Bill Gates’ ‘Synthetic Meat’ 25 Times Worse For Climate Than Real Meat: Study

A new study claims that lab-grown meat, the "synthetic meat" that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been advocating for, has a much greater negative impact on the environment than real beef.

While Gates and his allies in the World Economic Forum (WEF) have argued that lab-grown meat can help fight climate change, researchers have found that its "green" credentials are not as advertised.

The study's authors claim that animal cell-based meat is likely to be more resource-intensive than most meat production systems. In fact, lab-grown meat produced by cultivating animal cells can be up to 25 times worse for the climate than real beef, according to the study.

Although the carbon footprint of meat production is large, with water, feed, and clearing trees to make way for cattle, the carbon footprint of lab-grown meat could be "orders of magnitude higher" once the industry grows.

While the process can be done with multiple types of animal cells to create an approximation of the real thing, scientists use a cow’s stem cells to begin the process of creating cultured meat.

The cells are placed in Petri dishes with a "growth medium" comprising nutrients such as amino acids, glucose, vitamins, and inorganic salts, which is supplemented with growth factors and other proteins to help the muscle cells multiply and grow. However, for lab-grown meat to become more ubiquitous in the next 10 years and to be produced at a large scale, production methods will have to be scaled up from mere petri dishes to massive energy-intensive industrial units.

The scientists estimated the energy required for stages of lab-grown meat production, from the ingredients making up the growth medium and the energy required to power laboratories, and compared this with beef.

They found that the "global warming" potential of lab-grown meat ranged from 246 to 1,508 kg of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of lab-grown meat, which is four to 25 times greater than the claimed average "global warming" potential of retail beef.

The team says that the researchers did not consider the environmental impact of scaling up animal cell-based meat production facilities, which could bump the industry's footprint up even higher.

While lab-grown meat is generally seen as more ethical than real meat because it requires a sample of body tissue rather than the death of the animal, many vegans and vegetarians will not consume it because it is still made of animals.

Although lab-grown meat has yet to be rolled out to the public, scientists are growing meat products in a lab with a view to commercializing them.

The industry is young, and Singapore is the only country in the world to have approved the meats for sale. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared synthetic meat safe for human consumption, paving the way for them to be sold stateside. However, in other countries such as the UK, the Food Standards Agency has not yet done the same.

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