>New studies show cultivated meat can have massive environmental benefits and be cost-competitive by 2030
I don't understand the fixation that environmentalists have on meat. Methane farts is a trivially solvable problem with cheap dietary supplementation and otherwise the carbon footprint of a cow is negligible compared to a host of other, far more pressing pollutants. And what little deforestation happens to make pastureland only happens once. What am I missing?
> The cattle industry is the lowest hanging fruit in reducing greenhouse emissions.
Citation needed.
This is a recurring meme in online discussion and I am honestly a bit aggravated by this. I am all for curbing the slaughter industry for the ethical aspect of animal suffering but the argument for ecological reasons seems like something introduced in public discourse to create distraction.
For example fugitive methane emissions from oil wells, pipelines, and coal pits, account for 5.8 % of GHG (This is also I suspect largely underreported). In contrast Livestock emissions and Manure/Fertilizer related emissions are also 5.8%. [0]
Please explain how it will be easier to stop Farmers in remote parts of Brazil and Argentina from raising cattle versus forcing billion dollar companies to sequester methane at extraction sites in US/Canada/Gulf countries?
In fact let's take it further if we look at the GHG emissions of:
- Iron/Steel Industry (7.2%)
- Cement Industry (3%)
- Fugitive methane emissions from Oil/Gas/Coal (5.8%)
- Petrochemical industry/refinement (3.6%)
These 4x GHG sources alone produce more GHG emissions than our _entire_ Agricultural activity (Plants + Livestock) including deforestation and crop burning. [0]
Our governments/regulators are failing us. We expect a 180 change from developing countries when entire billion dollar industries are idle in jurisdictions where we actually have a saying. As much as I agree with it for Animal welfare, in my view, Beef as an ecological battle _is_ a distraction.
>> Meat production is such a big contributor to climate change that I’m all for this kind of research.
How big is the contribution of meat production on climate change? The following page has a pie chart of global emissions by gas (the site is the US Environmental Protection Agency):
I don't know when the data is from. Methane, which as I understand it is the primary emission from livestock, makes up 16% of overall emissions (CO2 is, unsurprisingly, the largest contributor with 65%).
Another chart a bit further down shows emissions by sector. Agriculture and forestry and other land use takes up 24% of that (another quarter+ is energy production). The text accompanying the graphic states that most of it is from crops and livestock, without further clarifying the contribution of each. I also can't tell how much of the contribution of farming is due to methane produced by livestock and how much from CO2 emitted by transportation etc.
Overall, I'm none the wiser about exactly how much meat production contributes to climate change. I have to say I remain very skeptical that farming is a heavier burden on the environment than transportation and energy production, not mention deforestation and desertification by urban sprawl etc.
>An independent study found that lab-grown beef uses 45% less energy than the average global representative figure for farming cattle. It also produces 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires 99% less land.
I'd really like to know how something that is 200,000 times more expensive could currently have less of an environmental impact. I just don't see how you move that much money and don't make an impact.
Every individual cow does produce CO2 and Methane. But that's not causing rapid climate change. The root cause is perceiving cows - or meat in general - as a commodity.
Factory farming, raising and keeping tens of thousands of animals, has little to do with the historically intricate relationship between individual humans and cattle. It's about producing as much of a resource as possible in order to compete on an open market. In such a model, CO2 and Methane are costs to the farm that need to be externalized as cheaply as possible.
Not to mention externalized costs further down the chain to the customer such as the waste of unsold produce, single use plastic packaging, transport and so on.
> And do you have a conflict that you are able to pay higher prices for meat than a lot of other people?
Not OP. I buy meat from a local butcher or farm.
No. I don't have that conflict for several reasons.
First, I rather buy quality meat once a week which I consume sparingly, then cheap, processed meat daily or even multiple times a day. So, that evens the costs out for me.
Second, I choose to pay a higher price. Why? Because that's closer to the true cost of keeping and raising healthy cattle on a small, sustainable scale. What I get is a quality product.
Third, I make self-cooked meals on a daily basis. I'm a stickler for good, tasty food. Choosing to approach meat more carefully prompted me to adapt my diet and replace the dishes I used to make. This is a positive experience since there's an absolute wealth of dishes out there that don't require meat. The meat I do buy and prepare only get minimally wasted (e.g. freezing portions, making stock,...)
Fourth, I don't support a model where the abundant availability of meat globally is taken for granted, even though the environmental and social costs are clearly there. My effort is entirely insignificant on a global scale, but at least it makes me sleep just ever so slightly better at night. That's more then enough for me.
> I get pushback on this opinion from my friends, so I expect this to be an unpopular opinion here also: the cost of meat should be priced to also cover external costs of water and harm to the environment.
Maybe that would have some kind of effect, but what exactly?
