Gee, who coulda seen this one coming? Oh right, me. It was me.
Although my usual reaction to cultured meat is "that can't *possibly* be the right answer," I don't think that Telegraph article accurately describes where the current scientific consensus is. I have a close colleague who does LCA research on cultured meat and she's said that the case that cultured meat is environmentally preferable to beef is pretty easy to make, and that it's only when compared to intensively produced poultry that the relative sustainability starts to look like a wash.
Against that backdrop, the idea that it would be *25 times* worse than beef is staggering. It might match my intuition, but the cited unpublished study seems to be an outlier in the very limited scientific literature on the sustainability of cultured meat.
I did a search for Raymond Pierrehumbert, who is mentioned in the last paragraph, and he seems to have published a 2019 LCA paper (#^https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31535087/) that takes a decidedly softer tone:
Digging into his paper a bit more, the really striking difference appears to be when comparing meat sourcing in the present while assuming that all meat consumption is subsequently and rapidly *phased out* entirely, which produces the graph in Figure 2e (attached).
Even then, the idea that cellular meat climate impacts are many times higher than beef production depends on the specific scenario considered. Only one estimated of heating from cultured meat remains higher than Western U.S. beef production by 1000 years in the future, and there is at least one cultured meat scenario that is comparable to the lower long term heating of Brazilian and Swedish beef production.
Whether "cellular agriculture" makes *economic* sense is a different question, and on that question I think the scientific consensus is much closer to the ideas put forward in the Telegraph article.
I think the bottom line (which most scientists would agree on) is that meat consumption needs to decrease.
My own view is that animals can play a functional role in diversified farms, something that vat-grown meat can never do, and the tradeoffs also change if meat is treated as a secondary product of other animal products (e.g. milk and eggs, see #^https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/science/article/pii/S0308521X16308034), but when animals are not primarily grown for meat, we end up with a lot less meat regardless.
Against that backdrop, the idea that it would be *25 times* worse than beef is staggering. It might match my intuition, but the cited unpublished study seems to be an outlier in the very limited scientific literature on the sustainability of cultured meat.
I did a search for Raymond Pierrehumbert, who is mentioned in the last paragraph, and he seems to have published a 2019 LCA paper (#^https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31535087/) that takes a decidedly softer tone:
"Under continuous high global consumption, cultured meat results in less warming than cattle initially, but this gap narrows in the long term and in some cases cattle production causes far less warming, as CH4 emissions do not accumulate, unlike CO2."
Digging into his paper a bit more, the really striking difference appears to be when comparing meat sourcing in the present while assuming that all meat consumption is subsequently and rapidly *phased out* entirely, which produces the graph in Figure 2e (attached).
Even then, the idea that cellular meat climate impacts are many times higher than beef production depends on the specific scenario considered. Only one estimated of heating from cultured meat remains higher than Western U.S. beef production by 1000 years in the future, and there is at least one cultured meat scenario that is comparable to the lower long term heating of Brazilian and Swedish beef production.
Whether "cellular agriculture" makes *economic* sense is a different question, and on that question I think the scientific consensus is much closer to the ideas put forward in the Telegraph article.
I think the bottom line (which most scientists would agree on) is that meat consumption needs to decrease.
My own view is that animals can play a functional role in diversified farms, something that vat-grown meat can never do, and the tradeoffs also change if meat is treated as a secondary product of other animal products (e.g. milk and eggs, see #^https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/science/article/pii/S0308521X16308034), but when animals are not primarily grown for meat, we end up with a lot less meat regardless.
That might be the case, but we really need to do both. And I do think that "eat less meat" should be an easier sell than "never eat meat again."