Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #38 "Solving energy is enough for solving climate" with Bruce Friedrich

Transcript

Bad Idea #38 "Solving energy is enough for solving climate" with Bruce Friedrich · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

0:00
The bad idea I came up with is energy transition is enough as I
0:04
think it's an incredibly bad idea.
0:07
And because I'm just befuddled by the basic unwillingness to
0:13
engage. What did the UN secretary
0:15
general say about how bad climate change is?
0:20
You know, the era of global warming has ended.
0:22
The era of global boiling has arrived.
0:24
Climate change is here. It's terrifying, and it's just
0:27
the beginning. And what does he have to say
0:29
about food? You know, basically nothing.
0:31
The FAO started measuring meat consumption in 1961.
0:37
And if you include meat and seafood, they have hit a new
0:40
global record every single year since 1961 for just land animal
0:45
meat. It was a slight hit for BSE,
0:48
there was a slight hit for African swine fever and COVID.
0:51
But the line trajectory, you know, it goes like this and then
0:54
it just picks right back up. Sergey Brin paid to develop the
0:58
Proto Tape Burger back in August of 2013.
1:02
It cost 250 €1000. They have brought down the price
1:07
in less than 13 years by a factor of 100,000.
1:12
So they brought down the price by 99.999% because they're
1:19
focusing on figuring out what are the scientific challenges,
1:22
what are the price drivers and let's fix them.
1:24
It's still twice the cost of producing beef, which means or
1:29
five times or more the cost of producing chicken.
1:32
But costs are plummeting with really not that many resources,
1:37
certainly relative to something like energy transition.
1:40
EVs got about $500 billion or more last year and investments
1:44
in all of time. Cultivated meat has gotten about
1:47
$3 billion. So the amount of progress that's
1:49
been made in really not very much time is pretty remarkable.
1:55
Welcome to saving the world from bad ideas.
1:57
I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a few bad ideas in my time.
2:01
I used to go out in the night time to destroy GMO crops, and I
2:04
also posed nuclear power. But then when I looked at the
2:06
science, I found I got it wrong. Oops.
2:09
I've learned the hard way that none of us are right all the
2:11
time. So now I'm here to challenge the
2:13
assumptions that we all too often take for granted because
2:16
the future depends on us getting it right.
2:19
Hello, My guest today is Bruce Friedrich, who's president and
2:23
founder of the Good Food Institute, of which I'm a big
2:27
fan of many years. And he's also of a new book
2:30
called Meat, How the next agricultural revolution will
2:34
Transform Humanity's Favorite food and our future.
2:37
Bruce, welcome. Thanks so much, Mark.
2:39
I'm delighted to be here. I really appreciate the
2:41
invitation. I'm delighted you could join us.
2:43
Thank you so much. Now we have to start with the
2:47
bad idea that you're combating. And this took some thought for
2:52
me and let me just sort of pitch this to you, OK?
2:56
Perhaps the bad idea is that everyone should give up meat or
3:00
everyone should go vegan because it's not a bad idea per SE.
3:04
I know you've been vegetarian since you were 18.
3:06
My wife's been vegetarian since she was 17.
3:08
But, you know, in terms of dealing with the issues of
3:12
industrial meat production, insisting that everyone goes
3:15
vegan just isn't, you know, in my view, and I think possibly in
3:18
your view too, and maybe this is the case you're putting in the
3:21
book isn't going to work. So would that work as a bad idea
3:24
that everyone should go vegan? I know it's a bit provocative,
3:26
but. I don't know.
3:27
I mean, I think one of the things that everybody should go
3:29
vegan does is it lights a fire under people and it Nets people
3:34
like me and your wife, the founders of companies like
3:38
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods and Upside Foods and wild type.
3:42
Like maybe everybody should go vegan doesn't actually get you
3:47
sufficient net vegans. But it's possible that the
3:50
message and the certainty of the message, it gets you a bunch of
3:54
vegans and it gets you people who are motivated to try to
3:58
change the system. I mean, the bad idea I came up
4:01
with is energy transition is enough, both because I think
4:05
it's an incredibly bad idea and because I'm just befuddled by
4:12
the basic unwillingness to engage among so many people who
4:18
will. What did the UN secretary
4:20
general say about how bad climate change is?
4:24
You know, the era of global warming has ended.
4:27
The era of global boiling has arrived.
4:29
Climate change is here. It's terrifying and it's just
4:32
the beginning. And then what does he have to
4:33
say about food? You know, basically nothing.
4:37
And that is pretty broadly true. And it's not they're engaging
4:42
and ruling things out. They're just not engaging, even
4:46
though 100% of the science, 100% of the models, whatever you
4:51
think about, you know, 2 point O and whether we should have
4:53
targets. If continued warming is the
4:59
problem, that the climate community recognizes that it is
5:03
continuing to ignore the cause of 20% of it when there is such
5:09
a tractable solution is pretty remarkable.
5:12
Interesting. I mean, that's ironic because
5:14
I've, we just published a paper in Nature, which we covered in
5:16
last week's podcast, which says almost precisely the opposite to
5:19
what you've just said, which is we were suggesting that actually
5:25
we should focus on energy squarely at the moment, at least
5:28
to deal with the CO2 problem. Maybe this is where this is
5:30
where the nuance comes in because fossil fuels is 90% of
5:34
anthropogenic CO2. And so if you can get rid of
5:37
fossil fuels from the system through transitioning rapidly
5:40
well and entirely to clean energy, then you've more or less
5:44
knocked that problem on the head.
5:46
But the argument, and I guess maybe this is where we can agree
5:49
the argument we make, is that Food and Agriculture and
5:52
deforestation, these things need a kind of more sectoral
5:54
approach. I mean, there's specific
5:55
problems with specific solutions, which I think you're
5:59
proposing in this book, and lumping them all together with
6:01
the kind of the broader energy transition and everything else
6:04
into this CO2 E basket as they do.
6:07
Actually, it's unhelpful. It makes the problem too
6:08
complex. I don't know whether you agree
6:10
or not. I think you would agree, Mark,
6:13
that we can do more than one thing at the same time.
6:16
And I'm guessing you would agree that however much progress we
6:21
can make in decarbonizing energy, that gets you to about
6:26
55% of emissions. Even Michael Lebreich on your
6:33
podcast was saying 100 dollars, $200 a ton for tech based
6:41
sequestration is going to be necessary to get us the rest of
6:45
the way there. So if you've got something, I
6:48
mean maybe there's some plausible explanation for why
6:53
the alternative proteins intervention doesn't work.
6:57
I haven't heard it yet. It really isn't.
6:59
We are engaging and think this isn't going to work.
7:04
It's we're not engaging because we're just going to focus on
7:07
this one thing which I find pretty remarkable from people
7:11
who are engaging on things like Cdr and who will say at 100
7:17
dollars, $200 a ton that is going to be necessary.
7:22
Well, not thinking about the much easier, I think scientific
7:27
and engineering challenge of figuring out how we create meat
7:31
in factories. And even if what you're thinking
7:34
about is fossil fuels, I mean, there's just the basic
7:36
inefficiency of growing 9 calories of crops to get a
7:40
calorie from chicken or 40 to 100 calories of crops to get a
7:44
calorie from beef. And then yes, of course, methane
7:48
at 80 times the warming over 20 year period, nitrous oxide at
7:54
274 something times the warming. Like why not tackle those
8:01
problems for a fraction of what is currently be being put into
8:07
clean hydrogen or Cdr? Well, I think Michael Lieber, I
8:10
could argue and has argued on this podcast that clean hydrogen
8:12
is not worth putting. Well, it's worth putting $0.00
8:15
into, pretty much. Yeah, I know.
8:17
I, I agree. But the, the broader climate
8:19
community is not I, I, I have learned an overwhelming amount
8:22
from him and from his podcast, which is why it, you know, just
8:25
continues to feel surprising to me that the exact arguments that
8:30
he uses for energy transition apply to protein transition.
