Is Beef the Next Internal-Combustion Engine?

So, just as the war in Iran, by causing gasoline prices to rise, provided a sudden opening for the E.V. industry across the world, this confluence of events might give alternatives to beef a moment of opportunity. Those alternatives include, of course, various forms of lab-grown meat. The first generations, kind of like the first E.V.s, have not really found a home; sales, never robust, have fallen during the past two years, in part because, though the flavor has got closer to beef, the price has remained high. But, as with many iterative technologies, the next generation might be cheaper: in the Netherlands, a recent survey found that prices for “alt meat” were thirty per cent below those of conventional meat and dairy. Bruce Friedrich, the head of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for alternative meats, said recently that Asia is starting to take the lead in developing the technology, and that soon “I think we could be at taste parity with a lot of plant-based products. I think we can see the cultivated-meat cost of production really falling, and I think we could see production infrastructure across both technologies scaling up.” Last weekend, he launched a Substack newsletter devoted to the topic, and in the first edition he quotes a scientist who says that “current cell line and media performance, if produced in commercial-scale facilities, could reach cost parity or cost advantage compared to their animal meat benchmark.”

Another possibility is that people might decide to eat other dead animals, instead. We already do, of course, and in large numbers, but we tend to think of eating beef and pork and chicken as more or less the same—you’re a vegetarian or you’re not. (Mostly not—only four per cent of Americans identify as vegetarian, and just one per cent as vegan.) But, at least in environmental terms, all meat is not, in fact, the same, and we may be getting to the point where the distinctions are important. Earlier this month, when the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published a major report on the climate future, most of the news coverage focussed on its conclusion that we’d missed the goal set in Paris of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees; we need, the report says, to dramatically scale up the pace of building renewable energy, and also get more serious about figuring out ways to scrub carbon from the air. But the report also included some pointed pages about the world’s agricultural system, which, depending on how you do the numbers, accounts for at least a fifth of the emissions driving the climate crisis. In the truly generic prose that the U.N., for some reason, insists upon, it said:

Further reductions of residual methane beyond mid-century must increasingly target agriculture and waste, since fossil fuel emissions can be largely eliminated at relatively low cost by 2src5src already under stringent policies. Agriculture and waste present greater technical, cultural and social challenges and have received relatively little targeted mitigation policy. Dietary shifts could significantly cut emissions and free land for carbon sequestration although implementation must consider nutritional, cultural and livelihood constraints. Societal preferences can also evolve in response to changing contexts and sociocultural narratives.

The report didn’t single out cows, but it surely should have. In environmental terms, they are the problem. In part, that’s because they’re wildly inefficient at converting grain to protein—it takes six or seven pounds of corn to produce a pound of beef. (Among other things, that means, to compensate, that we’re cutting down lots of rain forest to grow more soybeans for them.) And in part it’s because they’re ruminants, which means that they belch methane, a potent heat-trapping gas. (Some scientists have been at work on supplementing cattle feed with seaweed to reduce the problem, but at least one recent study describes the effort as “challenging” and unlikely to “single-handedly deliver transformative climate benefits.”) The numbers are really very stark: a chart from Project Drawdown shows the greenhouse-gas emissions of various livestock, and a pound of beef produces up to a hundred pounds of “co2-equivalent.” Lamb, the other ruminant-sourced meat on the chart, produces about a third as much. You can eat pork eight nights a week and do less damage to the environment than you would with one steak dinner. Chicken causes less than that. Tofu causes less still, but the margins at this point are tiny—if you cross beef off the menu, you cross off most of the climate damage.