One of the major drivers for businesses focusing on cultivated (or lab-grown, or cultured) meat is its potential for cleaning up the climate impact of our current food system. Greenhouse-gas emissions from the animals we eat (mostly cows) account for nearly 15% of the global total, a fraction that’s expected to increase in the coming decades.
But whether cultivated meat is better for the environment is still not entirely clear.
In a recent preprint study that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, [researcher Edward] Spang estimated the total global-warming potential of cultivated meat in several scenarios based on assumptions about the current state of the industry.
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The study’s results do differ from those of many previous analyses in the field, which generally found that cultivated meat would reduce emissions compared with conventional beef production. Most of those studies assume that producers of cultivated meat will be able to avoid the energy-intensive methods described in the preprint, and will instead scale up to large commercial facilities and progress toward using more widely available, food-grade ingredients.
Experience will provide a better picture of the industry’s potential climate impact, says Pelle Sinke, a researcher at CE Delft, an independent research firm and consultancy focusing on energy and the environment. “In all innovative technologies, there’s an enormous learning curve,” Sinke says.
