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What If You Could Eat Chicken Without Killing a Chicken? (theoutline.com)
From a report on The Outline: San Francisco-based startup Memphis Meats announced this week that it had grown chicken in a lab -- chicken strips, to be precise. The strips, which were grown using self-reproducing cells, are technically "meat," but because the cells were not from an animal, the process by which this "meat" was "raised" is much cleaner, resulting in animal food that has the potential to sate both environmental groups as well as animal rights activists and vegetarians. Memphis Meats says it's hoping the product is ready for commercial sale by 2021. The company is part of an ever-increasing horde of Silicon Valley startups trying to solve the complicated problems of the meat industry, which range from cultural ideas about food to industrial and environmental issues to, increasingly, discussions about animal cruelty. [...] About 99 percent of animals raised for slaughter in the U.S. come from factory farms, and about a third of the land mass of the Earth is used in raising livestock. More so than chicken, livestock is incredibly inefficient to raise: It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of beef.
Just go to Subway!
Polluters do not pay the cost to clean up their mess. That's why some things are cheaper than they should be.
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If this stuff is so much less taxing on the environment it should be much cheaper to produce.
Econ 101. Look up the word "externalities".
I don't respond to AC's.
Well, in case of meat production — or indeed any other Earth-bound activity — no water is lost. Zero. Nada. So, what is the quoted statement supposed to mean?
Yes, the net amount of water stays the same on Earth, but some water is more useful than others. E.g. fresh is more useful than salty, treated is more useful than not, a unit of water in the Sahara is more useful than a unit of water in Canada. When we "use" water, we often turn useful water into not useful water, or move it from a place where it's useful to a place where it's less useful.
Plus there's the issue where much of the water we "use" comes from groundwater sources, which can be completely non-renewable on any sort of human timescale.
Did you know Chernobyl won't be clean for literally millions of years?
Apparently, w/o human intrusion for 30 years, the land around Chernobyl is thriving with life.
http://news.nationalgeographic...
An interesting quotable from this article...
Essentially, this means that human populations have a bigger negative impact than radiation.
So what? Water is an effectively infinite global resource and it isn't ever actually consumed (i.e. lost).
Non-contaminated fresh water is not an infinite resource in any sense of the term. Water is only an infinite resource if you also assume energy (to decontaminate and desalinate) is also an infinite resource (it isn't).