Each piece of the pie is further broken down and so you can see that, for example:
> Agriculture etc > Livestock & manure: 5.8%
> Energy > Food and tobacco: 1%
The majority of emissions comes from burning fossil fuels. Additionally, fossil fuels produce gases that were buried in the soil for aeons, whereas meat production produces gasses most of which are re-absorbed by the soil. See carbon cycle:
> Livestock & manure (5.8%): animals (mainly ruminants, such as cattle and sheep) produce greenhouse gases through a process called ‘enteric fermentation’ – when microbes in their digestive systems break down food, they produce methane as a by-product. This means beef and lamb tend to have a high carbon footprint, and eating less is an effective way to reduce the emissions of your diet.
So cutting down on meat is an effective way to reduce the contribution to greenhouse gas emissions of your diet. Your largest contributions are your (direct or indirect) use of fossil fuels.
Furthermore, the majority of eemissions in meat production come from ruminants. Chicken and pork should are not ruminants and you should probably exclude them from your taxation suggestion.
>“We could imagine a significant shift from beef to chicken, and that by itself goes a long way.” (Poultry production has about one-eighth the climate impact of beef production.)
I think the possible benefits of this approach might be exaggerated. The uniquely "large" environmental impact of beef cattle results from methane emissions, but methane is not the big challenge; land use is. While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it also has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2/N2O, which, to me, suggests that it should be addressed after the other gases; the impact of a reduction in methane emissions will be felt quickly, and the risk of methane accumulation is lower.
Land use -- with 40% of the world's land devoted to agriculture -- is much more of a problem and I see less indication that it will be addressed by changing the relevant animal. A little, sure, but a lot of the land currently used for pasturing cattle isn't appropriate for chickens anyway, and I'm not convinced that it takes 8x as much land to raise a pound of beef vs. chicken.
Lab-grown meat is/will be a huge net win for the environment and hopefully our wallets, and I think it will be the final compromise on this front, at least for the next few hundred years. A few decades of lead time doesn't bother me for reasons discussed above.
On another front, the densest sources of plant protein after soy are hempseed, lentils and pumpkin seeds. These rarely make it into our diets, though. You need more than mere tax incentives -- the strong flavors of those seeds need to be managed somehow. I made a "curry" with a hemp-milk base once. The only thing that corrected the smell was a lot of Worcestershire sauce. Ironically, it's vegetarians who won't eat fermented anchovies.
> Looking at the bigger picture, if you discard of your vegetarian foods scraps in the trash, they get converted to methane, having emissions on the same order of magnitude as cattle emissions
Oh, c'mon. 1. No they don't. 2. Cows' methaney burps aren't the only greenhouse gas issue w/ animal agriculture. Those animals definitionally eat more food than they produce (in in the case of cows, it's by a large factor). Meat is inherently an inefficient form of food. 3. Don't throw your food scraps in the trash—it's easy to compost.
> need ruminants to provide the fertilizer to soil to make it into a positive carbon sink
No. No you don't. Composting works just fine. But furthermore, the number of cattle we have today is laughably excessive for talking about fertilizer production. It's not even worth mentioning at this point in time.
a) Because that's not true. The numbers don't actually work out that way. Transportation and heating are most American's biggest carbon contribution. Agriculture is down a ways.
b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna.
There is also evidence that this sort of grazing can substantially reduce carbon emissions. Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy pesticide* (edit: originally wrote fertilizer, meant pesticide) use - are devastating to ecosystems. They're essentially turning large swaths of land into killing fields, taking the bottom right out of ecosystem and contributing to the massive drop in insect populations (which form the foundation of the food web) we've seen across the developed world.
In short - the agricultural analysis is really fucking complex, multivariate, and grey.
She links a literature analysis that claims to contradict much of this, but I've read literature analyses making these sorts of claims before that just ignore most of the alternative systems, gloss over a lot of nuance, or downplay the harm of convention systems in major ways. I need to read the one she linked, but experience has taught me to treat it skeptically.
>And even better, it reduces methane and carbon dioxide emissions, because you're turning all that carbon into cows instead of just letting bacteria emit it as gas.
Cows don't work as carbon sinks if you're killing them every 2 years to eat them. You're just reintroducing that carbon in the form of sewage, transportation, and food waste. They need to be allowed to live all 20 years of their lives for the carbon efficiency argument to work. This necessitates (1) massively reducing the population of livestock by ceasing breeding (otherwise it's hurting any gains with carbon storage in the soil) and (2) finding alternative uses for the inedible byproducts of plant agriculture.
> When talking about meat and damage to the environment, the only relevant figures are associated with animal feed (e.g. water consumption per kg of meat).
>But... It does. 220lbs of methane per cow on average.
