat production.
The only interesting thing about the article is going to be how the headline will probably compel HNers to go into the same old hobby horse rant against lab-grown meat.
Back to the topic at hand, though. Purely from a climate perspective, does it actually make sense to target lab grown chicken? Chickens are something that can be raised with a much lower carbon footprint than beef.
Are things like an impossible burger simply a better substitute right now? Should we be focused on culturing cells or on "faking" it with plant proteins?
I'm not saying I have answers, and I'm not opposed to lab-grown meat in principle (I think it's damned cool), but it's fair to ask whether or not it makes sense to try to scale up a process that may be worse than "business as usual".
The article also gives very useful feedback on scaling things up, as well. It's pretty damned interesting.
Somehow it feels weird that beef gets attacked in ways let's say vegan food as worst case doesn't. Should we brand all vegan food bad if some of it is grown with desalinated water in article circle with artificial lighting and heating during winter?
Was everyone this skeptical / glib when the (insert technology) was useless when it was invented? Anyone seen the efficiency of a solar panel in 1970?
Factory farming is a real problem to solve.
Good thing someone took one for the team and invested in scaling this up.
It was an exports/services (consulting) play. "Skating where the puck will be" and all that—become the experts with plenty of production capacity before the market per se justifies it. IIRC they made similar efforts for other renewables, like wind power. Not sure how all that's going, but I know it was regarded by many as a good move, a couple decades back when they were investing in it all.
If solar panels are a solution to replace fossil fuels, then show me a decrease in fossil fuels (nope, solar panel adoption and fossil fuel burn are positively correlated). If factory farms are a solution for providing reducing the impact of traditional farms, then show me a decrease in the total ecological footprint of our agricultural system (nope, we can't even do so on a small scale per this study and others like it). What you call "skepticism", I call critical thinking about empirical data.
You've misread their comment:
> Factory farming is a real problem to solve.
It's similar in vein to the people who were absolutely convinced that Biden was preparing a team to confiscate gas stoves and responded by.... running their gas stoves on full burn for no reason, as a "protest".
I have no moral qualms with raising, killing, and eating an animal. If lab grown meat is tasty, safe, and affordable, it will be great.
I would be surprised if some HN topic does not provoke any skepticism at all.
rather thousands of thousands of thousands of years ...
1. filtering the growth medium for toxins (subject of this paper)
2. Powering the bio reactors (heating them and stirring)
3. Transportation of the materials
#3 Is going to be present regardless of whether you’re doing lab growth or traditional animal ag. From what I can tell, #1 will produce 25 times the emissions of traditional animal ag. What I don’t know is does #1 strictly require hydrocarbons as a material input, or does it require energy that could be provided by renewables.
In the later case, you might be able to make lab grown meat more sustainable than traditional animal ag, but to make it economically viable vs traditional animal ag, you would need a sufficiently high price on carbon/methane.
I don't want lab grown meat, the concept is disgusting. As it is our food is too processed and industrial.
Maybe we can focus on mixed farming instead https://www.earth.com/news/mixed-farming-could-increase-food...
Be careful what you want, you just might get it.
Whenever these conversations crop up, the idea that we might need to eat less meat to achieve ethical or environmental goals seems to be unthinkable to many commenters. The recent fad diets that focus on consuming tons of animal protein have really muddled the water as well since they seem to imply that you can't eat healthy while eating less meat. I think that's why you see so much enthusiasm for lab-grown meat.
[1] https://www.ethicalfarmingfund.org/post/2018/05/30/the-truth...
I feel the solution should me along the lines of pricing the meat accordingly vs inventing this freak alternative that allows you to virtue signal while still causing the same amount of damage. This without going into the question of what effects this synthetic meat could have on the human body - for better or worse people have been eating meat for all of history and AFAIK meat is one of the most nutriet dense foods you can eat.
Everyone can't have an American or European house with a garden and a car.
We don't plan for that in general.
My understanding is that we are not actually anywhere close to that point. And products are closer to the cheap products than anything quality. Think of pink slime...
Former is not feasible without production costs skyrocketing, and good luck trying to enforce regulation like that globally. The way to achieve the latter is to make artificial meat more attractive to food production businesses that mass exploit animals today.
You cannot defeat the tragedy of the commons[0] by just growing happy cows. Business will always exploit the available means, and we will continue to see 1 "happy farm" and 99 ugly grinders where animals suffer.
