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The idea that we should get our burgers in a laboratory and not in a slaughterhouse – the basic principle of the movement of "cultivated meat" or "clean meat" – tends to arouse the enthusiasm of people for two Main reasons: It could save billions of animals from immense suffering, and it could fight against global warming by reducing the number of cattle producing methane.
But a new study suggests that the second reason may be wrong, and that the meat grown in the lab could actually be worst for climate change.
Posted on 19 February in the journal Borders for sustainable food systems, the report says lab-grown meat can, in the long run, accelerate climate change faster than regular beef.
The authors note that other studies calculating greenhouse gas emissions from cattle grouped them as if they were all equivalent. But not all gases are created equal. Yes, cows produce a lot of methane, and methane is very bad for global warming. However, it lasts in the atmosphere for only ten years. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, lasts more than a century. And you know what releases a lot of CO2? Laboratories – including those that manufacture cultured meat.
In the two days following its publication, the study has already been the subject of several newspapers grieved, concluding that clean meat does not preserve the environment. The report has challenged our old assumptions, and that's a good thing. But do not replace them with new, equally problematic assumptions.
The authors emphasize that their study is based on highly speculative modeling, itself based on rather solid assumptions. Two of them are particularly glaring. The study models what will happen assuming that 1) lab-grown meat will continue to be produced using the same energy production methods as current production and 2) this will continue for 1,000 years.
To be fair, the researchers had to choose a deadline to execute their model, and any delay will be quite arbitrary. But 1,000 years is so long that it seems very unlikely that we still use energy-saving methods to produce lab-grown meat at the end.
Whether it's because clean meat companies are going to face the pressure of their climate-conscious consumers, or because policymakers will act to regulate emissions, or because scientists will come up with a way to use cleaner energy to produce energy (solar storage and energy technologies are improving and cheaper than it is), the cultivated meat will probably not be to be done using current methods, even in a century.
In other words, it is difficult to imagine a future scenario in which hypotheses 1 and 2 will be verified, which will produce the most pessimistic of the possible results modeled in the report.
The authors of the study are the first to note that the results of the study should also be used with caution: companies producing cultured meat do not generally communicate data on their production process and the amount of energy that it consumes. They are particularly inclined to consider this information as an exclusive property now that several competitors – from Memphis Meats to Just in the United States to Aleph Farms and Future Meat Technologies in Israel – are racing to market their products.
"We did our best," said lead author John Lynch at Quartz this week. "We've looked at all the literature, but it's still a fundamental problem that we do not know if [the data] match with what businesses do or not. "
For now, no one is producing large-scale farmed meat – production remains a relatively small, laboratory-based business. Companies are still trying to find a way to make clean meat more attractive while making it cheaper. There would be little data on the operation of the process at scale even though the companies were eager to share it.
Companies may want to be more open, though.
Lynch's study only proves that we can not assume the meat grown in the laboratory will necessarily be better for the environment; the research does not prove that it will necessarily be worse. But his report is not the first to warn about the potential impact of farmed meat on our climate, and it will not be the last. As more studies are published, consumers will likely join university researchers to demand more transparency. Many of them will not be content with reducing the suffering of animals if they fear harm to the environment.
Over the past decade, the movement of clean meat has been associated with a double promise: saving animals and the planet. So, of course, people now want both – and clean meat producers will have to adapt to meet that demand.
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