8:35
And he would be a phenomenal ally with really no extra time,
8:40
effort, energy, just, you know, not continuing to focus
8:43
exclusively on energy transition.
8:45
Well, when, when we finish recording this, I'll e-mail him
8:47
and tell him that we're talking about him because I'm sure he'll
8:49
be delighted. But for now, I think maybe the
8:52
strongest argument that and the one that I'm really persuaded by
8:55
is the land use argument. And this obviously intersects
8:57
with climate because if you're talking about more Cdr carbon
9:00
dioxide removal, allowing reforestation and rewilding of
9:04
all of these vanished ecosystems, which we've
9:07
basically plowed up and replaced with cattle ranching is a huge,
9:11
huge part of the solution. So for me, that's actually the
9:14
strongest argument. But there's various other ones
9:16
that you also make in the book, which perhaps would be less
9:18
familiar to listeners. I mean, everyone will know about
9:20
the climate issues like that you just outlined, but also talk a
9:24
bit more about the issue with antibiotic resistance and how
9:27
how used antibiotics are and animal agriculture.
9:30
Yeah. Thank you very much, Mark.
9:32
I appreciate that. I mean, I do think it's worth
9:34
worth pointing out. I mean there, there have been a
9:37
couple of analysis. So McKenzie did an analysis for
9:40
Climate Works Foundation in the UK Foreign Commonwealth and
9:43
Development Office. They found that alternative
9:45
proteins at 50% would mitigate 5 gigatons of CO2.
9:51
The Institute for the International Institute for
9:53
Applied Systems Analysis found 3.1 gigatons of mitigation,
9:58
another 3.4 gigatons of sequestration potential from the
10:01
spare of land. So I think these figures are not
10:04
well known in the climate community.
10:07
I think people are not engaging to a significant degree, and I
10:10
think that's largely because people have written off the idea
10:14
of trying to convince people to consume less meat in the same
10:17
way that most people recognize that people are not going to
10:19
consume less energy, so we need renewable energy.
10:22
They're not doing the cross application that they're doing
10:26
on energy. The real focus of the book
10:28
though is that China is leaning in on alternator proteins, Korea
10:33
is leaning in, Japan is leaning in.
10:36
Really good stuff happening in the UK, in the European Union.
10:39
And six years ago it was 0 and now it's hundreds of millions of
10:42
dollars per year. That is not because of the
10:45
climate benefits or the antimicrobial resistance
10:47
benefits or the pandemic risk benefits or the global hunger
10:50
benefits. And I do, I walk through those
10:52
benefits in the 1st 4 chapters of the book.
10:55
It's for food self-sufficiency benefits and economic
10:59
competitiveness. So one of the top national
11:03
security think tanks in the world is a Center for Strategic
11:06
and International Studies. They wrote a report a couple of
11:10
years ago about alternative proteins, and they recommend
11:13
that the US government invest in alternative proteins for the
11:17
same reasons and add a similar level of the investment of in
11:21
advanced chips for AI and to the biopharma industry.
11:25
And that has to do with food and water security.
11:27
So the first choice when I was thinking about somebody to write
11:31
the foreword for the book, my first choice was Caitlin Welsh,
11:34
who's a global food and water security expert.
11:36
She served about five years in the the Obama administration and
11:39
then almost all of the first Trump administration at the
11:42
Department of State and then the National Security Council.
11:45
And then she wrote the foreword. And it really is leaning in on
11:49
the self interested reasons for governments to fund a protein
11:54
transition. And it is the, you know, it
11:56
aligns to the land use benefits that you just described at 50%
12:00
alternative proteins, you get 600 and you free up 650 million
12:04
hectares of land. Like that's more than the entire
12:07
Amazon rainforest. So that's really the focus.
12:10
But yeah, I'm an antimicrobial resistance.
12:12
We're going backward on solutions for antimicrobial
12:16
resistance. Oftentimes you'll talk to
12:18
somebody in Europe and they'll point out that Europe is making
12:20
progress, but super bugs don't honor boundaries.
12:24
So about 70% of medically relevant antibiotics are fed to
12:29
farm animals. That number goes up every single
12:31
year. It's one of the top 2 causes of
12:34
antimicrobial resistance. The other is over prescription
12:38
in human beings. That's also getting worse every
12:40
single year. So moving in the direction of of
12:43
plant based and cultivated meat could take antibiotics out of
12:46
the food supply, literally eliminate, you know, the use of
12:49
70% of medically relevant antibiotics which are going into
12:53
farm animals, which is also a pretty big deal.
12:56
And why are antibiotics going to farm animals?
12:58
Because I don't think that will be obvious to people.
13:00
Yeah. I mean, I think once you think
13:01
about it a little bit, like if you're going to go on a course
13:04
of antibiotics, it'll probably be 10 days at the outside,
13:07
whereas farm animals are dosed with antibiotics for their
13:10
entire lives. Soon after antibiotics were
13:13
discovered, farmers realized that if they fed farm animals
13:17
antibiotics, the animals would grow more quickly.
13:20
And also, if you cram 50,000 chickens in a shed, death losses
13:24
without antibiotics would be sky high and would to destroy the
13:29
profitability of cramming 50,000 chickens in a shed.
13:33
Whereas if you dose them with prophylactic antibiotics, they
13:36
can live through those conditions.
13:38
So sort of a dual benefit. And it really is a global
13:42
scourge. The medical community has been
13:44
screaming about it in peer review literature literally
13:47
since the 1950s. It's been a top priority for the
13:50
World Health Organization since at least the late 1990s.
13:53
And nevertheless, on both of the key causes we just go backward,
13:57
backward, backward. And how serious a risk is the
14:01
sort of zoonotic outbreak from for future pandemics?
14:04
I mean, obviously COVID probably came from bats so far as we
14:07
know, maybe through some intermediary species like civic
14:10
cancer. Who knows what that was being
14:12
sold in in in China. There's this issue of bird flu,
14:15
obviously big issue for poultry, but it's also now junk, the
14:18
species barrier. I think it's been found in
14:20
cattle now and occasionally in humans.
14:22
So what kind of a risk is the continuation of this huge animal
14:27
agriculture industry posing to in terms of future pandemics?
14:32
Yeah, I mean, there was the United Nations Environment
14:34
Program and the International Livestock Research Institute.
14:39
In July of 2020, they released a report titled Preventing the
14:43
Next Pandemic. They have 18 of the world's
14:46
leading zoonotic disease specialists involved and make
14:49
something like 60 peer reviewers who are also credited in the
14:52
report. They list the seven most likely
14:55
causes of the next pandemic. The first one that they list is
14:58
increased animal product consumption.
15:01
You know, just simple, more animals means more possibility
15:05
of a pandemic of zoonotic disease that jumps a species
15:08
barrier. The second one that they list is
15:10
industrial animal production. If you cram 50,000 chickens in a
15:16
shed or hundreds of thousands of egg laying hens in a shed, that
15:19
creates the perfect conditions for a virus that will spread
15:24
through all of the animals. Combined with the fact that
15:27
these are such genetically similar animals so natural
15:32
disease resistance is super low because of the genetic
15:36
similarity. So they list 7, you know, 7
15:38
causes and the first two have to do with the meat production
15:41
system and meat just keeps going up.
15:44
So the both of these continue to get worse and all seven of the
15:49
things that they list are getting worse year by year by
15:52
year. So alternative proteins are
15:54
something that we could literally take from one of the
15:57
top two out of seven causes to not a cause at all with making
16:01
meat from plants or cultivating meat from cells.
16:04
So let's just go back to the issue that we started with,
16:07
which is the extent to which humans are hard wired to to
16:11
crave me. I mean, just speaking
16:13
personally, I've been vegan like 7 times and it never lasts
16:17
longer than about three months. I always fall off the wagon.
16:20
My friends even joked I'm vegan between meals because it's so
16:22
kind of, it seemed kind of pathetic and I feel really
16:25
spineless and weak willed about it.
16:27
But I think pretty much everyone moth, I don't know, you tell me
16:31
like, is this something which is widely shared by humans?