I find the idea of an animal corpse that’s slowly decaying in my fridge to be disgusting. I’m totally fine with the idea of lab grown proteins and fats in my fridge, though I’d still probably only eat it in small amounts bc it feels too similar to the corpses that disgust me.
Yes, R&D is inefficient, but all of us know this is not the point (unless of course, the research is focused on improving efficiency). Once a process and result is identified, it’s performance requirements and characteristics can be identified, measured, and standardized. This where industrial engineering comes in. Given that everything mentioned in this report is based upon simple measurements as a result of the R&D and this single identified process, we should file this under “pessimistic sensationalism.”
Will go away if you stop eating beans though.
We already get 82% calories and 63% proteins from plants. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
We could stay on our 1% of habitable earth, lower our agricultural footprint from 48% of land to 15%, use quarter of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, double forest area and store entire 1.5C carbon budget (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4) in the process, and enable return of wildlife and sealife (also storing a lot of carbon in them https://www.oneearth.org/how-restoring-key-wildlife-species-...).
[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...
36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens
Much of the rest is exported.
Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...
> We also shouldn't let the lowest common denominator have a say in the direction of society.
I guess it's human nature, I don't know.
Interesting. Do you see this as defending democracy?
How will that not backfire?
> People that "would go to war" over the fact that they should eat less red meat are not exactly of sound mind.
I see nothing in their position that indicates they aren't of sound mind. They're inconvenient to your own position, and you're willing to manipulate them if you can manage the trick.
Maybe you're worried that they will choose to "go to war" as manipulated people do so often once aware of the ruse?
You eat meat X times a week? Try X -1 or more.
Even a little bit helps tremendously. Everyone reading this who eat meat every day, try cutting down even one day, it will help.
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#dis...
Where I'm from most domestically consumed beef comes from diary cows. It's sort of chewy, but at least all this meat didn't go to waste.
No need for extreme measures.
The only way I can even remotely believe that is that 'agricultural' includes pastures which are useless to humans for any other purpose.
Land used for plants intended for human consumption would need to be expanded along with everything bad they require.
I also wonder how high would be the health cost of inappropriate diet because eating meat is brain-dead way of supplying yourself with some very crucial substances. And I don't believe that switching to plant diet would automatically make everybody eat smart.
This is really interesting! I didn't know that pastures cannot support crops and/or buildings.
Why are pastures so limited in their usability?
But such things are always conditional and depend on the tech. If Boston Dynamics robots start building the houses, or picking fruit and herbs on hillside orchards, such concerns probably stops mattering.
Lumping pastures with high class, farming suitable land is a bit dishonest.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-023-00349-8
"Comparable GHG emissions from animals in wildlife and livestock-dominated savannas"
> Pastoralism in Old World savannas is known to emit a significant share of global livestock-sourced greenhouse gases (GHG). Here, we compare calculated emissions from animals in a wildlife-dominated savanna (14.3 Mg km−2), to those in an adjacent land with similar ecological characteristics but under pastoralism (12.8 Mg km−2). The similar estimates for both, wildlife and pastoralism (76.2 vs 76.5 Mg CO2-eq km−2), point out an intrinsic association of emissions with herbivore ecological niches. Considering natural baseline or natural background emissions in grazing systems has important implications in the analysis of global food systems.
In other words, wild animals living in a natural savanna ecosystems emit an equivalent amount of greenhouse gasses to domestic animals being grazed. Much of the land currently under agricultural use for animal agriculture would revert to savanna and grassland, with wild grazers replacing the domestic grazers.
Don't even get me started on the degree to which these arguments ignore key issues in plant agriculture. Things like the fertilizer necessary to achieve its outputs is all fossil fuel based and carbon emitting for conventional or by products of animal agriculture for organic. We have to get to net zero - you can't reach net zero in plant agriculture any more than in animal agriculture.
I've seen these sort of thing again and again and again in the push to drop animal agriculture in an attempt to decarbonize our agriculture. This failure to take a systems approach leading to the wrong conclusions.
My read of the situation is that the push to drop animal agriculture did not originate with decarbonization, but rather originated with people who want to drop animal agriculture for ethical reasons (animal rights) who are then running studies attempting to show that dropping animal agriculture also has carbon benefits, or economic benefits, or wildlife rehabilitation benefits, or what have you. The problem with doing this - of course - is that they have a predetermined outcome that they want to find (animal agriculture bad) so naturally, they make omissions that lead them to that outcome.
