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

interestingengineering.com

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

#81

Post by haswell »

robinson7d wrote: post #72
haswell wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t an either/or proposition. Long term goals (“everyone just needs to do ”) 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 en…

The comment they were replying to didn’t sound long term. It specified “now” in the first sentence, so at best short-medium term. The “everyone just needs to do ” 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)

Both comments were essentially endorsing a binary position. My point was that reality must be some combination of both.

I’d read my comment as addressed to both parent comments.

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

#82

Post by abeppu »

thebigwinning wrote: post #66
myshpa wrote: post #18

Or we could switch to eating plants now. 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,…

Every activity and product has a cost and contributes to waste. If I enjoy that food and pay for the cost then whats the problem? Are we suggesting it's virtuous for its own sake to have a lower standard of living?

But you don't pay for the cost. Our continual struggle with environmental issues are substantially that (a) very meaningful externalities mean that costs are foisted onto others, either the public at large or specific unlucky communities and (b) industrial lobbyists get public policy to actively subsidize their behavior, so again, everyone pays to support destructive behavior.

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.

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

#83

Post by soared »

prottog wrote: post #79
Lutger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was Germany, they basically financed solar energy with tax money (about 200 billion), then their industry was killed by China.

It's so strange that a mostly cloudy country at 51ºN spent so much money developing solar energy.

Solar works when it’s cloudy.

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

#84

Post by skrowl »

prox wrote: post #29
blitz_skull wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck enforcing a world-wide “plant-only” diet. I know people who would go to war just over that.

Black-and-white thinking, think in gradients! 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.

[dead]

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

#85

Post by draw_down »

plaidfuji wrote: post #69

This is an expected result if you extrapolate from an early R&D stage process to a global scale, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth pursuing more sustainable routes to the mass production of animal muscle. 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…

[dead]

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

#86

Post by melling »

myshpa wrote: post #18

Or we could switch to eating plants now. 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,…

Yeah, I blogged about that 4 years ago and classified that under “stupid ideas”

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.

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

#87

Post by dmbche »

jcarrano wrote: post #71
myshpa wrote: post #18

Or we could switch to eating plants now. 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,…

What's the ultimate purpose? To subsist using the minimal amount of resources? Have you considered that people may want to eat animals? 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…

Do you think you might be onto a slippery slope here?

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?

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

#88

Post by samtho »

This is standard-faire, weaponized pedantry.

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.”

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

#89

Post by goodpoint »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #48
myshpa wrote: post #18

Or we could switch to eating plants now. 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,…

The solutions of "everyone just needs to do " are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting. 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…

> To make things work at society scale you need incentives, let the free market work for you.

The free market created and continues the problem.

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

#90

Post by 411111111111111 »

plaidfuji wrote: post #69

This is an expected result if you extrapolate from an early R&D stage process to a global scale, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth pursuing more sustainable routes to the mass production of animal muscle. 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…

Well said. The people advocating against this research have to be completely in denial about what modern meat factories actually are like (can't really call them anything else considering how the animals exist there).
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