16:33
Because obviously when people get richer and in developing
16:35
countries, the meat consumption rates just seem to go up.
16:38
So literally everyone everywhere seems to seem to want to carry
16:41
on eating meat despite all of the drawbacks, which are
16:43
actually fairly well known. I mean, what's your what's your
16:45
take? Yeah, I mean that that is all of
16:47
chapter 5 of the book. We may wish it weren't so.
16:50
I've been vegan for 39 years. You know, I went vegan and
16:54
didn't look back. And a lot of how.
16:56
Come, it works. Sorry to interrupt, but how come
16:58
it works for you then? Like what's different between
17:00
us? Like do we have different
17:01
biology or do you just give up when you were early enough that
17:03
you've basically forgotten how good meat toast?
17:06
Well, I know now because I'm eating cultivated meat on a
17:09
pretty regular, on a pretty regular basis.
17:11
I really don't know. I mean, I don't know what is the
17:14
difference between some people sticking with it and some people
17:18
not, but I would. What I do know, and I say in
17:21
Chapter 5, is if somebody doesn't understand the adverse
17:26
consequences of meat production, it's because they don't want to
17:31
understand the adverse consequences of meat production.
17:35
The FAO started measuring meat consumption in 1961, and if you
17:42
include meat and seafood, they have hit a new global record
17:45
every single year since 1961. For just land animal meat.
17:50
There was a slight hit for BSE, there was a slight hit for
17:53
African swine fever and COVID. But the line trajectory goes
17:57
like this and then it just picks right back up.
18:00
So as a, as an intervention that's going to change the
18:05
trajectory, it just seems fantastic.
18:08
Unlikely that we're going to come up with some new strategy
18:12
that allows us to change that trajectory.
18:16
But what we can do and what I argue in in chapter 6 and seven
18:20
is we can make meat from plants, which is, you know, not your
18:24
parents veggie burger. People are not going to pay more
18:27
and they're not going to sacrifice palatability.
18:31
So you do need something that is indistinguishable or that
18:36
satisfies the meat cravings. Like you can go beyond
18:38
indistinguishable, but until you get to indistinguishable, that
18:40
should probably be the goal. And you can do that from plants.
18:44
It's not easy, but you can do it.
18:46
Meat is made-up of fat, protein, minerals, and water.
18:49
Plants have fats, proteins, minerals, and water.
18:51
We can figure out how to make something that meat eaters
18:55
cannot tell a difference. And because it is so much more
18:59
efficient as we scale, we can bring down the price and
19:03
actually beat the price of industrial animal meat.
19:06
So it's a science challenge and you do need to focus on it, but
19:09
we can do it. We believe we can do it.
19:11
It hasn't been done, so maybe we can't.
19:13
But I argue in the book that all signs are positive.
19:16
And then on cultivated meat, just like you can take a seed or
19:20
a cutting from a plant, bathe the seed or cutting in nutrients
19:24
and grow a whole plant, you can do that with a small amount of
19:28
animal muscle or animal fat. And people are doing it.
19:31
There are more than 100 companies doing it.
19:33
There are probably 100 university labs doing it. 10
19:37
years ago right now, there was 1.
19:39
So it's happening. Governments are funding it.
19:43
Lots of top scientists are focused on it and I interviewed
19:47
for the book I I interviewed so GF 5, GF 5, the Good Food
19:51
Institute, which is the organization I found didn't run.
19:54
We have about 240 staff around the world.
19:57
The plurality of our staff are scientists.
19:59
I pulled our scientists and said who should I talk to?
20:01
Who are the world's experts? And then I reached out to them
20:04
and said, do you think that we can get to plant based and
20:09
cultivated chicken that? Is indistinguishable from an
20:15
eating experience and less expensive.
20:17
And if so, what's it gonna cost, what's it gonna take, etcetera.
20:20
And everybody pointed to 1st principles and a lot of people
20:23
said, you know, even five years ago we didn't know. 10 years
20:26
ago, we certainly didn't know all of the stuff that looked
20:30
like it might have been a blocker is not a blocker.
20:33
So, you know, I dive into what needs to happen and what are the
20:36
challenges. And there are, I mean, there are
20:39
blockers, there are challenges, but it certainly looks like all
20:41
of them are surroundable. Yeah, I'm, I'm really fascinated
20:44
by the whole cultivated meat. So I may, I don't know whether
20:49
we can call it a revolution yet, but the whole old proteins
20:53
issue, I mean, particularly for seafood as well, actually,
20:56
because I would love to have a situation where we could just
20:58
stop all industrial fishing and let the oceans begin to recover
21:01
from the damage that humanity's already done to ocean
21:05
biodiversity. And I know there's some
21:06
cultivated meat companies out there which are working on, on
21:09
salmon, I believe, and on, on bluefin tuna, so that the very
21:13
high end sushi and sashimi cuts that people really love and that
21:18
do such a lot of damage in their production.
21:20
So give me a sense of where things at in terms of, well,
21:24
both price and taste and kind of comparability.
21:27
Do we literally have cultured salmon and cultured tuna and
21:31
cultured beef and chicken available on the market now or
21:35
always still some way off? There is culture salmon and
21:38
there's, you know, cultivated salmon is on the market very
21:40
expensive, that price coming down.
21:43
I don't think there's beef there.
21:45
There are beefs that there is beef that has been approved by
21:47
governments. I don't think anybody's selling
21:49
it at the moment. And then vow Foods in Australia
21:53
is making a sort of duck foie gras ish kind of thing that
21:57
people like just as much as meat.
21:58
So you know, back to my idea that to my observation that it
22:01
doesn't have to be absolutely identical, but it does need to
22:05
satisfy what people love about meat.
22:07
But we do let you know we have some, we still have work to do.
22:10
I would one thing I would point out though, most of Meat, which
22:14
was founded by Mark Post, who is a tissue engineer and medical
22:17
doctor. He was a professor of medicine
22:20
at Harvard Medical School. Now he's a tissue engineering
22:22
professor at the University of Mass St.
22:24
He's also the chief science officer.
22:26
Most of me, Sergey Brin paid for him to develop the Proto Tape
22:31
Burger back in August of 2013. It cost €250,000.
22:38
So something like $300,000 for that one burger.
22:42
They have brought down the price in less than 13 years by a
22:46
factor of 100,000. So they brought brought down the
22:49
price by 99.999% because they're focusing on figuring out what
22:57
are the scientific challenges, what are the price drivers, and
23:00
let's fix them. It's still twice the cost of
23:04
producing beef, which means four or five times or more the cost
23:07
of producing chicken. The costs are plummeting with
23:11
really not that many resources certainly relative to something
23:15
like energy transition. EVs got about $500 billion or
23:19
more last year and investments, I believe in all of time,
23:23
cultivated meat has gotten about $3 billion and cultivated meats
23:27
investment has been spread across 100 companies.
23:30
So the amount of progress that's been made in really not very
23:33
much time and with not very much money, one EV batteries factory
23:38
is going to cost you 4 or $5 billion.
23:40
It's pretty remarkable. Yeah, you you mentioned actually
23:42
in the book about the hype cycle of of this and it's something
23:46
that all new, new technologies, new industries seem to have to
23:48
go through whether itsthe.com crash, you know, which didn't
23:51
end the Internet by the way, and didn't end e-commerce.
23:54
We've already had that, haven't we, for plant based old
23:56
proteins. What was it before COVID that I
23:58
mean there was all of these huge evaluations for all these new
24:01
companies and then then the whole sector seemed to collapse
24:04
where things kind of beginning to rebuild?
24:06
Now, I mean, yeah, I think a things are beginning to rebuild.
24:11
And then, yes, I would just slap some numbers on your
24:14
observation. the.com bubble, the NASDAQ lost more than 80% of its
24:19
value. Most Internet commerce companies
24:23
went bankrupt. Amazon lost 95, more than 95% of
24:27
its value. It fell from $213 to less than
24:30
six. And the sort of expert
24:33
commentary was ruthless. You know who would ever want to
24:37
buy pet supplies online? Of course, pets.com failed.
