I’ve recently written about a startup tech company that aims to manufacture artificial meat by fermenting CO2. While the vegans can keep their fake meat, at least the technology seems like a promising addition to the suite of engineering solutions to human CO2 emissions. Certainly, if you believe the green zealots of the Krazy Klimate Kult, the future is plant-based. Heck, even James Cameron swears by it, and he’d know, surely?
But, as so often is the case, when green fantasies are put under the microscope, they turn out to be just so much bullshit.
The environmental credentials of alternative proteins and plant-based foods are increasingly being scrutinised by scientists and academics and the report card is far from rosy.
Some experts are now warning the spin doctoring employed by promoters of fake beef is distracting from real climate solutions and the big polluters.
Ultra-processed plant foods do not stack up as a climate-friendly alternative to natural red meat, they say.
Wait, are they telling us that James Cameron is full of it? The guy who tells us all to make do with less while he flits about the planet from mansion to mansion in his fleet of private jets, helicopters, submarines…
Next, they’ll have us suspecting that climate change zealots are just hypocritical arseholes.
So does this mean that New Zealand dairy farmers don’t have to slaughter all their cows after all?
Professor Frank Mitloehner, from the University of California Davis’ Department of Animal Science, is at the forefront of cutting-edge research into quantifying and reducing animal agriculture’s environmental footprint. He will be a keynote CQUniversity Beef Australia Symposium speaker at Beef Australia in Rockhampton in early May.
He says animal agriculture certainly has a role in carbon emissions but it is not a lead offender and its impact is being depicted in a ‘drastically overblown’ manner[…]
Prof Mitloehner said the anti-animal food source lobby had deliberately honed in on climate to push its agenda.
“Where they once relied on the animal rights card, climate is proving more effective,” he said.
Wait, you mean it’s all just about big corporations making money? Never!
Associate Professor Alana Mann, from the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, is a political economist in food studies whose research focuses on the international food sovereignty movement and other efforts to democratise food systems.
She says scientists are calling out the false promise that ultra-processed plant products are a climate-friendly alternative to meat.
She has just published a book, Food in a Changing Climate, that, among other messages, interrogates the question of whether plant-based foods could be doing more harm than good.
She says the misperception that ‘alternatives’ are more planet-friendly has not only been driven by the animal rights lobby but by big food corporations who have identified ‘just another great market for processed food'[…]
“Almond milk is a good example. They did so well out of demonising dairy production. In fact, it takes enormous amounts of water to produce almond milk,” she said.
Queensland Country Life
It’s just one of the great hypocrisies of the green movement that they fetishise “natural” and “organic”, yet at the same time promote the most heavily-processed, industrialised fake garbage, with a gargantuan carbon footprint, as somehow “saving the planet”.
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