“Or, Two Environmental Science Stories that Caught My Attention”
The time is almost upon us. The day of reckoning is near. My dreams are about to become a reality. The future is now.
That’s right; lab-grown meat is nearly a reality. It’s so close that I can taste it.
Lab-grown meat is one of those things that I’ve been excited about ever since I first heard of it, probably a decade ago. It’s something I think that you should be excited about, too. At its essence, lab-grown meat is a, theoretically*, vegan meat alternative. But it has all the flavor and texture of meat. Because it is meat. Grown in a lab. At a cellular level, it is indistinguishable from ground beef or chicken. That would mean meat without the ethical dilemma of killing another living thing to provide our food and without the ever-growing environmental disaster that is factory-farmed meat. Lab-grown meat can produce meat with significantly smaller land and water usage than regular animal meat by growing meat in enormous bioreactors, kind of like how beer is brewed. Boiling down the science to its basics, you take animal cells and get them to multiply until you eventually have a tanker-truck full of raw hamburger.
This is something I’ve been talking to people about (mostly Nick) for years. I’ve been dreaming of this day. Of a time when I can eat a burger and not feel that guilty twinge at the back of my head because I’m doing, objectively, the wrong thing. I try to limit the meat I buy as-is, and I’ve been pretty good at it, and I do genuinely like some of the plant based-alternatives (hi, tempeh), but it would be nice knowing that I could get “real meat” without the complicated baggage that real meat entails. And if this company is right and it can produce lab-grown meat at market scale at a price that is competitive with animal meat, then it would, truly, change the way that the world eats. And it seems like that day could be soon.
It sounds amazing! It sounds incredible! NPR and the Atlantic agree!
It sounds too good to be true! And it probably is! As excited as I am about lab-grown meat, and as close as it seems with a nice, clean NPR article written about it, it probably isn’t going to happen. And if it does, it won’t be soon. further research, even of a most cursory kind, reveals that, even if lab-grown meat passes the FDA tests and makes it to market, it’ll be fucking expensive. The biggest player in lab-grown meat, UPSIDE foods, is preparing to launch meat from a facility that can produce around 50,000 pounds of meat in a year. And hopefully you can see where the problem lies; that is microscopically small. You can get roughly 500 pounds of meat out of a real cow. So, that’s, say, a hundred cows. For one facility. In a year.
The United States slaughters nearly 30 million cows a year. The rest of the world slaughters maybe 300 million. The new facility is about 70,000 square feet or so. With back-of-the-hand math, you’d need close to 300,000 of these facilities to feed just the U.S. That would take up land three-fourths the size of Rhode Island. Which, compared to the amount of land used on cattle now, is pretty small, to be sure. But it would be massively expensive, and entirely powered by electricity, where as most cattle land is just empty fields. If you can’t scale this stuff up, all they’re going to be making in that facility is $100-dollar hamburgers.
If you want a clearer, more detailed picture of the whole situation, I’d recommend this article. And that to the fact that this “brand-new” UPSIDE foods is actually just a rebrand of Memphis Meats, a company that hoped to release lab-grown products in the long-gone year of 2020, and the picture is pretty disappointing. I won’t lie, I was pretty bummed in reading about the more likely reality of the situation; lab-grown meat is, and may always be, too impractical to replace animal meat. I’m still holding out hope, I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed, I’ll be buying that shit as soon as stores start to sell it, and I’d sell my own pound of flesh to see this in reality at market-scale, but until then, it could just be another failed start-up and a pipe dream full of beef. We’ll have to see.
In other, more helpful news, I found a really cool new map I want to share! Because I love maps! Also brought to you originally by an NPR article! Hmm, that might be a trend of mine now. Am I getting boring?
Climate Trace is a scientist-run program backed by all sorts of different groups, including Al Gore, of all people (I thought he was killed by Chad while hanging out in Florida?). Their goal is to monitor every major source of greenhouse gas emissions, across the entire planet, without having to rely on governments or companies to report the data. This is especially important because, not only is the map super cool, the data is freely available and probably way more reliable than anything Exxon or Enbridge or China or the United States government or any world government except maybe Ireland or BP would put out. And it seems that they’ve succeeded pretty handily; the map sure looks pretty comprehensive to me. I guess the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter is an oil field in Texas? No surprise there. But did you know that some of Illinois’s biggest producers are coal mines? I forget that Illinois still has active coal mines. Isn’t history funny? Huh? Huh? Isn’t it funny? How we still mine the compressed bodies of dinosaurs out of the ground to burn them up and fill our atmosphere? Huh? Huh? How our modern energy industry is built on the backs of companies with more human rights abuses than China Guantanamo Bay the United States military your average Amazon warehouse? Huh? Huh? How our dependence on a fuel that’s been subsidized by the government to prevent innovation and change is going to strangle us until we die a hot, fiery death? Isn’t it funny?
Anyway, you get the picture. Go check out that map! I don’t have a ton more to say about it besides it’s really interesting and insightful and will probably give you a new perspective on who the biggest polluters are in your area. That’s it for the maps today!