24:42
pets.com's highest valuation was $400 million.
24:45
Chewy, a pet supply company online, has a valuation of $13
24:49
billion, so more than 30 times pets.com's value.
24:54
And Amazon is doing pretty well, too.
24:55
I think so. And you can look at just so many
24:58
different industries, everything from airplanes to automobiles to
25:03
artificial ice to artificial intelligence.
25:06
And obviously thinks that people who listen and watch this
25:10
podcast are maybe especially familiar with things like
25:13
electric vehicles and solar and wind energy.
25:17
Solar 1954, Bell Labs, the front page of the New York Times, the
25:22
solar willpower the world momentarily, essentially flash
25:26
forward to 2016 and the International Energy Agency like
25:30
the ultimate experts. This something obviously that
25:33
that Michael talks a lot about is predicting 50 gigawatts I
25:37
think per year increases through 2040, but no uptick just every
25:41
year 50 more gigawatts. So their 2040 projection, you
25:44
know, their 34 year projection was crushed in eight similar
25:48
stories to be told about electric vehicles.
25:50
Yeah. I think with the IEA and
25:51
renewables, it's not what they thought was going to happen, but
25:54
what they wanted to happen, which was continued fossil fuels
25:56
on the system. So I suspect that was not so
25:59
much a bug as a feature, but and what's exciting about all of
26:02
these technology sort of innovations is that it's like an
26:06
S curve, right? You're still perhaps on the flat
26:08
part of the S curve for old proteins and cultured meat.
26:11
But when it goes up and you begin to get into the vertical,
26:15
things transition very rapidly indeed.
26:17
And you know, you're, I think you're seeing this with EVs now,
26:20
certainly seeing this with solar and batteries.
26:22
And obviously it happened in the past with, you know, the
26:24
internal combustion engine, the car replacing horse transport.
26:27
And you talk about some of these analogies in the book, like
26:30
where do you, when do you think the S curve is going to really
26:33
begin to accelerate and, and all proteins?
26:36
Yeah. And then I think if you look at
26:38
something like EVs or solar 10 years ago, so 2016, I think they
26:43
both hit about 1% penetration in the US and globally.
26:48
They're probably a little higher in Europe.
26:49
I'm not sure they were ever so slightly higher in China or at
26:52
least EVs or they hit 1% in 2015.
26:56
And to your point, they went from, you know, in nine years
26:59
they went from 1% sales to 50% sales in China.
27:03
They went from 1% sales to I think it's 25 last year, percent
27:08
sales in less than a decade. And that happened because, you
27:12
know, what the IEA wrote in in 2015 about electric vehicles is
27:16
people don't want them. They don't go far enough.
27:18
They cost too much and there's no charging infrastructure.
27:20
And obviously the solution is, well, fix those three things,
27:25
100% of poles, literally every single pole that exists, a plant
27:29
based meat, uncultivated meat. The people who tried it and
27:32
stopped eating it say it's too expensive and it doesn't taste
27:35
good enough. And the people who haven't tried
27:37
it, you know, why not? What's your, you know, what's
27:40
the worry? I think it's going to taste bad
27:42
and it's too expensive. So I think we can start to go up
27:45
the S curve as the products get better and costs come down and
27:50
people become more familiar with them.
27:55
So for example, Impossible Foods and beyond me and a few other
27:59
companies have some some excellent products.
28:01
People can find them at Nectar, NEC, tar.org online, but you're
28:06
still in a world where the vast majority of the products are
28:09
designed for jet vegetarians and meat reducers, not designed to
28:14
compete with animal meat. So that's their niche.
28:17
That's been the niche forever essentially, until Pat Brown and
28:20
Ethan Brown challenged it. And again 10 years ago right
28:23
now, there was no Impossible burger, There was no Beyond
28:25
burger. There wasn't a plant based meat
28:27
that was even trying to compete with animal meat on taste or
28:31
price just 10 years ago. So we've made a lot of progress.
28:35
I think we really shoot up the S curve when we get to price and
28:38
taste parity. So just like solar competing on
28:43
price, competing on consistency, integrating the grid and when
28:49
you talk about you know what it's going to take to get to the
28:51
2065 vision, as long as you know you are out competing
28:57
electricity, you can get to that 55% of emissions that's
29:01
attributable to electricity. But then what does it look like
29:04
to deal with the heart to a bait sectors?
29:06
What does it used to look like to deal with land use change?
29:09
What does it look like to do a deal with cattle methane that
29:11
becomes a lot harder with plant based and cultivated meat.
29:14
Things like fish sticks, burgers, you know, all of the
29:20
ground beats will probably, you know, so we'll probably see, you
29:23
know, curves like this. Sorry for your, you know, like
29:26
this because the tech challenges of making a pork chop or steak
29:30
are going to be significantly more difficult than making, you
29:34
know, chicken Nuggets or burgers.
29:35
But it all feels surmountable. It's just going to take time.
29:39
It's going to take scale up. It's going to take science and
29:41
engineering. And and it's going to take
29:43
supports as well, right? I don't want people to get the
29:45
impression that you just have to sit back and leave it to the
29:49
magic of the free market for this S curve to to accelerate.
29:52
You know, and, and again, you make this point in the book that
29:55
most of the technologies have now become ubiquitous in the
29:58
modern world, including all the components of the iPhone and so
30:01
on, were at some point invented or supported by the government,
30:04
either by the Department of Defence or through through
30:07
publicly supported academia and so on.
30:09
So tell me what needs to happen now in terms of in terms of
30:13
support from government and from elsewhere to really push this,
30:17
this transformation forward. Yeah.
30:19
I mean, GFI, our number one goal is building a maximally robust
30:25
scientific ecosystem that is focused on these challenges.
30:29
And the way that you do that is you put these challenges onto
30:34
the agenda of governments as things that they should be
30:39
helping to make happen, both through funding R&D and also
30:44
through incentivizing private sector activity.
30:47
In Mariana Mazzucato, the entrepreneurial state, as well
30:51
as Derek Thompson and and Ezra Kleiner newer book Abundance was
30:55
the inspiration for as well as just what's worked in renewable
30:59
energy and electric vehicles. But chapters 9 and 10 of the
31:02
book, I really lean in on the fact that all of these
31:08
technologies have required government support.
31:12
And you know, maybe we can get there without government
31:15
support, but it's going to take a heck of a lot longer.
31:17
And it certainly weren't warrants government support.
31:20
So seven years ago there was none.
31:22
Now there's hundreds of millions of dollars.
31:24
It's moving in the right direction, but it absolutely
31:27
requires more. And even something like electric
31:30
vehicles, the electric vehicle batteries, both first iteration
31:34
and 2nd iteration were developed by the Department of Energy in
31:38
the United States. Similar stories to be told
31:41
across all of the technology. Professor Mazaki walks through
31:45
the iPhone and how pretty much like everything in the iPhone
31:49
was designed with government funding.
31:51
So the sort of myth of laissez faire, the world's most robust
31:58
and profitable agricultural systems, biopharma systems, tech
32:03
systems, all of the areas of the world that have, you know, every
32:08
most robust sort of economic sector, all of that comes
32:13
because those are the governments that are
32:15
incentivizing those technologies.
32:17
I look at biopharma in the United States, and the average
32:21
government subsidy for a new drug was north of a billion
32:25
dollars through the National Institutes of Health, the
32:28
National Science Foundation, other funding agencies.
32:32
You know, that's going to be true basically everywhere.
32:35
GFI Europe just released a report earlier this week that
32:40
they worked with Systemic on. So Systemic did the analysis
32:45
about both what it will require in Europe to create a robust
32:50
alternative proteins ecosystem and also what the payback will
32:54
be in terms of jobs and economic activity.
