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The "Backlash" to Plant-Based Meat Has a Sneaky, if Not Surprising, Explanation
(sentientmedia.org)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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I'm hating how lemmy.ml is losing my context parent, but I think I posted a video to you prior.
The problem with lab grown meat is that the process is inherently VERY complex and touchy. They like to compare it to making beer or wine, but it's an exacting process. IF we could figure out lab grown meat, that advance would likely involve a far bigger advance in nuclear medicine, changing the world of medication to a "this is YOUR cure for cancer, created for pennies based upon your DNA" type of utopia.
Maybe there's someone close to this who can suggest to me what I'm missing there, but the obstacles for lab grown meat are simply those same golden obstacles we've had to far more important problems, that we've thrown far more money at.
From the video, the biggest pain point for the next 20 years is this. You cannot scale the process. The bigger your bioreactor, the lower the efficiency. "Scale" involves building hundreds or thousands of resource-expensive bioreactors, filling them all with chemicals, and running the bioreaction over a long period of time, in highly a sensitive lab environment. Unfortunately, it feels like this is a "down to go up". While possible, it seems as likely to be a success as some sort of New coal tech wiping Solar out and being the real solution for dirty power. If you put THAT kind of money into the already well-understood meat industries that already have some good best practices (that aren't necessarily followed like they should be), you'll end up with agriculture that's good for the environment AND billions of dollars to spare to use on some other green initiative.
Of course, the real issue is that the countries whose people care the most aren't the problem at all. The US is a great example. Our meat industry is an insignificant part of the problem, at <2% of the GHG emissions. The US meat industry is actually statistically INCREDIBLY effective... but the meat industry in other countries, not so much.
Short version for anyone wondering:
Even assuming the absolute best, most rose colored glasses kind of outlook, lab-grown meat will be many times as expensive as meat currently is, and that's notwithstanding the billions in investment it will take to get there. Currently it's so expensive to produce that it doesn't even really exist except as publicity stunts. But unlike other potentially paradigm-shifting tech like solar, there's not an exponential downward-sloping cost-adoption curve to look forward to. As of right now, inexpensive lab-grown meat doesn't seem difficult, it seems scientifically impossible.
It would probably be much better to spend those billions on reducing methane in cow farts (seriously), using sustainable grazing to preserve and rejuvenate disappearing and desertifying grasslands, accelerating carbon capture, subsidizing Omnivore's-Dilemna-style holistic farming, etc.
Because, seriously, affordable lab-grown meat is not going to happen without several Nobel-worthy breakthroughs. Instead, it's just going to waste a bunch of money out of the pockets of well-intentioned VCs and institutional investors who could be using it more effectively.
Exactly this.
And then there's some other contexts with the meat production to help realize that those billions might be better spent on something totally different. The US only produces about 30% more methane total than it did in the colonial days. Back then it was largely buffalo. SO long as there's a balance of things, we have a cycle of cows producing methane, breaking down to CO2, the CO2 being absorbed by crops, and the crops eaten by cows. Honestly, research in carbon seems to be the best focus if we want to make any improvements without just cutting down the major contributors. And the real biggest are fossil fuel emissions, mining, and deforestation.
Completely agree that in general, methane/carbon emissions from ruminants cannot be much of a long-term problem since they're part of a closed carbon cycle.
But, it is worth research IMO, simply because methane is so much more powerful as a greenhouse gas for the short time it remains methane. And it seems quite possible we could steer cow diets in a less methane-y direction without much cost if we had all the right information.
Absolutely worth research. It's also worth research (before action) to try drastic countermeasures that don't involve reverting the earth to an earlier state. For example, animal methane production in the US is not much higher than it ever was. If a "vegan revolution" happens, the animal methane production in the US will be dramatically lower than pre-civilized homeostasis. Probably not a big deal (since it's such a tiny percent of GHGs anyway).
Similarly, I agree we could find a way to reduce cow methane production that could be given to the actual countries (potentially) contributing to global warming with their livestock... And also similarly, we should take each step with some care so as not to worsen the situation.
We think we know a lot about carbon and global warming, and we do. But we need to remember as we look at this stuff that we don't know everything.