Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that rich countries need to switch from real beef to synthetic, plant-based alternatives as a way to combat climate change.
“I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time,” Gates said during an interview with MIT Technology Review. “Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.”
Gates said one of the challenges of switching to fake beef would be political, thanks to bills that would require the synthetic alternative to come with a label warning that the product isn’t the real thing.
“So for meat in the middle-income-and-above countries, I do think it’s possible,” Gates said. “But it’s one of those ones where, wow, you have to track it every year and see, and the politics [are challenging]. There are all these bills that say it’s got to be called, basically, lab garbage to be sold. They don’t want us to use the beef label.”
The billionaire, however, admitted that beef producers in the United States, a country that he would want to switch over to synthetic beef, are much better at reducing the emissions associated with beef production than poorer nations.
“For Africa and other poor countries, we’ll have to use animal genetics to dramatically raise the amount of beef per emissions for them,” Gates said. “Weirdly, the US livestock, because they’re so productive, the emissions per pound of beef are dramatically less than emissions per pound in Africa.”
The comments came during a wide-ranging interview about the billionaire’s new book, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster. The book details his perspective on what it will take to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions while detailing his efforts to invest in technologies that could help society overcome climate change.