32:58
And I believe it's at 10% alternative proteins you get
33:01
north of €100 billion of economic opportunity and support
33:06
for north of 400,000 jobs. And then a couple years ago GFI
33:11
Europe worked with Green Alliance on a report that looked
33:15
at low alternative protein adoption and high alternative
33:18
protein adoption. The latter was was 2/3 and the
33:22
10 countries that they looked at got, if you amalgamate them to
33:27
food self-sufficiency, 8 of them were internally food
33:30
self-sufficient. The two that want could import
33:32
from the other eight 'cause they went to net exports, but they
33:35
could also 4X the amount of regenerative agriculture
33:39
agroecology and they could with freed up land sequester.
33:44
I think it was about 250 million metric tons of carbon, which is
33:48
basically the equivalent of all air travel in and out of Europe
33:51
if memory serves. So really big carbon
33:55
sequestration and Wilding benefits, benefits for better
33:59
forms of agriculture and food, self-sufficiency, which is
34:03
something that governments care about.
34:04
I mean that that's why Korea, Japan and and China are
34:08
investing in alternative proteins.
34:10
It's really food self-sufficiency and economic
34:12
benefits. Well, I mean, one of the big
34:13
roadblocks though is that the vested interests don't just go
34:17
gently into that good night. I mean they fight back with some
34:20
force. You know, we've seen this in
34:22
Europe actually. Producer Rob, who's on the call
34:25
with us now, is leading We Planets campaign against this
34:29
ridiculous proposal to ban the use of the word burger and
34:33
sausage and other so-called meaty terms for for plant based
34:37
products. And that's led by a particular
34:39
MEP with, you know, who's who's a sort of, you know, obviously
34:43
an alliance with with the farming farming lobby.
34:45
So the politics here is complicated, isn't it?
34:48
And there's, you know, quite a schizophrenic attitude, it seems
34:53
from the EU and probably other other governments as well.
34:55
And they want to support innovation.
34:57
They want to develop a whole new sector, particularly as it
35:00
promises food security and all these benefits you outlined.
35:02
But at the same time, they're under pressure from the cattle
35:05
ranches in the US or the, you know, the meat and livestock
35:08
lobbying the EU to basically stop this in its tracks.
35:10
So there's a lot of work for us, we Planet and your GFI and
35:15
others to do, I suppose, in trying to put some more wind in
35:18
the sails of the of the old protein side to try to fight
35:22
back against some of the these big blockers.
35:24
Yeah, I mean, I think that's true to a point.
35:27
I think if you compare it to something like the fossil fuel
35:30
lobby, there isn't the same organized, opposite level of
35:35
organized opposition. So in the US, both the Meat
35:39
Institute and the National Calamans Beef Association, which
35:42
are the two largest meat lobby groups, they are opposed to
35:48
state bans on cultivated meat, for example.
35:51
Their free market principles are strong and they see plant based
35:56
meat will certainly cultivated meat to some degree plant based
35:59
meat as alternative ways of making meat and they're
36:02
welcoming of that. That's less true of sort of
36:06
farmer and rancher lobbies writ large.
36:09
I do spend some time in Chapter 10 just pointing out that market
36:13
penetration for plant based and cultivated meat is low such that
36:18
whatever farmers and ranchers, you know, it's hard to be a
36:23
farmer or a rancher anywhere in the world.
36:26
And the complaints that they have about their lives getting
36:29
harder are real. Michael kind of nodded at some
36:33
of this when he was talking about 1.5 and two point O and
36:36
some of the policies that were supported that maybe were
36:38
counterproductive to actual progress.
36:41
And I think some of those hit farmers and ranchers
36:44
particularly hard in Europe in particular.
36:47
What does it look like to a lie with farmers and ranchers?
36:51
And as we are moving forward with alternative proteins,
36:55
ensure that part of that transition includes things like
37:01
ramping up agroecology, keeping exports steady as we move toward
37:07
farmers and ranchers producing for in country consumption.
37:12
With less agricultural subsidies than exists now, we could create
37:17
a system that centers farmers and ranchers and focuses on high
37:23
value crops for plant based meat as well as inputs for cultivated
37:28
meat as well as tying it to an increase for the meat that's
37:34
produced that's focused on agrocology, regenerative
37:38
practices, etcetera. I mean, it's important to be
37:40
honest about the fact that does require more land and does
37:42
create more emissions, but it is better for biodiversity, it is
37:47
better for farm families, it's better for soil health.
37:49
It's better for a lot of things, just not just not climate
37:52
change, but climate change isn't 100% of the things that we
37:57
should be caring about. No, I mean, I can see it's, I'm
38:00
generally a bit skeptical on the regenerative agroecology thing
38:03
for precisely that reason that you know, it uses well twice as
38:06
much land organic roughly. And obviously the numbers can be
38:09
argued about, but it's definitely because it's less
38:12
efficient. You're not using all the
38:13
industrial inputs, of course. It's sort of more or less stands
38:15
to reason, but I can see that working.
38:18
If you've spurred so much land because you're taking a lot of
38:20
livestock out of the system, then I can see that sort of
38:22
compartment actually coming into its own a bit more.
38:25
So that that does make a lot of sense.
38:27
And I think it's important not to see farm farmers as or the
38:30
farming lobby is entirely monolithic.
38:32
I mean, I think Calderetti, which was the one of the farming
38:35
sort of lobbies in Italy was the ones who orchestrated the ban
38:39
for that whole country on cultivated meat.
38:41
And something similar happened in Hungary.
38:44
But there are plenty of farmers in other countries in Europe who
38:47
are actually quite excited about the potential of a whole new,
38:51
you know, economic sector opening up.
38:52
And maybe tell us a bit more about what those value chains
38:56
might be. Because obviously you've got
38:57
feedstocks going into these products, right?
38:59
You've got sugars that need to go into producing alternative
39:02
proteins and perhaps or whatever.
39:03
So it's not like you're, you're decoupling the entire food
39:07
system or protein system from from the land or from farming in
39:11
general. So, yeah, what what's, what are
39:14
the potential opportunities that that farmers might find with
39:17
this? Yeah.
39:18
I mean, I think for further to your point, there are a lot of
39:21
farmers who are enthusiastic about the new opportunities and
39:25
are also enthusiastic, you know, I mean, the the sort of get
39:28
bigger, Get out started in the early 1970s in the United States
39:32
with a guy named Earl Butts, who is Richard Nixon's Secretary of
39:35
agriculture. And Get Bigger, Get Out was, you
39:38
know, literally his mantra. And that has spread globally.
39:41
And so we have seen farmer and rancher consolidation, fewer
39:46
farmers and ranchers producing a much higher percentage of the
39:49
food, and the average age of farmers and ranchers just
39:52
getting higher and higher and higher.
39:54
And it's tough to be a farmer or a rancher today.
39:58
And honestly, nobody knows better.
40:01
What it looks like to degrade an ecosystem than the people who
40:05
are working in that ecosystem on a daily basis.
40:08
So we've been really heartened by things like the Royal
40:11
Agricultural University in the UK did a sort of deep dive focus
40:17
group based project focused on what does it look like to have a
40:22
shift like this with everything from on farm production of
40:30
cultivated meat or mycoprotein from ask some of the stuff
40:35
that's grown that isn't going to be eaten by human beings, which
40:40
is pretty exciting and interesting.
40:42
So sort of cottage industry ask, I talk in the book about in
40:47
developing economies, if you're looking at something like, you
40:49
know, our entire India strategy has to do with India doing for
40:53
alternative proteins what China has done for renewable energy
40:58
and electric vehicles. And, and a part of that that is
41:00
producing mycoprotein and producing cultivated meat.
41:05
Everything from, you know, small production, which would be sort
41:09
of like your neighborhood pub, if the pub is actually brewing
41:12
beer up to, you know, larger production as well.
41:16
Even down to the Gates Foundation funded Nature's Fine,
41:20
which is a mycoprotein company in Chicago.
41:22
They fund they funded them to do some research on essentially
41:25
tabletop protein makers of mycoprotein, which is corn QUORM
41:30
uses uses mycoprotein just insanely efficient, very high
41:35
quality protein, much higher protein percentages even then
41:40
meat, dairy or eggs. And what's it look like to
41:43
integrate that into farming? And then yes, shifting farm
41:48
production to food for human beings when just vast quantity
41:52
is of it is grown to be fed to animals, which is going to be a
41:56
much cheaper commodity crop. What does it look like to shift
41:59
in the direction of commodity crops?