Abandoning animal agriculture is not a silver bullet for decarbonizing our agriculture. Its advocates really need to get off their horses and start taking a systems view if we want to come up with solutions that could actually decarbonize our agriculture in a realistic way.
The systems that seem most promising for reaching a truly sustainable agriculture are agroecological systems. These systems often combine animal and plant agriculture in ways that mimic real ecosystems. And they often provide ecosystem services very similar to those of natural ecosystems. They can potentially interweave with natural habitat in a way that current agriculture systems - either plant or animal - cannot. And again, they depend on the animal portions of them to be productive. They still need a lot of research, but they show the most promise in terms of an agriculture that gets us to true sustainability.
No, it's not.
>In other words, wild animals living in a natural savanna ecosystems emit an equivalent amount of greenhouse gasses to domestic animals being grazed. Much of the land currently under agricultural use for animal agriculture would revert to savanna and grassland, with wild grazers replacing the domestic grazers.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of pastoralism - you let the animals out on the land, they eat, you bread some, then you eat some. The actual "in other words" here is that the only way to reduce the GHGs of animal agriculture is to reduce animal agriculture itself. These animals are purposefully bred to eat. All it confirms is that if you breed less animals, you produce less GHGs. The wildlife live out their whole lives, the bred animals do not.
>Don't even get me started on the degree to which these arguments ignore key issues in plant agriculture. Things like the fertilizer necessary to achieve its outputs is all fossil fuel based and carbon emitting for conventional or by products of animal agriculture for organic. We have to get to net zero - you can't reach net zero in plant agriculture any more than in animal agriculture.
Animal agriculture requires plant agriculture to exist, but the same isn't true for the reverse. It's not necessary to eat animals to get the benefits of having the animals in the system. For example, you don't have to eat honey for bees to pollinate. How do we know that? Because honeybees aren't native to the US and the native bee population got along just fine pollinating before honeybees were introduced.
Reforming and using fossil-fuel-free fertilizer is already something people are working on.
>I've seen these sort of thing again and again and again in the push to drop animal agriculture in an attempt to decarbonize our agriculture. This failure to take a systems approach leading to the wrong conclusions.
>Abandoning animal agriculture is not a silver bullet for decarbonizing our agriculture. Its advocates really need to get off their horses and start taking a systems view if we want to come up with solutions that could actually decarbonize our agriculture in a realistic way.
I think if anyone needs to start using systems thinking, it's you. The systems approach here is not to overuse one particular resource. So taking animals, a resource, out of the system continuously is not systems thinking. It is unsustainable use of a resource. You erroneously claim that the food system needs animal agriculture to exist, but it doesn't. It just needs animals to exist. There is no way to make the continuous breeding and killing of animals emit less GHGs than just not doing that.
https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/news-views/defras-plans-for...
We have to find a way to be more sustainable in our agriculture.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
We could double forest area, stop biodiversity loss and store whole 1.5C carbon budget with subsequent reforestation effort. Studies confirming this exist. It's the easiest and surest way how to stop climate change.
Crop rotation predates the wheel by about two millennia.
We're using the synthetic alternative because it's really amazing not because we don't have alternatives.
Small but critical detail.
Not after what happened last time.
(What happened last time varying between country, of course).
All of the problems you perceive about crops apply even more to animal agriculture due to trophic level efficiency loss. You're inadvertently making the case against animal ag.
I raise chickens and feed them my kitchen and yard waste. They also eat bugs.
Two chicken eggs can power me all day.
Reason about that "trophic energy loss [gain]".
For example, how much do your backyard chickens contribute to global egg consumption, and what would the egg market look like if all eggs came from chickens living like yours? That's the kind of topic going on here.
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
The climate benefits of veganism and vegetarianism
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...
https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p0c41hws.webp
Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2120584119
Sustainable eating is cheaper and healthier - Oxford study
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-chea...
Why the food system is the next frontier in climate action
Virtually all paths to a net-zero-emissions food system rely on consumers in high-income countries shifting to a more plant-forward diet, according to a recent study.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/04/why-the-food-syst...
How can the calories out be more than the calories in?
Or are you suggesting people don't get all the calories they eat from plans? I don't think this is true.
And we could/should use nitrogen fixing plants and biodiversity instead of man made chemicals.
It's better to fix incentives such as making meat more expensive through taxes or fewer subsidies on meat or feed grains (corn). Or making vegetables cheaper. I could see a serious PR campaign to support farmers/small business (conservative hook) and eat local planet variety combined with fulfilling recipes or even tax breaks for fast food items that are vegetarian.
