Lab-Grown Meat Suffers Significant Setback With Shocking New Scientific Findings
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions
Lab-Grown Meat Suffers Significant Setback With Shocking New Scientific Findings
By Chris Morrison
Earlier this year, the Grocery Gazette reported that the UK was set to be a world-leading developer of lab-grown meat. In the recent past, Guardian climate hysteric George Monbiot claimed lab-grown food “will soon destroy farming – and save the planet”. Alas, such boosterism is being challenged by hard facts. Lab-grown meat is up to 25 times worse for the environment since it needs ‘pharmaceutical-grade’ production to make it fit for human consumption. In particular, there is a need to remove endotoxin from the cultured mix, a substance that in concentrations as low as one billionth of a gram per millilitrie can reduce human IVF pregnancy success rate by up to four fold.
These are the startling conclusions of ground-breaking work recently published by a group of chemists and food scientists from the University of California. It turns out that ‘pharma to food’ production is a significant technological challenge. The major problem with lab meat is that it uses growth organisms that have to be highly purified to help animal cells multiply. Compared with environmental savings on land, water and greenhouses gases, the whole bio-process is noted to be “orders of magnitude” higher than rearing the actual animal.
“Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said co-author Edward Spang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. The study found that even across scenarios using lower pharma standards, efficient beef production outperforms cultured meat within a range from four to 25 times. This suggests that investment to advance more ‘climate-friendly’ beef production may yield greater reductions in emissions.
The route to New Zero is littered with improbable technologies that promise much – and give endless opportunities for virtue signalling – but deliver little. While many countries press ahead with plans to destroy conventional animal husbandry, the options for new ways of actually feeding populations look thin on the ground. To be fair to Monbiot, he has picked up on the problems of lab meat, noting in a recent blog post that “the more I’ve read about cultured meat and fish, and the more I’ve come to appreciate the phenomenal complexities involved… the more I doubt this vision will come to pass”. Always the worrier, Monbiot asks, “How can mass starvation best be averted”? Not removing the 337.18 million tonnes of global meat production in favour of flaky factory solutions might be a start.
The California study could throw a major stick into the spokes of the lab-grown meat bandwagon, which to date has had a largely uncritical mainstream media ride. Grocery Gazette’s cheer-leading report noted that the sector was predicted to “rapidly increase its market share within the food industry”. Research was quoted suggesting cell cultured meat was expected to make up almost quarter of global meat consumption by 2035.
The authors in California acknowledge that lab-grown meat ventures have attracted around $2 billion of investment to date. Early reports on feasibility were bullish with some predicting a 60-70% displacement of beef by 2030-2040. But of late, sentiment has waned with more conservative estimates noting a 0.5% share of meat products by 2030. As noted, the huge problem in producing lab meat is the presence of endotoxin which is said have a variety of side effects including harm to in vitro fertilisation. In pharmaceutical labs, animal cell culture is traditional done with endotoxin having been removed. There are many ways to remove the unwanted substance, but the use of these refinement methods “contributes significantly to the economic and environmental costs associated with pharmaceutical products since they are both energy and resource intensive”.
The study also highlights concerns about past scientific consideration of lab-grown meat. There is said to be “high levels of uncertainty in their results and the lack of accounting for endotoxin removal”. It is further noted that despite researchers “clearly reporting high levels of uncertainty”, the results were often cited as clear evidence for the sustainability of lab-grown meat.
So a much-touted green Frankenstein food solution – arguably to a problem only promoted in alarmist circles – looks to be biting the dust, sweeping away a billion or two of credulous capital in the process. As the authors note, investing in scaling this technology “before solving key issues like developing an environmentally friendly method for endotoxin removal… would be counter to the environmental goals which this sector has espoused”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, http://www.theenergyreport.com/pub/na/11079 and whose boat I have personally been on in Vancouver Harbour in the 1980s.
