Written by Kate Wheeling of Pacific Standard Magazine on 12/4/2018.
Today more than 60 percent of Americans are worried about climate change, and it's easy to understand why. In the last year alone, record-breaking hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, and algal blooms, all linked in one way or another to our changing climate, have affected nearly every part of the United States. The the scale of the problem can be overwhelming. The latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last month, underscored, once again, that solving the climate crisis will require a complete and unprecedented transformation of the world economy. Such a transformation will require concerted global action—the kind that comes about when hundreds of world leaders and delegates come together for negotiations like COP24, taking place in Katowice, Poland, next week. But that doesn't mean there's nothing the average person can do to help. Reducing waste—and food waste in particular—is something that Americans can tackle at the state, city, and even individual level. Every year, Americans throw out 400 pounds of food per person, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. By weight, food waste is the No. 1 contributor to landfills, where it decomposes and starts emitting potent greenhouse gases like methane. Some 14 percent of U.S. methane emissions come from landfills, and, accounting for emissions all along the supply chain, wasted food accounts for 2.6 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
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Battle lines blur over labeling lab-grown substitutes as Big Meat invests in the startups making them. Lab-grown. Cell-based. Clean. In vitro. Cultured. Fake. Artificial. Synthetic. Meat 2.0. These are all terms that refer to the same kind of food, one that’s not even on the market yet.
But the companies making it have already raised hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investor cash and earned the close attention of U.S. regulators. Rather than methodically slaughtering animals, this industry uses science to grow what it claims is essentially the same thing as traditional meat. Given the planetary damage wrought by mass-market animal husbandry, such cellular agriculture is seen as the future of meat. But what to name it, and getting people to eat it, is another matter altogether. Crucial to public acceptance of any consumer product, of course, is branding. But no one can agree what to call this stuff. Originally, there was a push for the label “clean meat.” This was seen as a better alternative to the more clinical “lab-grown meat,” said Bruce Friedrich, co-founder and executive director of the Good Food Institute, which lobbies for these new products. Read more on Bloomberg. Each year, livestock production pumps out greenhouse gases with the equivalent warming effect of more than 7 gigatons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same global impact as the transportation industry. Nearly 40% of that is produced during digestion: cattle, goats, and sheep belch and pass methane, a highly potent, albeit relatively short-lived, greenhouse gas.
If the reductions achieved in the UC Davis study could be applied across the worldwide livestock industry, it would eliminate nearly 2 gigatons of those emissions annually—about a quarter of United States’ total climate pollution each year. Ermias Kebreab, an animal science professor at UC Davis who leads the work, is preparing to undertake a more ambitious study in the months ahead, evaluating whether smaller amounts of a more potent form of seaweed can cut methane emissions even further. Meanwhile, some businesses have begun to explore what could be the harder challenge: growing it on a massive scale. Read more on MIT's Technology Review. |
AuthorMy name is Kelly Smith. I am a Senior Government and Politics Major, Law and Society Minor at the University of Maryland. ArchivesCategories |