ENVIRONMENT02 June 2023

https://www.sciencealert.com/lab-grown-meat-has-a-big-problem-very-few-people-know-about

ByTESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS

(TopMicrobialStock/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

In spite of advances in making laboratory-cultured meat products taste like the real deal, we’re yet to see a single factory pumping chicken nuggets out of a vat.

That might not be such a bad thing, according to a recent study by researchers from the University of California, Davis (UCD), and the University of California, Holtville.

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They warn current production methods of lab-grown meat could end up being way worse for the environment than beef farming, despite being touted as a sustainable alternative.

Their life-cycle assessment of current meat-growing processes – which has yet to be peer-reviewed – found cultured meat production could emit between four to 25 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than regular beef and all its hidden costs, depending on the techniques used.

“This is an important conclusion given that investment dollars have specifically been allocated to this sector with the thesis that this product will be more environmentally friendly than beef,” UCD food scientist Derrick Risner and colleagues write in their paper.

“My concern would just be scaling this up too quickly and doing something harmful for the environment,” Risner elaborates.

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Cultured meat is grown from nonspecific animal cells coaxed into forming tissues we’d be happy to eat, such as fats, muscle, and connective tissues.

While cultured meat uses less land than herds of cattle or flocks of sheep, not to mention less water and antibiotics, environmental costs of the highly specific nutrients required to grow the product rapidly add up.

These include running laboratories to extract growth factors from animal serums, as well as growing crops for sugars and vitamins.

Then there’s the energy required to purify all of these broth ingredients to a high standard before they can be fed to the growing meat lumps. This energy-intensive, extreme level of purification is needed to prevent introducing microbes to the culture.

“Otherwise the animal cells won’t grow, because the bacteria will multiply much faster,” Risner told New Scientist.

It’s not all bad news though. Reducing pharmaceutical-grade purification to a food-grade standard should drastically reduce the energy requirements. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions from cultivated meat production could drop to a little over a quarter more than typical beef farming. In best case scenarios, it could be a greener option, being 80 percent better than raising cattle.

Yet the most efficient cattle-grown beef systems that already exist today can still outperform this scenario of cultivating food-grade meat, according to the researchers’ estimates.

“It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media,” explains UCD food scientist Edward Spang.

What’s more, the researchers’ calculations only included the energy costs of making lab-grown meat using current methods, but not the impact of building larger facilities to house large scale production.

Animal cell cultures are a lot harder to grow than bacteria and fungi as they’re far more sensitive to their environment. Unsurprising, really, given they evolved to be safely tucked within other protective layers of a body.

This means they require specialized, sterilized, energy-hungry bioreactors to provide the right conditions and protections for these fragile cells.

The researchers say it would make more sense to invest in increasing the efficiencies of existing livestock farms to limit their environmental footprint, which may provide greater emissions reductions sooner that this fledgling industry of lab-grown meat can.

“Given this assessment, investing in scaling this technology before solving key issues… would be counter to the environmental goals which this sector has espoused,” Risner and team conclude.

Those improvements better come quick. Overall demand for meat is expected to jump more than 70 percent by 2050 and livestock farming currently represents about 15 percent of all current human greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN ​​Food and Agriculture Organization. Alas, for those of us who would sorely love a more sustainable meat alternative, it looks like plant proteins are still the most viable option.

But if more of us just reduced our meat consumption rather than eliminate it entirely, which is also great for our health, we could still drastically reduce the environmental impact of our flesh-eating habits together.

The research can be found on the preprint server bioRxiv.

• Updated: Jun. 01, 2023, 5:15 p.m.|
• Published: Jun. 01, 2023, 8:30 a.m.
• https://www.syracuse.com/opinion/2023/06/if-youre-outraged-by-killing-of-manlius-swan-stop-eating-meat-your-letters.html

By 

• Your Letters

To the Editor:

What did you eat for dinner the day you were outraged about the killing of Faye, the beloved swan? (”Faye, the mama swan taken from Manlius pond, was eaten on Memorial Day,” May 30, 2023)

While it was certainly a shock to the senses to learn of a bird with a name that many knew was butchered for a meal, it should not be any more emotionally jarring than the deaths of the 8 billion chickens in the United States that are slaughtered for the taste of their flesh on a yearly basis. Psychologists would describe this mental state as cognitive dissonance; a mental conflict when one’s beliefs are not in alignment with their actions.

