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

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

#101

Post by dmbche »

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?

Yeah - kind of like leaded gas and DDT, or BPA plastics, no one pays the costs when they are externalised to the environnement/population.

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

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

#102

Post by baremetal »

dmbche wrote: post #87
jcarrano wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I bought farmland and raise my own beef because of this type of thinking.

Absolutely, _no one_ is gonna control whether I eat beef or not.

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

#103

Post by hombre_fatal »

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…

Pastures and ranches still rewild back into something populated by the ecosystem even if it just looks like devoid grassland to you. Not to mention how many forests are destroyed to turn them into ranchland.

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

#104

Post by x86x87 »

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…

Not disagreeing with you, but ultimately you have to ask the question: does this make sense? And look at the "why". What are you trying to optimize?

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

#105

Post by ImHereToVote »

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…

I think the fundamental problem is keeping the huge bio tanks hermetically clean. The cleaning process is very energy intensive as is the medium growing process.

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.

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

#107

Post by Izkata »

daneel_w wrote: post #93
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Only if they were forced, is the point. For most it's a significant reduction in quality of life they're not going to choose.

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

#109

Post by awb »

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?

> If I enjoy that food and pay for the cost then whats the problem?

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.

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

#110

Post by PartiallyTyped »

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…

A minor addition, the agriculture industry had an enormous amount of subsidies and decades of research and work at the global scale to reach the current state. Comparing an early prototype with an industry of this kind is disingenuous at best.
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