To make things work at society scale you need incentives, let the free market work for you.
Long term goals (“everyone just needs to do <x>”) can (must) coexist alongside shorter term incentives and PR campaigns.
To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable.
But conversely, short term incentives must necessarily be informed by long term goals if there’s hope of establishing a useful incentive structure.
Success will require focus on both ends of the spectrum.
Ultimately what we’re talking about is society-scale habit change, and habit change relies on both a belief in a long term outcome and a commitment to daily progress towards it.
The “everyone just needs to do <x>” part wasn’t a reference to a long term idea, it was them replying to somebody expecting that immediately (or, with a more forgiving reading, in a shorter term)
I’d read my comment as addressed to both parent comments.
It's not even a feasible long term goal, though. There are plenty of places where steady progress will lead to achievements in the long term that seem unbelievable now - science may yet reverse climate change, achieve nuclear fusion at scale, cure cancer (and aging), etc.
This isn't one of those things, though. There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time. Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.
It sounds like you’re imposing a specifically slow set of increments here.
We know that these goals can’t be met overnight, so the only option is some kind of incremental progress.
But the size of those increments certainly isn’t set, and will be increased (voluntarily or not) as our situation becomes more dire.
> Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.
I think it’s problematic to conclude that what we’re discussing can’t be plausibly achieved. Insanely difficult, sure, but at some point these decisions will be made for us, and abandoning hope is one option that seems guaranteed to lead to failure.
Going further and calling these kinds of goals “bad” seems actively harmful.
But how is that any less dime a dozen? In theory, I agree with you. But the reality is, we don't have the politicians with the backbone or the will to say "I'm going to make your food more expensive." People lost it when eggs shot up in price. Imagine that across the entire diary and meats section at the supermarket?
Incentive work, but this Fed gov solution is DOA.
No one steps up to be accountable for waiting. No one steps up to be accountable for a painful solution.
What could go wrong? We're living it.
Everyone loves to eat healthy or at least believe that they're doing so. A salad is a great healthy choice (until you slather it with dressing, which is nutritionally awful stuff.)
But a house salad is composed of the cheapest ingredients ever: you've got tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, cucumbers, a little shredded cheese and croutons. But you can charge at least $7.99 for something that simple. And you can offer a protein to go on top for extra profit.
And truthfully there's very little nutrition of any kind in that ingredients list. When you've grown your lettuce in impoverished soil, and your tomatoes are picked green and "ripen on the vine" or artificially induced, there's not much they can offer. Someone once said to me, "How do you kill an iguana? Feed it nothing but iceberg lettuce."
Now don't get me wrong, salads are a great part of anyone's diet and we should never neglect salads, because they're certainly preferable to a burger and fries every day. But vegetables, being cheap to produce and profitably marked up, are hindering many a plan to stay healthy.
Developed countries do not build food plans based on the good nutrition of the populace, they're based on maximizing shareholder value for the agribusiness conglomerates, and subsidizing the most strategically important crops. We could eat corn until we are literally blue in the face.
As long as your corner convenience store is jammed with corn chips, beef jerky, and beer, Americans will never eat healthy, even if the Food Pyramid is rehabilitated. I have seen some good progress made on bringing fresh produce to food desert areas. I hope those initiatives succeed and continue.
Also, https://www.myplate.gov is very reasonable. The problem with food guidelines aren't that they're wrong. It's that nobody adheres to them the same way they don't adhere to a guideline like "get daily exercise".
My source here is 10 years old, so it does not have up-to-date information on whatever MyPlate is pushing. But it says: "[the pyramid] no longer gives any clear recommendations whatsoever. It is fairly open to artistic interpretation."
Previous food pyramids were demonstrably "perverted", such as one where a major food group component consists of sugars and fats. Carbohydrates were the base of that pyramid.
Luise Light, Ed.D., explained that "3-4 daily servings of whole grains were changed to 6-11 at the base" as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. The processed white-flour, low-nutrient products which she had placed at the peak, were moved to the base, encouraging a foundation of sugars, fats, and highly-processed sweets. The wording was changed from "eat less" to "avoid too much".
The food industries and their allies in Congress were pissed because they said the USDA shouldn't be telling citizens to "eat less" of anything!
Many health guides are written by pharmaceutical companies, and therefore everyone in hospitals here gets Jell-O. Cool stuff.