42:01
What does it look like to shift in the direction of fruits and
42:05
vegetables, which are also more expensive?
42:07
Like what would it look like to align diets with the EAT
42:10
Commission's recommendations and Eat Lancet one and Eat Lancet 2?
42:15
All of these can be significant winners for the people who are
42:20
currently producing chickens, pigs and cows, who would still
42:24
be producing chickens, pigs and cows, but in a more
42:29
agroecologically sustainable manner.
42:33
And I do think, I mean, the place where I think the
42:36
agroecology people get in trouble is when they start
42:39
claiming things that the science doesn't indicate around things
42:44
like soil sequestration, out weighing the ruminant methane
42:49
emissions or whatever. But what does appear to be true
42:52
is especially if you're like working in agroforestry, if
42:56
you're scaling down numbers, you can scale out and improve soil
43:00
health, you can improve biodiversity and certainly
43:03
improve farmer incomes. Like there is a lot of good to
43:06
it. And especially, you know, with
43:07
alternative proteins requiring so much less land and causing so
43:10
many fewer emissions, it feels like a a reasonable trade off.
43:13
You also, I mean you do, you don't need the antimicrobial
43:17
drugs. If you're using a more diverse
43:19
range of species, you don't have the same contribution to
43:23
pandemic risk. Like there are a lot of
43:25
benefits. I was interested to hear you
43:27
mention India there. And you know, I think this is
43:30
often a very sort of global N centred conversation in that,
43:33
you know, the the big innovations are happening and I
43:35
don't know in Singapore or Israel or the United States.
43:38
What about Africa? What about South and East Asia?
43:41
I mean, Africa is a very meaty place.
43:43
I've spent a lot of time there. Everyone wants their chicken and
43:46
and beef and everything else. And cattle are sort of a unit of
43:49
unit of wealth. Actually there was Africa
43:52
climate some director who I was with a couple of weeks ago and
43:56
he's got 40 cattle, you know, and that's, that's that's his
43:59
family's wealth. So how does the old proteins
44:03
transition, revolution, whatever look like from a global S
44:07
perspective? Yeah.
44:08
I mean, there's, there's, there's sort of global South and
44:10
global S, right. So for India and Brazil, which
44:15
are both obviously in the global S, but they also have really
44:21
excellent scientific and innovation ecosystems.
44:25
They're two of the top five government funders of
44:29
agriculture. We are really leaning in in
44:32
India, as I mentioned, like the the strategy is essentially, can
44:36
India become protein producer for the world?
44:38
And we think the answer is yes. And again, when you think in
44:40
terms of what is the government most interested in the Prime
44:44
Minister of of India, Narendra Modi, his entire like life
44:49
mission. If you asked him to list what
44:50
are the 10 things that are most important to you?
44:52
Like one through 7 is going to be are going to be India is a
44:56
developed economy by 2047, the Indian Centennial.
45:00
And he's really leaning in on some stuff that's going to put
45:02
him in, you know, put India into competition with much wealthier
45:07
countries. And it's just going to be really
45:08
hard to ramp up that infrastructure.
45:11
Here's an area where much like China got in early on solar
45:16
nebs, India can get in early on mycoprotein production, cell
45:22
culture media production, plant protein production on the cell
45:27
culture media production. More than 60% of global vaccines
45:30
are manufactured in India. That's the same kind of
45:34
infrastructure and expertise that you need for the media for
45:38
culture cultivated meat. It's almost all happening in the
45:40
state of Telangana, very near the city of Hyderabad.
45:44
And we're in we're in, you know, conversations with them about
45:47
becoming producer to the world and, and bringing them the price
45:50
of of that media even more on the mycoprotein and plant
45:53
protein. India also has more malnutrition
45:56
than any other country in the world.
45:58
Not the highest rates, but certainly the highest numbers.
46:01
And a big part of that is that their feeding programs are
46:03
focused on rice and wheat, which are both low in protein and
46:07
have, you know, the protein that they have is is fairly, you
46:10
know, low in bioavailability with mycoprotein or soy protein,
46:13
either of which India has the raw materials to produce that
46:17
volume. You'd be producing something
46:20
that has the same bio available availability percentages and
46:24
much higher protein content than even the animal products.
46:27
So this could be a part of solving their stunting, wasting
46:30
malnutrition problem even as as it ramped up, they became
46:34
supplier to the world. The analysis in some place like
46:38
Brazil is going to be similar. Looking at Southeast Asia,
46:41
Thailand is going to to be similar in Thailand and they
46:43
have CP Foods, which is like the 5th or 6th largest meat company
46:47
in the world and is already very enthusiastic about alternative
46:51
proteins, plant based and cultivated meat.
46:53
They also have production capacity, you know, not at
46:58
India's level, but certainly significant.
47:00
So it could be a part of feeding people in Thailand and also
47:04
giving Thailand a new industry. I think they're focused on EV
47:08
batteries at the moment, which is pretty high in another really
47:11
sort of high competition industry to be focused on.
47:14
Same sort of thing happening with Indonesia.
47:17
The Indonesian government is trying to plug into the global
47:20
energy transition and that's going OK, but they could be on
47:24
the ground floor of this. They also have a very
47:27
forward-looking school lunch meals feeding program, similar
47:32
to Indian feeding programs. So Indonesia could also be a
47:36
supplier to the world even as it's solving some of their
47:39
internal problems and creating a very inexpensive way of
47:42
producing high protein foods. And then Africa, it's similar,
47:48
but just the African ecosystem is a lot harder.
47:50
Obviously, that's why Africa imports so much food despite
47:55
they're having significant productivity.
47:56
They're both importing food and exporting food in ways that
47:59
really present a conundrum. There is, you know, I talk in
48:02
the book about the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition,
48:05
Sarah Lahaye, when she was at One Acre, as you mentioned, in
48:09
Africa, it really is how much meat can we eat.
48:13
I think that's partly status. It's also just partly dense
48:18
calories, high nutrition, and something like mycoprotein or
48:22
plant protein does satisfy that need.
48:27
And One Acre Fund has found that in ways that are pretty
48:31
fascinating. I tell a couple of those stories
48:32
in the book. And then there's another
48:34
organization called Essential, a guy named Grant Gordon, who's
48:38
been in global development for his entire professional career.
48:41
They're now based in Nigeria. They're operating and I think
48:43
four African countries. And they're focused on
48:46
mycoprotein production, again, to create high quality protein
48:51
as inefficiently as possible. And then the other thing that
48:54
they're really focused on is climate resilience.
48:57
So Michael Kramer, the Nobel laureate in economics from the
49:00
University of Chicago, for his global development work, we GFI
49:04
worked with him, with his team at the University of Chicago,
49:07
which was looking at, you know, what are interventions that can
49:10
mitigate emissions, offer climate resilience and allow
49:17
more hungry people to be fed. And one of the recommendations
49:21
is alternative proteins on the basis of conversations with us
49:25
and conversations with Grant Gordon at Essential really is a
49:28
huge climate resilience intervention in addition to
49:32
being a mitigation intervention and A food security
49:35
intervention. So you can produce mycoprotein,
49:38
you know, 365 days a week, a year and 24 hours a day, no
49:42
matter what the weather is. So crop losses, animal losses
49:46
from, you know, drought or heat waves don't to the same degree
49:50
adversely impact something like mycoprotein production.
49:54
So that's another really powerful possibility in Africa.
49:58
I'm worried that Europe's going to find itself left behind
50:00
again. I mean, Europe's current protein
50:03
model is to import large amounts of feed from, well, Brazil and
50:06
the United States feed it to pigs and cattle in the EU have
50:10
to deal with all of them and you're going into the rivers and
50:12
so on. So it's, it's completely protein
50:15
insecure in that sense. And then when this new sector
50:18
comes along, they, they seem to be mostly focused on saying no
50:22
and putting huge regulatory roadblocks up.
