I'm an angel investor in both plant based meat and clean meat and I'm actually more optimistic for plant based meat becoming better than animal meat in the short term. The rate of innovation has been really impressive and momentum is picking up steam.. once prices get under animal meat huge amounts of people will switch
Hopefully carbon taxes and such would kick in at some point and would include the real environmental cost of beef, so the switching to plant based beef would be even more swift.
Beef only is responsible for 3% of greenhouse gasses in America. I'm not sure an "emission" tax would really affect the price all that much. In addition, you have to account for and tax the emissions produced in plant production (fertilizer, agricultural soil, transportation, etc...). Agriculture is a total of 9%, whereas livestock only accounts for 3% of that.
I work for agriculture companies, and a lot of animal feed comes from by-products of other agricultural products. For example, beet pulp pellets, raffinate, betaine, molasses are all by products of sugar production and are used for animal feed extensively. They are cheap and very shelf stable.
According Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the UN 2006 report livestock were responsible for 18% of all human-related greenhouse gas production. 14.5% according to 2013 report.
Of that 43% is Enteric.
There may only be 9% GHG emissions in the US, but beef also comes from other countries where these emissions are very different. See Regional and Production System differences.
From the article -- There was an approximately 4-fold difference in emission intensity between the top 10% of producers and the bottom 10% of producers within a system.
You are right, but I was discussing in reference to a U.S. based emissions "tax". Maybe I misunderstood and they were suggesting a worldwide tax? Not sure how that would work.
If the U.S. were to tax agriculture production of beef, I'm assuming that would be for U.S. farmers so the relevant statistic is emissions in the U.S.
Minor note; "Manure management accounts for about 15 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the Agriculture economic sector in the United States."
If you include the emissions from manure management you end with 45% of all emissions emanating from livestock production.
Plant based products have similar transport & manufacturing impact so I am not including that.
In addition, for feeding often this comes from by-products of plant production (sugar by-products, etc...). The only reason corn is so popular imo is because it is so heavily subsidized by our government making it dirt cheap. But grass fed beef is a thing and it's on par or even quite a bit cheaper price wise than fake meat.
I think ultimately the price will be determined through government subsidies. Current Meat and Dairy Industry receives massive subsidies (~38$Bn) and the lobbying groups won't appreciate a cut of profits.
Right now plant based meat is well under 1 percent of the meat market in the US and it's realistic it could become the majority within 10 years. Who will get the bulk of that is up for grabs, I invested in a smaller competitor to beyond and impossible which had a much lower valuation but with product I think it's right up there with them. Personally I'm a big supporter of them all
I'm really bullish on the possibility of a wide range of competitors for any given meat alternative. There are probably 10+ different brands of prepackaged beef burgers at most grocery stores, and there's a lot more room for differentiation if you're building a product from scratch than if you're just deciding which cows to grind up and shape into a patty.
Do you mind sharing the name of the company you're referring to? I'm always looking to try new options and support companies in the space.