> a major food group component consists of sugars and fats.
How many servings of sugar and fat does it say?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/USDA_Foo...
This one doesn't even give servings, it says to use sparingly.
The Wikipedia copy derides and downplays some of the criticisms, but at least they admit that criticism exists.
Vegans consume a variety of plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and plant-based alternatives.
Most of the recipes you know and love can be modified to have a vegan version.
The free market created and continues the problem.
As evident from your (absurd) comparison you're responding to the parent from the perspective of another completely different problem. Consuming less meat and more plant-based foods, including going fully vegetarian, is absolutely within grasp for a substantial amount of people in the west.
I'm convinced that it takes a very special consumer (minority) to actually suffer a significant reduction of quality of life from being forced to give up meat.
This has not worked for a long time in the US. Conservatives have repeatedly cut their nose to spite their face. Plenty of states have still refused to expand medicare simply because it's a liberal policy, and the conservatives in these states have not wavered in their support of those politicians despite directly suffering as a result of poor access to healthcare. They will simply boot up a GoFundMe and muse about "why can't we just set up one big GoFundMe for everyone?" without an ounce of self reflection.
Consider Florida: Thousands of conservative voters died from covid needlessly, while cheering on Desantis as he made it a crime to not allow someone in your private business who didn't take precautions.
And "free market" got us where we're now.
If we want to scale up food production on earth leaving as much land as possible for nature and humans, the ocean offer plenty of space for food production.
The issue, of course, is that we're not going to master nuclear fusion in the near future, just as we're not going to all switch to eating plants now. (And I say this as someone who's gone from eating beef as my main source of protein to something like 50% fish/20% chicken/30% veggie meals.)
Arguments that take the form of "If we just do <thing that there is no plausible chance that we will do>, that would solve the problem!" aren't helpful. Inasmuch as they discourage people from researching plausible but less extreme solutions, they're harmful. People are going to keep eating meat, so it's a good idea to research ways to reduce the carbon footprint of raising it and getting it to them.
In the case of meat production, apart from the direct agriculture subsidies, and the large carbon footprint, feedlots are a source of pollution that communities have to deal with, antibiotic resistance contributes to (costly) health risks for everyone, the Gulf of Mexico has that giant dead-zone, etc, etc.
My problem is unnecessarily destructive practices which are causing giant and totally avoidable crises.
If we were running the same meat production system in a centrally planned economy under some "the proletariat deserves meat" party plan with the same concentrated waste from feedlots, reckless use of antibiotics, clearing of the Amazon for ranch land, feeding a large portion of crops like corn and soy to animals that we then slaughter, the resource allocation system would be different but the destruction would be the same, and my objections would be unchanged.
But the "I paid for it and I enjoy it so what's wrong" response seems in bad faith and will not die. Suppose I enjoy the aesthetic experience of seeing oil on ocean waves; it catches the light in such a unique way. On weekends, I buy a barrel of crude, head out in a boat and dump my barrel and just spend the day watching the sun glisten on struggling seabirds. I think most people would not accept the "I paid for the oil; what's the problem" response, because _obviously_ the problem is I'm wreaking unnecessary destruction, and while I owned the oil, I don't own the ocean, the sea-life etc. You might like meat, and you might exchange money for meat, but that doesn't mean you're paying for the problems that meat production is creating.
But animal meat is different from most consumer goods in the sense that it’s alive and conscious. There isn’t much comparison to other goods there.
No one paid for the damages caused by DDT - YOU are paying for it by having a crippled biosphere.
If the costs were brought down to you, the meat in a burger would be 20-25$ easy - not thibking about steaks and the like. This would cripple the economy - but it's heavily subsidised
In other words, a plant based diet is primarily about your budget?
Not OC, but I don’t think that’s quite right.
When you create any good, like converting a tree into a piece of paper, you convert a natural state into a productive state. No amount of money can reverse this transformation. You can only attempt to offset the conversion. In this example people plant new trees to offset, but the forest remains altered. Then we argue about to what degree it’s been altered and if that’s better or worse.
So I think the debate is more like: Can we offset our consumption of A by doing B? Because B never equals A, some people will naturally always say no and advocate against consuming A in the first place. Others will debate the price/effectiveness of B.
You can't pay the price. If the subsidies are stopped, the farmers have to sell their animals to slaughterhouses order of magnitude more, the slaughterhouses have to do the same with distributors, and those guys do the same to restaurants/grocery stores.
