Lab-grown meat could be worse for climate than cattle

SCIENTISTS and companies working to grow meat from animal cells will need to minimize energy use and avoid fossil fuels if claims that cultured meat is better for the climate than real meat are to hold true, researchers said.

Cultured meat production with high-energy inputs could spur global warming more in the long-term than some types of beef cattle farming if the world shunned a low-carbon path, said a study published yesterday by the UK-based Oxford Martin School.

Lead author John Lynch, a researcher at the University of Oxford, said reducing beef consumption would help curb climate change, as methane emitted by cattle is a potent heat-trapping gas. But how best to replace conventional meat remained unclear.

“We have to dig into the details a bit more to know if the substitutes would be as beneficial as claimed,” he said. “It just comes down to how much energy demand would be to produce a kilo of meat.”

Lynch said companies promising to bring lab-grown “clean” meat to the mass market, many of them based in the United States and Israel, had yet to release information on their planned large-scale production processes.

The website of one highprofile firm, Memphis Meats, which produced the world’s first cell-based meatball in 2016 followed by poultry in 2017, says its meat, cultivated “at scale,” would use significantly less land, water, energy and food inputs.

“Our process will produce less waste and dramatically fewer greenhouse gas emissions. We believe that the planet will be the ultimate beneficiary of our product,” it adds, without giving details of how that would be achieved.

Memphis Meats has received investment from business tycoons Bill Gates and Richard Branson, as well as multinational corporations Cargill and Tyson Foods.

David Welch, director of science and technology at The Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that supports earlystage companies producing “clean” meat, said it would likely be another five to 10 years before cultured meat products were commercially available to consumers.

Development work was still being carried out in labs, with production facilities yet to be set up, he added.

The Oxford Martin School study said research on greener ways of producing cultured meat was a priority at this nascent stage.

Global energy system

Its study used four hypothetical cultured meat production methods, concluding the most energy-efficient would not warm the planet more than farming beef in the long term, even without decarbonization of the global energy system.

“If the real (clean meat) production processes are like that one, then there is no problem,” said Lynch.

Livestock are responsible for about 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

A separate paper by London-based think tank Chatham House said yesterday cultured meat had the potential to contribute to the emissions-reduction goals of the European Union, but policy-makers would need to promote clear regulation and invest public funds in research, development and commercialization.

(Reuters)