50:25
We were at some solar foods. We planet held a Co hosted
50:29
alternative proteins festival actually in Finland at the in
50:33
September last year. And we went to solar foods and
50:35
they let us try some of their, their products, but of course
50:38
you can't actually buy them. And they so solar foods told us
50:42
that they'd been supported by the EU.
50:44
You know, they've given them a couple of 10s of millions of
50:46
EUR. I can't remember exactly what
50:48
the figure was. But then when they sent the
50:51
dossier saying can we please sell it, you know, six years
50:54
ago, they still haven't opened the e-mail.
50:55
I mean, it's just insane how difficult it is to actually
50:59
bring any of these products to market in Europe.
51:00
And so that the prospect of this whole new industry doesn't seem
51:04
to be enough to convince the politicians or whoever it is to,
51:07
to make a more, you know, a more innovation friendly environment.
51:12
Yeah. I mean, we are chipping, you
51:13
know, the GFI Europe team is chipping away at it, and I think
51:16
they're making progress. So, you know, Germany obviously
51:19
remembers that they put $200 billion into, you know, there is
51:23
no, you know, solar is now shooting up the S curve.
51:24
That does not happen without Germany's $200 billion solar
51:28
incentive. And all that production went to
51:30
China, which obviously they're not thrilled about.
51:33
So we were really heartened to see the Science Advisory Council
51:38
to the German AG Ministry put out a it was 350 page
51:42
alternative proteins report focused on how do we make sure
51:46
that this industry is in Germany and the EU and doesn't dominate
51:51
elsewhere. And China is ramping up on
51:53
alternative proteins. If you look at the 20 most
51:56
active patent applicants and assignees globally over the last
52:01
six years, 8 of them are in China, three are in Korea, and
52:05
three are in the US. Sorry.
52:06
Yeah, 3 in Korea, 3 in the US, three in Israel, 8 in China.
52:10
And in China almost all of them are universities.
52:13
So it's not private IP that's going to, you know, it's not
52:17
private that's going to be protected by IP, which is most
52:19
of the rest of the world. So China is kind of the odds on
52:22
favorite on this as well. And if China starts producing,
52:26
you know, meat, dairy and eggs significantly less expensively
52:29
than Europe can, because they're shifting in the direction of
52:33
doing it from plants and and using, you know, growing it in
52:36
factories much more efficiently, that's going to leave Europe in
52:39
the dust. I do think we're seeing in
52:41
Switzerland into the UK significant ramping up and
52:46
understanding of where sort of global competition for
52:50
agriculture and economics and the promise of alternative
52:54
proteins. And we're seeing it to some
52:55
degree in the EU. It's just a much harder to
52:59
reconcile all of the member states when they disagree.
53:04
But it's a pretty new argument. So it feels to me like, it feels
53:07
to me like things like the systemic report and the Green
53:11
Alliance report looking at the opportunities for Europe
53:16
economically, jobs, food security are the way to go.
53:21
And I think we will, I think we'll continue to see growing
53:23
support and understanding really for self interested reasons, you
53:27
know, not knock on wood. I hope so because it certainly
53:29
is the case that, you know, if you're looking globally, even
53:32
the US, you know, it was Donald Trump's National Science
53:35
Foundation that gave the first major government grant in 15
53:38
years since the Netherlands did it in something like 2005, was
53:43
Donald Trump's FDA and USDA that rolled out the red carpet.
53:48
So we don't need new regulations for cultivated meat.
53:51
And so now there are more approvals in the US than I think
53:53
the rest of the world combined. Trump in his first 90 days
53:57
approved more cultivated meat, private products, and then Biden
54:00
did in four years. And certainly, you know, the
54:03
Defense Department, AG department, like they're not all
54:07
in on it, but they are. RFK junior probably isn't in.
54:11
I mean he's as bad as anti science as it's possible to get
54:14
him just about everything. I mean surprise me.
54:16
Maybe, maybe then maybe that's not what's going on.
54:18
He hasn't taken a position he, you know, nobody has been no
54:23
public figure has been more opposed to industrial animal
54:26
farming than RFK. So the fact that it is a much
54:30
more efficient way and much less polluting way, and also that
54:36
something like cultivated meat is just a cleaner product.
54:39
Like if what you're concerned about is ultra processed foods,
54:42
and I know you did a did a show on this so we don't need to dive
54:45
into it. But if that's your concern,
54:47
cultivated meat, the US government has regulations that
54:50
have safe levels of roughly 100 drugs, including things like
54:55
ractopamine, penicillin, all kinds of things.
54:58
When they measure antibiotic residues in meat, even organic
55:02
meat, they find that 1/5 of organic meat, which isn't
55:05
supposed to use antibiotics, has measurable levels of
55:08
antibiotics. Just from a, you know, whatever
55:10
it is that concerns you about ultra processed foods from a
55:13
health standpoint gets better with cultivated meat.
55:17
So I don't, I don't know what RFK thinks about it, but I, I
55:20
think, I think we could make a pretty strong case within the
55:23
construct of stuff that matters to him and.
55:26
And what's, what does the environmental movement think
55:29
about it? Because all the kind of grass
55:31
fed beef type, organic type people, I mean, it's all about
55:35
things being natural, right? And as far as so my hunch is
55:38
that they're, oh, lab meat, pink slime tech, eco modernism, which
55:43
is all terribly bad. But maybe that's not the case.
55:45
I mean, it's the environmental movement split on this.
55:47
Or do you find that they're largely supporting your position
55:50
or against? I mean, what's your, what's your
55:53
hunch so far? I mean, the World Resources
55:56
Institute is very supportive. The World Economic Forum,
55:59
obviously not an explicitly environmental group, but even at
56:03
like the height of their environmental consciousness,
56:05
very supportive kind of early, you know, WEF was early
56:08
adopters, people like Bill Gates, very supportive.
56:13
You know, the real leaders I think have probably been the
56:15
World Resources Institute has really been fantastic on this
56:21
issue. There's an advisory called
56:22
Climate Advisors now the basis our fund is all in funding
56:27
centers around the world including alternative proteins
56:29
in their $100 million challenge for climate in nature.
56:33
Of the 1st 25 stores starter grants, nine of them were
56:37
alternative proteins. Of the recent eight or nine
56:40
grants, I think it was at $2,000,000 each, Four of them
56:43
were alternative proteins. So there are some sort of
56:47
smaller organizations like the Organic Consumer Association,
56:51
which is also anti vaccine in the US, So they're anti.
56:54
GMO the anti GMO crowd as well I guess which which they are as
56:58
well. Yeah, I mean, the juries, some
57:00
anti GMO people are not concerned as long as you're not
57:05
using genetic modification in the production, but they're
57:08
supportive of alternative proteins just because what
57:11
they're replacing is, you know, they're just such a huge
57:15
advantage for air and water, you know, everything.
57:18
So they're supportive. But yeah, there is, there is
57:21
some, but at least in the US, it's the, you know, sort of
57:23
smallest and most niche groups. No major environmental
57:29
organization that I can think of has expressed opposition, and a
57:33
lot of them have expressed support, even if they're not
57:36
leaning in as much as I wish they would.
57:39
I don't mean we, we plan to been working on this issue for a year
57:43
or so. We've just secured a couple of
57:44
major grants on it. So we'll be doing a lot more.
57:47
And I don't think we've had, we don't get anything like the
57:50
pushback that we get on GMOs or on nuclear or some of these more
57:53
controversial things, which is encouraging.
57:55
I mean, it's easier to, I don't know, score.
57:57
It's an open goal, I guess than when you've got a lot more
58:01
roadblocks in the way to mix my metaphors.
58:04
But just finish up. I think it's, it's good actually
58:07
to, you know, because we get, we get in very much in the weeds
58:10
about all of this. But just to go back to the
58:12
bigger picture here, like we, I actually think we could be
58:15
really optimistic about about the future, like about the 21st
58:20
century with this technology and all of the new opportunities
58:23
that there are with clean energy, we can tackle the
58:27
majority of the carbon dioxide problem.
