Bill Gates wants you to eat artificial meat

The human population is predicted to peak somewhere between 9.7 billion and 11 billion, depending who you ask. But how to feed them all? The answer, as economic leaders like to tell us at every opportunity, is more non-meat protein: bugs, plants or things grown in vats.

Now, Wired reports that former NASA scientists in California are using bacteria to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, then fermenting it to create protein powder for processing into a ‘meat’ substitute.

The result, claims Kiverdi, is a carbon-neutral, sustainable, animal-free protein alternative that’s massively scalable: the solution to the increasingly urgent challenge of how to produce enough protein for all those billions.

The problem this company seeks to address is real. Protein is a key building-block for human health; no wonder that global meat consumption has more than quadrupled since 1961, and is growing most swiftly in low and middle-income countries. Where it’s possible for meat to go from a luxury to a staple, people want it to.

But the boom in meat production has been achieved largely by industrialising animal farming — a practice with grave environmental consequences. Unlike pastured animals, factory-farmed ones need a lot of feed, which must be grown, and this drives deforestation. Where an old-fashioned mixed farm would plough animal manure back into the soil, manure on an intensive farm is a waste product linked to a number of pollution issues. Intensive farming is also carbon-intensive, as well as being a key incubator for antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

So far, ideas for solving these side-effects of industrialisation have tended to involve even more industrialisation, and often considerable animal cruelty: see for example this 12-storey Chinese pig farm, which clamps down hard on disease and pollution — at the cost of nearly every natural porcine need or behaviour. Others argue that problems created by the industrial paradigm can’t be solved by remaining within it, and what we need is more holistic ‘regenerative agriculture’.

What, though, if the ‘regenerative’ approach doesn’t produce so much, meaning a green paradise simply doesn’t generate enough food to feed everyone? Is fake meat grown in vats the solution? Bill Gates thinks so: he argued in 2021 that rich nations should shift entirely to artificial meat.

But if the eco-utopian argument obscures some problems of scale, the Gates one obscures others of social class. For example, studies show poor people now eat more meat than rich ones, as a proportion of overall diet, a shift that perhaps explains why billionaires now view meat-eating as fair game for curbing in the name of a green future.

When the EU moved in 2021 to impose ‘green’ taxes on aviation, it was widely noticed that an exemption was made for private jets. And as we move into an era of ‘green’ meat politics, it’s noteworthy that Bill Gates is now America’s largest single owner of farmland — even as he pushes fake meat for the masses.

Reading between these lines, it’s plausible that what we face isn’t moving away from the horrors of factory farming toward either lab-meat or regenerative agriculture. Rather, what we’ll see (like the restriction of aviation to the ultra-rich) is both, depending on social status. Vat-meat for the masses; and ethically raised, environmentally sustainable steak from the Bill Gates eco-pasturelands for those that can afford it.

The production of artificial meat will benefit the environment

Farming is one of the most carbon-intensive industries, accompanied by the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, stimulating the global temperature change. So we once had to choose between suitable for living planet and a juicy Burger, scientists are trying to establish production of so-called artificial "meat from a test tube". One of its advantages just is their reduced carbon footprint, i.e. the volume of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere as a result of the particular activity. But a new study experts from the University of Oxford suggests that a complete failure of production of the meat, and the transition to artificial, lab-grown, capable of inflicting far more harm to the environment.

was in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. Its authors, John Lynch and Raymond Perumbur report that on the basis of the three available assessments conducted a more thorough comparative analysis of the carbon footprint resulting from traditional beef production, and also by growing artificial meat. The researchers note that these estimates are very much different from each other, but in General show that the production of artificial meat, especially beef substitute, will indeed be less carbon intensive than the production of natural.

The Researchers used a climate model simulating the different properties of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, wherein, for example, the duration of the presence in the atmosphere. It is possible to estimate the difference of potential changes (growth) in global temperature between the two types of meat production in the next thousand years.

"Sustained, high consumption of artificial meat first gives less global warming. However, over time this gap has been narrowing. In some scenarios, the model showed a smaller increase of temperature in the case of the production of natural meat. The reason is that methane, unlike carbon dioxide, does not accumulate in the atmosphere — methane, unlike carbon dioxide is retained in it only 12 years" — according to the study.

Scientists say they also conducted a simulation of the reduction in consumption of natural meat, which showed that although peak emissions from livestock higher, the rates then decline and stabiliziruemost. Carbon dioxide from the production of artificial meat, in turn, is retained in the atmosphere and accumulates.

"Thus, the production of laboratory meat, in terms of climate impacts may be even worse than livestock", — researchers summarize.