No restaurant/grocery store would buy meat at that price (edit: restaurants and grocery stores make 1-4% profits on their sales) this is a PERISHABLE good. It's way too much risk - and what consumer would buy that?
Not forgetting that everything else remains the same price - McDonalds makes money off of dollar meals - that's not gonna work if a quarter pounder is 20$+.
So no - it's not about budget. This is to explain that the "status quo" is heavily supported and is more akin to a sinking ship that is being propped up by subsidies.
A plant based diet is justified many ways by many individuals. To me, sentient animals are not food and have the right to freedom, so that's why I eat plants. Some are motivated by the environnement, some budget, some health benefits, some other reasons.
Very few activities have costs that can be paid in full by the participant.
In your example, the burden of transforming the land, the carbon footprint of producing the food + transporting it is shared in varying degrees by the community, yet the enjoyment goes only to the purchaser. The cost paid at the store does not offset these other costs.
A free market is wonderful and the best economic system we have, but I think it’s also worth considering the impact our purchases have on the community.
All of this is `fighting the last war'. World population is going to fall precipitously by the end of the century.
The scarcity thinking everyone is parroting is a relic of the 20th century and it gets in our way. It keeps us from thinking about creating abundance.
That would be too late.
Are you aware about the amount the destruction we cause?
Without functioning ecosystems our civilization will perish, 100%. Some think we have 50 years, some are expecting the collapse any day now.
UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
Report Warns 1 in 8 Bird Species Now Facing Extinction
https://www.birdlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SOWB2022...
Climate change: Six tipping points ‘likely’ to be crossed
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62838627
As many as one in six U.S. tree species is threatened with extinction
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/2...
Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7...
WTF is Happening? An Overview
https://climatecasino.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/NA_SST-...
https://climatecasino.net/2023/06/wtf-is-happening-an-overvi...
Every human activity consumes resources. We cannot make the reduction of consumption as a goal in itself. At the end of the road, what that line of thinking leads to is just existing for the mere fact of existing while occupying the minimal space and feeding ourselves enough to meet our required daily values. I do not think that is an existence that makes sense.
Going back to "agricultural land use". Much of the land use for raising animals would not become a lush forest if left alone. There's a reason it is being used for animals and not crops.
Eating animals is not a cornerstone of modern society, and none of the experience/ benefits of eating animals cannot be reproduced. Just like using lead in the gas, at some point as a society we might decide that the costs overweight the benefits.
I think we're waaaaaaay past the discussion - it's self evident that animal exploitation is a blight on the earth and on the animals, and the benefits are unclear (for 95% of the world).
So why keep going? Because "i want to"?
What would you think if people wanted to use leaded gas, or use DDT on their lawn? See the similarity?
Absolutely, _no one_ is gonna control whether I eat beef or not.
Anyway. Enjoy the highest level of depression in any industry and the shit smell all around your house.
With scrub land, that is about the only agricultural use for it. Putting cows on arid scrub land turns useless land into useful land. It's so easy to falsely reason about agriculture when one is so far removed from it.
>What's the ultimate purpose? To subsist using the minimal amount of resources?
That is the ultimate purpose to reduce the standard of living of the poor and middle class.
For many people eating plants only is extremely difficult - e.g. for me personally, with a plethora of food allergies (soy, almonds, various kinds of nuts, apples, peaches and other fruits) and intestine issues causing irritation when consuming multiple other things.
Ditto people that require a low/slow carb diet - there is a limit of how much nuts you can eat a week without getting sick ;)
If that's the case, wouldn't a world where you get lab grown meat and everyone else eats plants make more sense? Since it's a medical issue you get special treatment, it seems to make more sense than supporting an entire industry just for you!
- American Dietetic Association
A vegetarian or vegan diet can be suitable for everyone, regardless of their age.
- NHS UK
It is possible to follow a well-planned, plant-based, vegan friendly diet that supports healthy living in people of all ages, and during pregnancy and breastfeeding.
- British Dietetic Association.
For adults, protein from two or more plant groups daily is like to be adequate.
- WHO
- American Heart Association
A healthy, balanced diet should include at least 2 portions of fish a week, including 1 of oily fish.
- NHS UK
You should try and include both types of fish in your usual diet. Some foods have DHA added (fortified). Human milk contains DHA and infant formulas must have this fat added. The best way of ensuring we are getting enough omega-3 is to eat foods rich in these fats.