We recognize the beauty, personality and maternal instincts of a single swan but cannot extend that understanding and compassion to a chicken — who, when given the chance, can and will display those very same instincts and characteristics. While Americans may hold swans in high regard due to their beauty and perceived rarity, swans have been eaten by cultures all over the world for centuries. Just as most of us would not consider eating our companion animals like dogs and cats, many countries continue to raise dogs and cats specifically for the purpose of eating them. What passes as a cultural norm in one country can be seen as abhorrent in another.

Regardless of the cultural norms at play here, one thing is certain — the animals that end up as meals are inarguably sentient and can experience the same panic, terror, pain and horror that beloved Faye from Manlius did in the last moments of her life. The only ethically consistent decision that aligns with that certainty is to leave animals off of our dinner plates for good.

Joel Capolongo

There is no special place in our cosmos, as far as we can tell.

DR. ALFREDO CARPINETI

• https://www.iflscience.com/why-there-is-no-center-of-the-universe-69143

Senior Staff Writer & Space Correspondent

PublishedMay 29, 2023

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About 14 billion years ago, everything we know of started with the Big Bang. A common misconception, however, is to envision it as an explosion. The actual event did not explode into anything; space and time were created as the universe began. Picturing it as an explosion makes us also think that it started at a single specific point – but this is not the case.

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The Big Bang happened everywhere. In your right hand and your left hand. In the town of Whynot, North Carolina, and in the Andromeda Galaxy. When astronomers say everywhere they really mean everywhere; because there was no single point where it began, all distances in the universe were zero, so every point in the universe was effectively in the same place: everywhere. 

Is there a center of the universe?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is as follows.

The visible universe is about 94 billion light-years across. It is everything that we can see. If we consider that, we are at its center. It is the visible universe after all. What we see has two very important properties defined by cosmologists: it is isotropic and uniform. Isotropic means it looks the same in whatever direction you look at and uniform means that at the largest scale it’s the same everywhere.

These facts inform us a little about the universe as a whole, which is much bigger than the universe that we can see. We don’t know how much bigger yet or what the whole universe is like, so our patch of the universe might be special or might be representative of the whole.

To infinity and beyond 

The easiest scenario to deal with is that the universe is infinite. Something that is infinite doesn’t have a center. Now, our little ape brains did not evolve to visualize the concept of infinity but if something goes on forever we can consider there is no special middle point.

However, it’s not certain that the cosmos goes on forever, it could well be finite. Our experience with the world tells us that if something is of a finite size then there is a center, for example think of a cube or a sphere. Unfortunately, our experience doesn’t translate to the universe as a whole because the geometry that we are most familiar with is not the geometry of a finite universe. We have to deal with the concept of curvature, and once again our brains are not built to deal with curvature in three dimensions. 

An easier (but imperfect) analogy is this: “If you think about the surface of a sphere, if that’s all there is it doesn’t have a center. The center of the sphere is outside of that space, right? It’s not a real thing,” Professor Peter Coles, a theoretical physicist at Maynooth University, told IFLScience.

“You think of a sphere as being embedded in a three-dimensional space, and the center is in that three-dimensional space. But if all there is the two-dimensional space, it doesn’t have a center.”

This is all to say, the universe doesn’t have a center. Our physics, as far as we can tell, operates in the four-dimensional space-time continuum. Looking at it with more dimensions the curvature might imply a central position. But if there is one, it is not part of our universe, as we can understand it.

BY SAUL ELBEIN – 06/01/23 6:00 AM ET

SHARETWEET https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/4028811-climate-paradox-emission-cuts-could-unmask-deadly-face-of-climate-change-scientists-warn/

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Scientists have uncovered a potentially lethal paradox at the heart of efforts to slow human-caused climate change.

A series of new studies suggest a stark truth.

One the one hand, cutting fossil fuel pollution is necessary for avoiding severe destruction over the long term. But such cuts will make the earth much hotter in the short term.

One recent study cast the well-known declines in air pollution during the COVID-19 pandemic in a darker light.

These cuts remain one of the only examples of successful cuts to climate-warming pollution, but the new study found that those pandemic-era cuts in air pollution led to a rise in global temperatures.

