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A future in that your hamburger is grown from animal cells in a laboratory is fast approaching. The idea is that by growing meat in a tank, you reduce not only the slaughter of animals, but also the emissions, because the livestock takes a lot of energy to be raised , shot and shipped. Not to mention their digestive systems, they dump a significant amount of methane, greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
This is the idea anyway. The problem is that there is very little data to support the hypothesis that in vitro or cultivated meat, as it is also known, will be better for the environment than traditional livestock. Scientists know the impact of this livestock. In the United States, animal agriculture is responsible for about 4% of greenhouse gas emissions. But we have struggled to quantify the impact of large-scale meat production in vitro because it does not exist yet.
But this does not prevent scientists from modeling potential emissions from a potentially developed meat industry. Today in the newspaper Borders in sustainable food systems, researchers are exploring an interesting ride: not all greenhouse gases are created equal.
Livestock farming involves CO2 and methane, while cultured meat would not result in a lot of methane. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. On the surface, it looks like a victory for cultivated meat. But it disappears from the atmosphere much faster than CO2 – in 12 years, compared to thousands of years for CO2. So if the production of large-scale meat starts to emit a lot of CO2, it will be particularly problematic on a large scale.
"Energy-intensive forms of agricultural production can be an extreme case, in which you exchange mainly methane, because cattle emit a lot of methane, against carbon dioxide potentially linked to fossil fuels", explains the author Principal of the study, John Lynch, Oxford University.
To build their models, researchers examined past quantifications of greenhouse gas emissions from meat production, particularly cattle production. (They chose the cows because the animals are particularly happy with the livestock emissions.) Then they asked the question: What will the emissions of farmed meat compare to traditional livestock?
Like any model, this came with assumptions. On the one hand, they have assumed the humanity would not to decarbonize energy production during this period – in other words, we would still use fossil fuels to power factories producing meat in vitro. In addition, the laboratory-produced meat industry does not yet exist, apart from a few largely experimental laboratories. It would be companies like Just, who works on chorizo, and Finless Foods, who works on fish. "There is a lot of uncertainty about the production of meat grown in real life, so we have placed a range of footprints currently proposed in the climate model," Lynch said.
They found a major difference in the effects of CO2 and methane. In the short term, lab-grown meat may cause less warming because it does not reject this extremely powerful methane, unlike real cows. But in the long run the trend is reversed: laboratory-grown meat could lead to more warms cows because it consumes energy and releases CO2. (Part of the reason researchers used a huge 1,000-year time scale in their modeling was to observe the differences between CO2 and methane emissions over time.) If you suddenly stopped raising cattle, methane emissions would dissipate relatively quickly. the production of cultured meat and then suddenly stopped, the CO2 would persist for millennia.
This, however, is loaded with warnings. The cattle industry emits its fair share of CO2 in addition to methane. And theoretically, instead of requiring consumers to ship meat over long distances, you can simply build in vitro meat facilities where the population is housed, which would reduce transportation-related emissions. The study did not consider that. In addition, researchers assume that meat consumption remains stable and that we are not moving to renewable energy production. But it is reasonable to assume that these meat production companies, whose products are supposed to reduce emissions, will supply their facilities with renewable energy such as solar power. This, and again, researchers are using emissions estimates from a sector that has not yet figured out how to grow meat on a large scale.
"These are modeling systems that do not exist yet," says Alison Van Eenennaam, a zootechnic geneticist at the University of California, Davis. "What I still miss is that cows do more than hamburgers."
Like a lot more. Different pieces of cow make leather, gelatin and pet food. Manufacturers use grease to make candles, lubricants and even explosives. And of course, there is milk. "So I think modeling is too simplistic to say that cows only produce hamburgers," Van Eenennaam says. The cultured meat industry can take a share of the hamburger market, but it can not touch the galaxy with other products from cows.
In dozens, if not hundreds of years, laboratory meat is unlikely to completely replace traditional meat. In developing countries in particular, cows are more than just food: they are workers and a currency. In developed countries, there are still consumers who want this good old traditional steak. In addition, these cultured meat companies still have work to do: they must reproduce not only the taste, the mouthfeel and smell of beef, but also the high protein nutrition of the meat.
What science will need is a so-called "life cycle" analysis of the cultivated meat to show how effective it is. "The problem is that you can only do one as long as your system is not running," Van Eenennaam says. "So that's the kind of scenario," actually, that's what we estimate. "
But researchers can still begin to probe what the industry might look like in the future. Of course, environmental impact estimates have many uncertainties. "Yet, these estimates help us understand that could be Says Carolyn Mattick, an engineer from the University of Arizona State, who studied the industry. "From there, we can decide What should be in terms of meat production and carbon intensity sources of energy. "
In addition, the promises of lab meat go beyond emissions. According to David Welch, director of science and technology at the Good Food Institute, a non-profit organization that promotes lab-grown meat, the technology would use 82 to 98 percent less water and 90 percent less energy. land. "If you imagine a significant reduction in land use, you can focus on CO2 sequestration, but also on reversing species losses and reforestation," says Welch. "Clean meat makes very significant improvements in other areas of the environment in addition to emissions."
But, again, these numbers have not been proven yet, because the clean meat industry does not exist yet. This data will arrive in due time, but for now, your burger will continue to grow in a field, not in a tank.
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