- British Dietetic Association
Among the general adult population, consumption of fish, particularly fatty fish, lowers the risk of mortality from coronary heart disease.
- WHO
And we can obtain Omega-3 from algae, which is the same source that fish rely on.
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The oceans are home for up to 80% of all life on Earth.
Today only 3% of Pacific bluefin tuna remain.
Overfishing puts $42 billion tuna industry at risk of collapse.
For the first time, sharks are going extinct because of us.
Species like thresher, bull, and hammerhead sharks have lost up to 80-99% of their populations in the last two decades.
Seabird populations have declined by 70% since the 1950s.
Sharks kill 10 people per year. Comparatively, people kill 11,000-30,000 sharks are killed per hour.
Approx. 50 million sharks are killed every year as bycatch.
Studies estimate that up to 40% of all marine life caught is thrown overboard as bycatch.
An Iceland fishery in one month killed approx. 269 harbor porpoises, 900 seals of four different species, and 5000 seabirds.
The Iceland fishery was awarded the blue tick by the MSC.
There are 4,600,000 commercial fishing vessels in the world.
10,000+ dolphins are killed as bycatch off the coast of France every year.
Over 300,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises are killed as bycatch every year.
46% of the Pacific garbage patch is fishing nets.
There is enough long line set every day to wrap around the planet 500x.
Six out of seven species of sea turtles are either threatened or endangered due to fishing.
The fishing industry kills more animals in a day than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill did in months.
Fishing has become a major threat to coral reefs from the Middle East to the Caribbean, where 90% of large fish have disappeared.
In the 1830s, a typical fishing boat caught 1-2 tons of halibut per day, but today the entire fishing fleet catches 1-2 tons across the entire year.
2.7 trillion fish are caught every year, or up to 5 million caught every minute.
Fish populations are in decline to near extinction.
Virtually empty oceans by 2048.
One can not have their cake and eat it too. Either we defer truth to the experts and cite what they say as if that was the end of discussion, or we use the word of experts to advance the discussions with the caveat that experts recommendation exist in the context of culture and concessions that those expert individuals made. This apply to both a vegan diet and fish.
Current industry farming technique is terrible and belong to a time when we did not care about animal welfare nor did we understand the destructive an inhumane nature of large scale industry. Sadly this apply to every form of farming, from animals, to agriculture, to fishing. As a society we don't know how to generate a lot of food at the lowest price possible without the side effect of massive harms.
And for many people eating plants only is extremely difficult. Metabolic illnesses have significant increased in the last 100 years (or those who suffer from them have managed to survive and reproduce). A likely contributing cause is our current lifestyle of using artificial light (harming the circadian clock) and Sedentary lifestyle. All this contribute to a smaller selection of diets that any individual can eat and stay healthy on, and it mostly up to trial and error to determine which diet work with any particular individual. Beans and grains works for some people and in others it will cause drowsiness, allergic reaction, and/or pain.
As an random example, look up FODMAPs and check around how different people react to those foods. Take a random vegetarian diet and how many items list high or low, and then compare it to a random non-vegetarian diet. Diet and health are complex issues with few simple answers, and most dietitians seem to operate on a extremely individualistic level.
Those recommendations are not inherently incorrect. If obtaining Omega-3 from algae were not an available option, it would be a viable choice. If fish populations were not severely depleted, it would be a suitable choice. If there were considerably fewer humans, it would be a reasonable option. However, it appears that environmental impacts were not adequately considered in their viewpoints.
I have selected a citation affirming that plant-only diets are a viable way forward.
> experts recommendation exist in the context of culture
Culture is just stories we tell ourselves. Those stories may not be true or moral or right. It's better explained in this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7JE8j5Ncmw
> As a society we don't know how to generate a lot of food at the lowest price possible without the side effect of massive harms.
But we do know how to generate a lot of food without excessive harms. The only problem is ... price. But there we're getting to the problems of our current system. That would be even harder and longer discussion.
> Metabolic illnesses have significant increased in the last 100 years ... likely contributing cause is our current lifestyle of using artificial light and Sedentary lifestyle
Other possible culprits for the increase in metabolic diseases in past decades include factors such as changes in dietary patterns, increased consumption of processed foods high in sugar and unhealthy fats and lack of physical activity.
We're eating much more meat/dairy that we've been eating in centuries before, and we're using too much poisons in our food production.
