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The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
-Senator John Fetterman
Lol. LMAO even.
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.
I don't think the main point against eating animal meat is the fact that it kills animals, but the impact on environment and the land efficiency. To eat a pound of beef, you need the cow to eat a lot of grass, which takes a lot more land than producing a pound of vegetables. Moreover, cows produce a lot of CO which has a huge climate impact.
Cows don't "produce" CO2, they're part of the biological carbon cycle, like rotting leaves and compost piles. All the carbon a cow emits comes from vegetation that got it from the air only a few months before. It neither adds nor removes carbon from the cycle.
Intentionally conflating the exogenous release of geologically sequestered carbon through fossil fuels with the natural carbon cycle is unforgivably dishonest vegan propaganda that needs to be stomped out thoroughly.
Whoever told it to you is a malicious liar you should hunt down and punish for trying to fuck with your understanding of the world.
Hey I was asked to look at your comment by the volunteer quokka report thing and I assumed you were bullshitting but decided to look at the actual science just in case. To my shock, you are correct, despite all the things I've read online, the science suggests that cows largely maintain the current CO2 levels as opposed to adding on to them. So kudos for calling attention to a very important fact and I apologize for having been successfully brainwashed up to this point.
Isn’t the cow complaint usually about methane? I assume that isn’t automatically sequestered by plants like CO2 is.
Wait, apparently methane tends to turn into CO2. If that’s accounted for in your net calculation, then yeah, it sounds like the effect is neutral. That’d be interesting.
So, the way methane works is: it lasts about 12 years in the atmosphere, during which it gets completely broken down. But you have a lot of cows (~1.5B) constantly producing methane so you can think of the situation as a submarine that is constantly losing oxygen because of a leak but is also constantly getting air because of an open air tank. The overall result amounts to about a 0.5° increase in the planet's heat because of these cows. In other words, if you had a magic wand and made all the cows disappear, global temperatures would drop by about half a degree over the course of the next decade.
So methane has a significant negative impact on the climate but it can largely be managed and ameliorated through good policies. Proper manure storage can cut emissions by 50%, for example. Which is still worth discussing and thinking about, of course. But my priors were "cows are objectively bad, we need to cull the vast majority of them if we want humans to continue existing on this planet" which is very far from "the ecological impact of cows is a solvable problem".
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