"I am a skeptic on climate change. I know the climate is changing, and it always has been. I've studied this intensively over many years. I started what I call the Carbon Project here in British Columbia back in 1989 in order to bring everybody together to discuss this subject and figure out the facts behind it. Since then, I have watched as hysteria has grown, as if the whole world is going to come to an end and civilization is going to die because of humans causing this climate change. I don't buy that, and I certainly know we don't have any proof of it. I'm not denying that we might be playing some role, but the natural factors that have always caused climate change have not suddenly disappeared. I'm very skeptical of the alarmist nature of climate campaigning.” –
Moore later wrote in his book Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom (WattsUpWithThat summary here or Technocracy News summary here) that “A while back it dawned on me that the great majority of scare stories about the present and future state of the planet, and humanity as a whole, are based on subjects that are either invisible, extremely remote, or both. Thus, the vast majority of people have no way of observing and verifying for themselves the truth of these claims predicting these alleged catastrophes and devastating threats. Instead, they must rely on the activists, the media, the politicians, and the scientists – all of whom have a very large financial and/or political stake in the subject – to tell them the truth. This welcomes the opportunity to simply invent narratives such as the claim that “CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are causing a climate emergency.”
In his book Moore said “A while back it dawned on me that the great majority of scare stories about the present and future state of the planet, and humanity as a whole, are based on subjects that are either invisible, extremely remote, or both. Thus, the vast majority of people have no way of observing and verifying for themselves the truth of these claims predicting these alleged catastrophes and devastating threats. Instead, they must rely on the activists, the media, the politicians, and the scientists – all of whom have a very large financial and/or political stake in the subject – to tell them the truth. This welcomes the opportunity to simply invent narratives such as the claim that “CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are causing a climate emergency. No one can actually see, or in any way sense, what CO2 might actually be doing because it is invisible, odorless, tasteless, silent and cannot be felt by the sense of touch. Therefore, it is difficult to refute such claims because there is nothing to point to and tangibly expose the falsity of these claims.”
Here is Moore in his own words on YouTube (that is, until this too gets banned) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkiQ0qIm-M. He discusses his youth to help found Greenpeace to becoming aware of the global warming scam taken over by big money.
For horse's ass George who Monbiot wrote in The Guardian “Every time someone drowns as a result of floods in Bangladesh, and airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned” (no comment on whether those creating C02 to research, print or disseminate The Guardian should be similarly treated, nor if the globe-trotting Hollywood limousine liberals should meet a similar fate – and of course, Mr. Monbiot is ignorant of the Royal Society study, that shows that the ocean level may, in fact, be dropping. In fact, The truth about sea level is, per Nils-Axel Mærner, who is chief of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Sweden's Stockholm University, that sea level has “risen by about 1 millimeter a year from about 1850 to perhaps 1940. That's a tiny amount. But then sea levels fell. There's no trend, absolutely no trend.” Regarding the IPCC report (the politically correct scam AGW group) on rising ocean levels, Maerner said the IPCC team didn't record -- i.e., actually see -- such an increase. It was a "correction factor" of a computer model. In other words, Mærner said, "It is a falsification of the data set."
The article re. Mærner also discusses the Maldives Islands sinking into the Indian Ocean, which he has visited for his research. What he discovered from the people living there that there was a sinking of the sea level -- but this was back in the 1970s; however, this may have been caused by non-oceanic factors. Nevertheless, the new level, per Maerner, "has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years." The polar regions melting? "Antarctic is certainly not melting," Maerner said, and "All the Antarctic records show expansion of ice." The problem, to Maerner, is that the warmers have no background in sea-level research. "So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations…The observations don't find it!"
Dr. Klaus Ekart-Puls, physicist and meteorologist, has also noted about sea level that “it’s important to remember that mean sea level is a calculated magnitude, and not a measured one. There are a great number of factors that influence sea level, e.g. tectonic processes, continental shifting, wind currents, passats, and volcanoes. Climate change is only one of ten factors.” Sea level rise, according the Ekart-Puls, has risen 100m from 10,000 years ago (as noted elsewhere, the Romans and Vikings didn’t drive SUVs), but from 1900 to 2000 sea level rose only 25 cm – a slowdown even though CO2 and temperature rose from the LIA NoTricksZone has a good summary on this here.
The late Dr. Tim Ball also illustrated the sea level issue , showing no precipitous rise. The links are all on my substack, here. https://blaisevanne.substack.com/p/global-warming-for-learjet-leftists-4e6