The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal NPJ Climate and Atmospheric Science, unveil a stark paradox at the heart of human-caused climate change.

It suggests that while cutting fossil fuel pollution is necessary for avoiding severe destruction over the long term — such cuts will make things noticeably worse in the short term.

The pandemic-era economic slowdown led to “a large-scale geophysical experiment,” study leader Örjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University said in a statement.

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That’s because the shuttered factories and power plants led to a corresponding crash in emissions.

Even so, not all emissions fell in the same way.

From a research station in the Maldives, an island archipelago off the coast of India, Gustafsson’s team detected that when pollution from smokestacks fell, so did concentrations of aerosols — tiny floating particles that hang in the atmosphere.

That fall was an unmistakable boon to public health. According to Our World in Data, these contaminants — like tiny floating particles of soot or sulfates — cause millions of global deaths per year.

But for all the damage they do to human lungs, aerosols also help shade the earth by scattering light particles from the sun that would otherwise warm the planet.

After the cuts, the study found that light reaching the surface increased by 7 percent.

“While the sky became bluer and the air cleaner, climate warming increased when these cooling air particles were removed,” Gustafsson said.

While aerosol concentrations fell as the smokestacks shut off, other gases remained stubbornly high.

In particular, levels of the most potent climate-warming gases — like carbon dioxide — barely changed.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases warm the planet by trapping heat. The combination of more heat hitting the same amount of carbon dioxide meant a straightforward rise in temperatures.

The sudden rise in temperatures led by the pandemic reduction is a stark example of a more general problem — one that has long haunted the drive to cut pollution.

A draft study led by Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen suggests that the recent rise in temperatures doesn’t come from greenhouse gases at all, but from the reduction in sulfate aerosols since the early-2000s.

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Hansen has an esteemed pedigree on this issue. He is the former NASA scientist who in 1988 warned Congress about the dangers posed by burning fossil fuels, which he explained were causing climate change by releasing carbon dioxide.

But by 2021, Hansen was troubled: the Earth was warming too fast.

In part, that was because the U.S. and world governments had largely ignored his calls to cut carbon emissions. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased by more than 40 percent between 1990 and 2021.

But even that surge in carbon dioxide levels wasn’t enough to account for how fast the climate was warming, Hansen and fellow scientist Makiko Sato warned in 2021. 

“Something is going on in addition to greenhouse warming,” they wrote.

Their culprit: The fact that the immediate aerosols released by fossil fuels temporarily hid their worse impacts, meaning that cutting them would make things worse before it made them better.

The two warned that declines in aerosols could lead the rate of global warming to double by 2040.

Last week, Hansen and colleagues reiterated those concerns. Under current emissions reduction policies, they predicted rapid warming.

Average temperature increase “will likely pierce the 1.5°C ceiling in the 2020s and 2°C before 2050,” they wrote.

One coauthor on the paper pointed to another troubling natural experiment of the COVID-19 era: the sudden surge in temperatures above ocean shipping lanes that were suddenly devoid of ships.

“For decades, this area has been kept relatively cool by sulfur emissions from ships,” climate entrepreneur Leon Simons wrote on Twitter.

“But this changed in 2020,” he added. “More extreme weather is likely.”

Not all climate scientists accept Hansen and company’s conclusion.

“I have nothing but respect & reverence for [Hansen] … but I think he is wrong on this one,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann tweeted.

But Mann said they agreed on something important: We don’t understand the earth’s atmosphere as well as we need to. “And where there is uncertainty, we should weigh in on the side of precaution,” Mann tweeted.

Like the larger threat of climate change, this threat has loomed for all long time.

The thorny double-edged relationship between aerosol and carbon dioxide emissions is something Hansen had warned of as early as 1990.Transgender teens, families sue Idaho over felony ban on gender-affirming carePoll shows 80 percent of older voters concerned prescription drug reform will hurt drug innovation

In their 2021 paper, Sato and Hansen described the problem — that the longer we burn fossil fuels, the hotter it becomes when we finally stop — not simply in practical terms but moral ones. 

Their point wasn’t subtle. The paper was subtitled “Faustian Payment Comes Due,” about the legendary doctor who makes a deadly deal with the Devil in exchange for an enviable life — at least for a while.

But there was one difference, they noted: “Dr. Faustus had to pay the debt himself. We have willed it to our children and grandchildren.”