> for many people eating plants only is extremely difficult
Many individuals have depleted gut microbiomes due to Western dietary patterns (e.g., processed foods, sugar, lack of fiber), but this can be resolved through dietary changes. The number of individuals who require a diet solely comprised of animal-derived foods would be extremely small. Veganism's definition also includes a practicality clause.
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
Have we made any progress on the coal problem?
https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-...
Nope.
Maybe we can limit these silly discussions to one day a year to avoid these “Groundhog Day” discussions.
In other news, 1.5C is guaranteed within a decade. To keep it interesting, Let’s come up with a few more miracles that won’t work.
How people get convinced to act against their own self interest I'll never understand.
[1] https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...
"Someone else is lighting a fire in the building so we shouldn't try putting out this grease fire we have here" is a stupid, accelerationist take that doesn't even make sense on it's face.
We were also warned that even if the United States solved the problem that it wasn’t enough. People think they can convince several billion people to give up meat but replacing several thousand coal power plants is too hard…
“Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/24/china-ramps-up...
No, energy and transport is easy.
Changing agriculture and diets/habits is hard. Unfortunately we have to do everything, not just this or that.
The science is clear.
And CO2 / warming is not our only problem. Biodiversity is equally important problem to be solved.
The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately, says study
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...
Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Australians far less aware of biodiversity loss than climate crisis, research finds
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/20/australi...
That's a HUGE range - but let's assume this new tech can get down to 250kg/1kg, that's not much worse than 188kg/1kg, so... what's the headline? That we don't expect the process to be able to scale better?
> Livestock is grown in parts of the world on stuff which cannot be sold or which grows on its own - example: grass etc.
Has to do with CO2 produced from raising livestock? I can't connect the two in my head, there's some missing information here I don't have.
I still have no idea what it means with regards to your original statement.
Livestock eat more plant based food that we will ever need though, it's the most inefficient food production for a reason.
If we stop growing beef on the second category of land that's not suitable for combines but is suitable for bovines, well, that could represent a net loss of food.
1. The premise is false. Quite a lot of farmland is devoted to growing feed grains. See https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr... If we had less livestock, we could either grow human-edible crops instead (with much less energy per calorie expended) or leave these fields fallow.
2. It ignores the fact that some livestock (cows) converts feed into methane, which has a disproportionate climate impact—more methane than if the same grain had been produced, but not consumed by a cow. Admittedly, this is less relevant when we're talking about lab-grown chicken meat. But GP's point was about livestock generally, so this is worth considering.
1. put them into small boxes usually, which creates a big nitrogen problem (mixing urine and shit is bad news)
2. feed them other stuff, usually made of soy which is grown in burned down rainforests
3. grow the grass with artificial fertilizers (made out of natural gas) and use pesticides, which also requires gasoline (to power machines)
If we're not even talking the CO2e emissions including methane, or the land use, pollution etc then for each calorie of cow you produce you could also create 25 plant based calories. The problem is a lot of people don't want to (only) eat plant based stuff, so we are coming up with ways to manufacture something in a lab that tastes similar to meat.
There are several ways to beat the natural process, which is really not that efficient at all and involves a lot of negative effects on the environment even if we disregard animal suffering. I mean, it does make sense if you think about it from first principles: a cow doesn't only turn grass into meat and milk, but also needs to move, to reproduce, it needs to power its brain, etc. We should be able to save a lot of energy in a lab not doing all those things and become vastly more efficient than what the cow does. And we could build a mass production process that is way more easier to manage than cattle and slaughterhouses. That is the theory.
The vast, vast majority of meat is grown on land which we can put to better use. The tiny amount of livestock that can be put on a natural rotational grazing system in a sound way making use of land that has no better purpose is so, so small, we shall be eating one burger a year at most from that system.
Vegetable Protein isolates/processing combinations can bring this up a bit, but processing can have varied effects on availability defending on how it's performed, making something with a high DIAAS score without processing or additives to taste and act like meat ideal. "Literature suggests that the extensive processing needed to obtain protein isolate might induce molecular alterations, making the protein more resistant to digestive enzymes and decreasing its protein nutritive value."[2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino...
As synthetic meat gets more attention, more strict evaluations of its carbon footprint will start to pop up, and me might see what’s actually true —- past the hype, i mean.
Just look at ethanol. Several studies now show that it's actually much worse for the environment than fossil fuel. But very few people care (plants are natural!!!1) or know about it. Even the government ignores its own studies and keep pushing for more subsidies and higher ethanol content.
So, nothing to see here ... yet.