Actually, you know what? I’m feeling generous. Let’s go for the double-or-nothing deal. Here’s a second really cool map that my dad showed me a while back. This one demonstrates North American bird migrations in a way that is at once both entirely readable and deeply obtuse to use. Not nearly as user-friendly as Climate Trace, the Audubon Bird Migration app is great if you want to look at one bird species as it moves, but not so helpful to try and view all of them. And yet, it’s really friggin’ cool! Have you ever seen a bird actually migrate? I know I haven’t; I’ve just imagined them doing it, usually with little suitcases and a visor. I know hundreds of species migrate every year, but it’s incredibly difficult to actually picture it without visual aids. Well, here you go. I think that’s about it on environmental news, or at least as far as interesting things I have to contribute about it.
This is your bonus map for the article. Remember to thank your bus driver on the way out.
Believe it or not, I once envisioned this blog as having one environmentally-themed post a month. That went out the window exceptionally quickly because of how fucking depressing this shit is, what with us living in basically the end-stage of civilization if something major doesn’t happen to tackle climate change soon. And for most of the time since I started this blog, I’d also been making climate change/environmental science part of my day job; I didn’t want it to be part of my free time, too. I know some people can make this stuff their entire life, but I came to the decision long ago that it just isn’t healthy for me to do that. And I don’t have that much to say about it that isn’t already being said somewhere else, probably in a more interesting way. So I kind of eventually figured that I’d save anything interesting I had to say on the environment for more professional pieces that wouldn’t get posted on here without considerable editing beforehand.
That doesn’t preclude me from writing about the environment, of course, especially when I’m got some good news to share, like this! Or when I’m in the mood to write about it! Like, for example, this weekend I got to go to the Minnesota Naturalist Association’s annual conference. My job (and the government) graciously paid for me to attend and learn about that all-important INTERPRETIVE TECHNIQUE. Because the brunt of my environmental work has now moved away from direct activism (though I’m trying to make efforts to get back to it) towards something akin to a paid gig in actual environmental work, I do occasionally receive actual trainings and support now. Although I don’t know if historical interpretation counts as direct environmental work. I mean, I work with the public to teach them about nature and history and strive to create programs that impress upon people the importance of conservation work and ethical land management, but I don’t “directly” do conservation or restoration work. But hey, educational work is still important. Right? Right?
Naturalists, for those of you who haven’t been on a 5th-grade field trip in thirty years or haven’t had a chance to visit your local nature center recently, are professionals whose job it is to teach about and interpret nature and the environment in exciting ways, often for the goal of larger public understanding and appreciation of nature. Think of the rangers at any given national park. Those are, usually, naturalists. I mean, how can you vote to protect the environment if you don’t care about the environment? Naturalists are the people who aim to convert teach the unwashed masses public about how to drink bog water loving nature. They are, to a T, incredibly friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable people, and I wish I had more time to spend with them. I’ve also realized that my nature knowledge is entirely inadequate I wish I knew more stuff about nature.
I mean, nothing has come quite as close as the MNA Conference as giving me more hope that what I’m doing actually, nature-adjacent as it is, makes a difference. I went to a residential environmental learning center (think summer camp but for nature nerds, and in the winter) and spent the weekend socializing with naturalists, other cultural interpreters, and people also adjacent to environmental education. I also learned some really nifty tips and tricks for more efficient nature interpretation (not always applicable to me specifically but still general enough to be useful) and got to do some primo networking in the field. It also rattled my long-held belief about the inevitable eventuality of my backup plan of a job being GIS work. You know, if writing doesn’t work out. There were other rattled confidences that cropped up, too. My cage has been thoroughly rattled in several unexpected ways. If I were a bird, I would have shit myself and died. Call me a skeleton, because I am rattled. If I were a rat, my name would be tled. If I were a snake, I would be inside your walls a rattledsnake. If I were- well, I think you get the idea.
I also won an enormous mounted fish in a silent auction, which was pretty cool. Cheyenne hates it and we have no wall space, but I saw the damn thing and knew I had to have it. And now I do and I regret nothing. Between that, and casino night, and learning lots of cool things, and going to visit a wildlife refuge, and getting to walk in an honest-to-dog bog and drink honest-to-dog bog water, and getting to hang out with friends old and new, and cry upgrade my interpretive knowledge, it was a pretty stellar weekend. And I am now considering going to graduate school for outdoors education/interpretation, even though I don’t think I’m particularly good at it. It’s not a thing that comes naturally to me, like it seems to for others. Maps come naturally. Writing comes naturally. And yet… Whoo. What a weekend. But hey, just because I’m considering it doesn’t mean I’m locked into it. And besides, writing is still my one truest passion. Spectral Crown’s got to get published, and I’m gonna write that sexy vampire death metal book I keep thinking about. You’ll see. You’ll all see.
So here I am. Doing everything I can. Holding on to what I am. Pretending I’m a superman naturalist. I guess you could say there’s three environmental science stories that caught my attention this week.
