We can do so much better with meat manufacturing. A new policy report from the Good Food Institute: “Led by the livestock sector, today’s protein production systems are the single largest anthropogenic use of land and driver of deforestation. Protein systems, including grazing and feed crop production, use 70% of all agricultural land and 30% of the land surface of the planet. Plant-based meat uses up to 99% less land than conventional beef and cultivated meat could use 95% less land than conventional beef. In both cases, innovations will make alternative proteins even more efficient as they scale up.
Even if fossil fuel emissions were immediately halted, global protein production alone would make meeting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target impossible.
Plant-based and cultivated meat and seafood concentrate energy use in the manufacturing facility. In addition to eliminating meat’s methane and nitrous oxide emissions from ruminant digestion and manure decomposition, alternative proteins are the land and agriculture sector’s way to “electrify everything.’ As Bill Gates notes in his new book, ‘Cultivated meat has all the same fat, muscles, and tendons as any animal… All this can be done with little or no greenhouse gas emissions, aside from the electricity you need to power the plants where the process is done.’
The land spared can reduce deforestation and free up land for regenerative agriculture and ranching practices, natural climate solutions, production of renewable energy, and protection for biodiversity.”
— https://gfi.org/resource/a-global-protein-transition-is-necessary-to-keep-warming-below-1-5c/
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