Tag Archives: climate change

The Pale Blue Dot

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Originally posted on my Post.news account

Last night I dreamed about being in a war, in an old abandoned building with my comrades, working on some vague military intelligence. Then I realized that water was lapping at the ledges of our second floor windows. Water had swallowed the floor below us, and we were aware it might not be done rising. We worked to hike our electronics onto high points and waited. And then I woke up.

It wasn’t a nightmare. That’s the puzzling part. I was reminded of our climate crisis, which assails us every day, but is so gradual and varied it doesn’t cause panic. Just reactive measures.

I’m listening right now to this song that samples heavily the wise and gentle words of the late astronomer Carl Sagan. He reminds us that we’re alone in the universe and we need to take responsibility to save ourselves.

“No hint [from our monitoring of the universe] that help will come from elsewhere to save us.”

No-kill is brilliant branding. The lives saved may be our future generations

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For nearly a decade I’ve been crowing about our plodding progress toward lab-grown meat. The biggest barriers are from two realms: Scalability and consumer psychology. This piece in The Guardian describes how Eat Just seems to have addressed both. I couldn’t be more thrilled, and for reasons I’ll get into below, you should too.

Now being test-marketed in Singapore, their lab-grown chicken nuggets (made with other plant-based ingredients) have found a way to scale production of meat from chicken stem cells.

They’ve also addressed the “yuck factor” that can hinder consumer trial by emphasizing the humane nature of their product. “No-kill” is brilliant marketing.

Saving Our Planet While Sating Our Desire for Meat

What you might not realize is the life that is saved may be our climate, and possibly our very species. As I described in detail in my 2011 post, raising livestock not only harms our environment to the extreme (greenhouse gases, deforestation, fresh water depletion) but our very gut biome (the majority of antibiotics are used on livestock and not humans). And don’t forget the horrific working conditions that seems to be intractable within the factory meat industry.

For these reasons, I’m optimistic that we are finally making progress in addressing our evolutionary hunger for meat with products that do not introduce death throughout the farm-to-table equation.