New study suggests that lab-grown meat produces up to 25 times more CO2

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.

Livestock eat more plant based food that we will ever need though, it's the most inefficient food production for a reason.

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.