Is it likely that a diet including lab grown meat will have a lower climate footprint than a fully plant-based diet?
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Definitely not. In the long run “cultured meat” may accelerate climate change faster than regular beef does.
The difference is in the gasses. Cows produce a lot of methane, and methane is very bad for global warming, yet it only lasts in the atmosphere for a dozen years. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, lasts more than a century. And you know what releases a lot of CO2? Labs — including those that make cultured meat. This rate is vastly higher if we’re still burning fossil fuels (including natural gas) to power labs for cultured meat production. As such, there are no plans in existence to actively replace the entire meat industry with a “clean meat” industry.
Study: [Climate Impacts of Cultured Meat and Beef Cattle](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00005/full)
Plants are carbon negative. That’s awfully difficult to discount.
The thing is: If eating animals, ergo farming animals is %13-%18 of greenhouse gas production, is a plant-based diet significantly better than a lab-meat diet. 18 vs probably -2 vs 0-1
The real answer is either will be a huge win, and some people will not forgo meat, so the best is for people to do either, just to stop farming animals for food.
I wonder how that compares to farming insects for food as well since it’s suppose to be very sustainable even in mass production.
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