Already being captured for energy. VC funds are all over this
> I'm not saying I'm not in said "bug camp"
So you are saying you are in the bug camp, got it.
>but you're arguing that transport of plants, using fossil fuels, even remotely touches the amount of fossil fuels...[meat]
Hyperbole and no accounting. You have no idea. Scale production and see what happens. Have you any data to validate your assessment?
> grassland that could be significantly more productive
How so? Do you believe all grassland on earth should be appropriated for "best use" to increase productivity? Why would you believe that? Are you aware that allowing cattle to forage in forests helps prevent wildfires and enriches the soil increasing undergrowth and biodiversity. The practice is largely banned in state and national parks thanks to zealots of ecowarriors and bug campers.
>We don't need meat
What we need is trivial. We don't need cars or shoes or knowledge.
Meat can be considered a byproduct of an immensely useful material that lasts indefinitely, has been harnessed by possibly every culture to exist and has uses that every person requires.
Leather.
You need to read Oryx and Crake before you destroy the world.
> Also, removing beef consumption would increase consumption of other foods so the emissions reduction wouldn't be as drastic.
Well, since you have a factor between 10x (cereals) and 100x (legumes) in the CO2 emissions between beef and vegetables, yeah it does drastically decrease emissions.
> Objectively, chicken and pork have much lower emissions than beef.
Right. However, pork is mostly fed with cereals, inducing a high level of CO2eq/kg + land use + loss of diversity.
> Meat production is using some parts of this energy (e.g. transportation of feedstock + food).
Everything is using energy.
Transportation is not included in the 45% (check the link in my previous comment). And AFAIK we also need to transport vegetables, using machines for agriculture, etc.
> Vegetarianism (or better veganism) sounds like the best thing to start with.
Objectively, chicken and pork have much lower emissions than beef.
Also, removing beef consumption would increase consumption of other foods so the emissions reduction wouldn't be as drastic.
> Key difference is that agriculture is a closed cycle, animals produce a lot of green house gas, but it's gas that's already a part of our ecosystem.
How is it a closed cycle? They require a lot of food and water to be grown, all of which has its own greenhouse gas cost to produce, and then they fart methane while they're alive and require more fuel to process/transport. All the while the world demand for meat is increasing pretty quickly, right?
> There might be ways to reduce the emissions of cows in the future (different feeds, gut biome interventions, bioengineering), but right now these are science fiction.
I thought there's already research showing that seaweed in the cow's diet drastically reduces methane emissions.
> What he is saying is that it doesn't grow. It is a constant relationship. Cows sequester GHGs from the atmosphere (via the food they eat, mostly) and then release it.
There's two issues with that:
1. cows really release the carbon stored in the food they eat, that carbon could otherwise stay locked (as it was before we cleared the field from which we grow feed).
2. cows also convert part of the carbon their release from their feed into comparatively worse greenhouse gases than just CO2
> Now imagine the amount of energy it takes to: Grow the feed to feed the animals
Animals are fed from crops, which sequester carbon from the air. Carbon atoms make up about 15-20% of most animal's mass. A 1000 lb cow would have sequestered 200 lbs of carbon out of the atmosphere. Some of which will be re released when eaten, but not it's not as simple as just saying "look how much energy goes into feeding a cow". Because most of that energy comes from crops - cows don't eat gasoline.
> butcher and transport the meat/dairy in refrigerated vehicles, store/prepare/cook the meat, etc.
All of which had to be done for plant products as well.
In reality is that going vegan isn't going to have a significant impact on the environment. About 10% of the US's carbon emissions are from any kind of agriculture, and animal products are a fraction of that 10%.
> We could see huge reductions in our food-related emissions simply by eating pork
There's and easier way
In the US, dogs and cats consume about 19% ± 2% of the amount of dietary energy that humans do (203 ± 15 PJ yr-1 vs. 1051 ± 9 PJ yr-1) and 33% ± 9% of the animal-derived energy (67 ± 17 PJ yr-1 vs. 206 ± 2 PJ yr-1). They produce about 30% ± 13%, by mass, as much feces as Americans
Wetlands are responsible for a third of all the greenhouse gases emitted in the atmosphere, followed by agriculture and livestock (in general) at 25%.
It's absolutely not given that removing beef from our diet would make things much better.
Also considering the fact that billions of people have just entered the club of those who can afford eating red meat and won't stop now.
The most likely scenario is that we will slowly switch to other sources of proteins and they will replace us as meat eaters, basically making no change whatsoever in the output.
I don't understand the fixation that environmentalists have on meat. Methane farts is a trivially solvable problem with cheap dietary supplementation and otherwise the carbon footprint of a cow is negligible compared to a host of other, far more pressing pollutants. And what little deforestation happens to make pastureland only happens once. What am I missing?
reply