58:29
We know already how to do it. And the technologies are cheaper
58:31
than fossil and are really upscaling really rapidly
58:34
worldwide. So we're beginning to make a
58:36
dent on that, on that issue. And with this, you've got land
58:40
use and potentially you can reverse biodiversity loss and
58:43
rewild huge areas of the planet, bring back disappearing
58:46
rainforests. I mean, that's the other big
58:48
global problem. And also if we can stop
58:51
destroying the oceans at the same time, so much the better, I
58:53
guess. And you do this really, really
58:55
effectively in the book is to present that positive vision to
58:58
really get people enthusiastic about this is is is perhaps the
59:02
way to to to really build the momentum that we need to really
59:05
move this forward. Yeah.
59:07
I mean, in the book I try to be both clear eyed, say it's not
59:10
self executing, it's not going to happen automatically, but
59:13
also to say all of the science appears to be positive.
59:17
What we have done and even the last five or six years is really
59:22
significant progress. And if we continue to lean in,
59:26
if we continue on the trajectory of especially scientific and
59:30
government support, super optimistic that we can make it
59:34
happen. And then to really underline how
59:37
critically important it is because you look at something
59:40
like livestock long Shadow from the UN Food and Agriculture
59:43
Organization that's now 20 years old.
59:45
They released that in 2006. At the time, they said animal
59:49
product production is one of the top three causes of every major
59:54
environmental problem, from the smallest and most local to the
59:57
largest and most global. They called out air and water
1:00:00
pollution, soil depletion, climate change, deforestation,
1:00:04
really all of it. And in the 20 years since, we
1:00:08
went from 266 million metric tons of landing on me to 40%
1:00:13
more, another 104 million metric tons of landing on me.
1:00:17
All projections are we're going to do something like that again
1:00:20
over the next. 20 years. And if that happens, all of
1:00:24
these problems get worse. Everything from antimicrobial
1:00:27
resistance and pandemic risk to hunger and malnutrition because
1:00:31
of the inefficiency of cycling crops through animals drives up
1:00:34
prices and for both land and food, which leads to hunger and
1:00:37
malnutrition. That's chapter one of the book.
1:00:40
But governments recognize the economic opportunity, they
1:00:43
recognize the food security and food self-sufficiency
1:00:45
opportunity. So if you flashback 10 years,
1:00:48
there've been 4 peer reviewed papers ever on cultivated meat.
1:00:53
Last year there were more than 160 through the end of 2016.
1:00:57
So 9 years ago there were 10 patents ever.
1:01:00
Now there are more than 1000. If we've been sitting here 10
1:01:03
years ago right now, there would have been no investments
1:01:06
announced and cultivated meat ever.
1:01:08
There was one for $125,000, but just one, The company that's now
1:01:13
Upside Foods, you know, could go on and on.
1:01:17
So we have a long way to go. But for 10 years we've also,
1:01:20
we've also also made quite a lot of progress.
1:01:22
And the book tries to be both cautious and optimistic and to
1:01:26
challenge people who are looking to make a huge difference across
1:01:30
these areas. This is 1 area where you can do
1:01:32
that. Well, that's why I wanted the
1:01:34
bad idea to be just to go vegan. Producer Rob is going to kill me
1:01:38
if I don't really nails down and have something simple which fits
1:01:41
on a, you know, little bit of little slide for an Instagram
1:01:44
post or something. You're actually going to insist
1:01:46
that we can't have that? Well, I mean, I really do think
1:01:49
I wouldn't be here. An awful lot of people at GFI
1:01:52
wouldn't have joined GFII think most of these companies wouldn't
1:01:55
exist. Even when I'm talking to
1:01:56
scientists, you know, tissue engineers, stem cell Mechanical
1:02:00
Engineers, etcetera. Like a lot of people have
1:02:02
aligned to their vocation with their diet and it was the moral
1:02:06
urgency of the vegan call that got them interested.
1:02:09
So will veganism change the upward trajectory?
1:02:13
No. And maybe that's click baity,
1:02:16
but I really think, I really do think energy transition is
1:02:20
enough is a much bigger deal. We we really need the, you know,
1:02:26
sort of global policy community, the multilaterals like, you
1:02:29
know, the UNEPUN environment program released a phenomenal
1:02:33
report called What's cooking on alternative proteins.
1:02:36
But among multilaterals, that's it.
1:02:38
Probably every climate or nature think tank on the planet has
1:02:42
looked at Cdr and like IIASAI think is the only one that's
1:02:48
looked at alternative proteins. So it seems to me like, you
1:02:52
know, the one that does more good and that is also the bigger
1:02:56
bad, You know, the worst idea is the idea that we can rest on our
1:03:00
energy laurels and everything will be fine.
1:03:03
Well, producer Rob and I are going to have to sit down, think
1:03:04
of a click baity way to summarize that because we're all
1:03:07
about click bait here and saving them all for bad ideas.
1:03:09
But Bruce, I just want to thank you for sharing your time with
1:03:13
us. Is the book out now?
1:03:14
Can people get hold of it straight away?
1:03:17
Tuesday, Tuesday being, I don't know when this is going out,
1:03:20
probably in a week or so, but Tuesday being the beginning,
1:03:23
beginning of February, right? Yeah, I mean, I, I don't know if
1:03:26
you want to go all the way to, you know, the climate, the
1:03:28
climate movement is extraordinarily and I just like,
1:03:33
you know, I think I, I guess I don't open the book, but like in
1:03:36
the book I talk about the secretary general being so clear
1:03:40
eyed about energy transition and ignoring food transition, like
1:03:44
their goals, you know, ideas that line.
1:03:47
We're on a highway to hell with our foot on the accelerator and
1:03:51
everything he's advocating like shifts our foot up a little bit
1:03:55
but keeps it on the accelerator. So the sort of global climate
1:03:59
and deforestation communities are basically their big
1:04:04
complaint against the world as you're ignoring what is already
1:04:07
a catastrophe and it's getting worse and they're ignoring.
1:04:10
It's something that if they continue to ignore it, they
1:04:13
can't solve their problems. Well, they probably are Lego
1:04:16
meat. I'm sure the UNSG is the same as
1:04:18
all the rest of us. So.
1:04:19
But this allows them to have their meat.
1:04:21
Absolutely. And that's that's why I think
1:04:22
your book is so important because I mean, it's the same
1:04:25
for energy. No one stopped driving when the
1:04:27
first IPCC report came out. They needed a new technology
1:04:31
which provided the same benefits and the same services.
1:04:33
And we need proteins which have the same taste profile and the
1:04:37
same cost as as meat. And I think we're making a lot
1:04:40
of progress in that direction in your book and you've just
1:04:43
eloquently explain more about it on on this show, for which I'm
1:04:46
I'm super grateful. We'll let you go, Bruce, But
1:04:49
thanks again. And please, everyone do purchase
1:04:52
the book. It will be out when you are
1:04:54
listening to this and it's called meet How the next
1:04:57
agricultural revolution will transform humanity's favorite
1:04:59
food and our future by Bruce Friedrich.
1:05:02
Yes, holding it up right now. Thanks again, Bruce and and
1:05:05
we'll, we'll reconnect with you soon.
1:05:07
Awesome. Thank you so much, Mark.
1:05:08
I really enjoyed our conversation.
1:05:13
Thanks so much for listening to Saving the World from Bad Ideas,
1:05:15
a Weplanet podcast. Weplanet's a movement of
1:05:18
citizens and scientists dedicated to defending the
1:05:20
science and solutions we need to save the world.
1:05:23
Please do subscribe and share a nice review.
1:05:25
It helps us spread the message. We'd also love to hear your
1:05:27
feedback and suggestions at our e-mail podcast at weplanet.org.
1:05:31
Please also join our podcast mailing list and we'll let you
1:05:34
know when a new episode drops. Just go to Saving the World from
1:05:37
badideas.org or weplanet.org/podcast right now.
1:05:41
See you next time.