Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change - Fake Meat, What’s The Beef? Ep166: Bruce Friedrich

Fake Meat, What’s The Beef? Ep166: Bruce Friedrich

06/12/24 • 65 min

Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Has science cracked the code on mass producing realistic meat substitutes? Or are lab-gown alternative proteins an impossible dream? In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, Baroness Bryony Worthington sits down with president of the Good Food Institute, Bruce Friedrich, to explore the future of food. Friedrich details his vision for a more sustainable food system through technologies like plant-based and cultivated meat and outlines the promising progress and significant challenges remaining in scaling these novel proteins. Worthington and Friedrich debate the roles of policy, public opinion, and big agriculture in determining whether alternative proteins can truly transform our food system or remain forever niche.

Links and more:

The Good Food Institute (https://gfi.org)
TEA of cultivated meat. Future projections for different scenarios (https://cedelft.eu/publications/tea-of-cultivated-meat/)
A new land dividend: the opportunity of alternative proteins in Europe (https://green-alliance.org.uk/publication/a-new-land-dividend-the-opportunity-of-alternative-proteins-in-europe/)
Recipe for a Livable Planet: Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System: (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/406c71a3-c13f-49cd-8f3f-a071715858fb)
UNEP Report on alternative proteins (https://www.unep.org/resources/whats-cooking-assessment-potential-impacts-selected-novel-alternatives-conventional)
Episode 136 with Jim Mellon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqFPic5iqds)

Links and more:

The Good Food Institute (https://gfi.org)
TEA of cultivated meat. Future projections for different scenarios (https://cedelft.eu/publications/tea-of-cultivated-meat/)
A new land dividend: the opportunity of alternative proteins in Europe (https://green-alliance.org.uk/publication/a-new-land-dividend-the-opportunity-of-alternative-proteins-in-europe/)
Recipe for a Livable Planet: Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System: (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/406c71a3-c13f-49cd-8f3f-a071715858fb)
UNEP Report on alternative proteins (https://www.unep.org/resources/whats-cooking-assessment-potential-impacts-selected-novel-alternatives-conventional)
Episode 136 with Jim Mellon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqFPic5iqds)

Previous Episode

Battery Recycling Is Here - But Where Are The Batteries? - Ep165: Hans Eric Melin

As everyone knows, battery prices are plummeting and manufacturing volumes are soaring, whether for EVs or for grid-connected storage. And everyone knows there's a problem: only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. The rest go to landfill, right? Wrong. This week's guest on Cleaning Up is the world's preeminent expert on battery recycling. Hans Eric Melin is the Founder and Managing Director of Circular Energy Storage.

Circular Energy Storage is a London-based data collection and analytics consultancy focused on the lithium-ion battery end-of-life market. They help companies and organisations in the entire battery value chain to take better decisions in everything that relates to reuse and recycling of lithium-ion batteries. They do this by continuously collecting, analysing and publishing data from all parts of the value chain worldwide and by working actively with customers in their strategy and business development.

Please like, subscribe and leave a review. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, and sign up for the Cleaning Up newsletter at https://cleaninguppod.substack.com.

Links and more:

Circular Energy Storage: https://circularenergystorage.com/about

Hans' LinkedIn post on the false narratives around lithium-ion battery recycling rates: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-rate-other-untruths-battery-recycling-hans-eric-melin-m5lde

Hans' more extensive research report explaining the real rates: https://www.energimyndigheten.se/globalassets/forskning--innovation/overgripande/state-of-the-art-in-reuse-and-recycling-of-lithium-ion-batteries-2019.pdf

The 2023 Battery Materials Review Yearbook, featuring a chapter authored by Hans: https://www.batterymaterialsreview.com/products/

The 2016 paper Hans mentioned, featuring the 95% landfill rate: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11837-016-1994-y

Next Episode

Texas Hold'em: Playing Poker With Methane - Ep167: Grant Swartzwelder

Depending on who you ask, methane is either a useful transition fuel to a low-carbon future, or a super polluter. The science of methane says that for natural gas to have a lower climate footprint than other fossil fuels, particularly coal, there can be leakage of no more than 3.2% from end to end. Yet studies across the US show wildly different leakage rates. One of the most influential, by Robert Howarth of Cornell University, puts it at 4.8%, making methane worse for the environment than coal. The EPA tells a different story, and says leakage rates are just 0.93%. All of this really matters for the climate, especially since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The US has become the world's biggest producer and exporter of natural gas, and hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested globally on the premise that natural gas is a cleaner stop-gap between our fossil present and our low-carbon future. So who's right? And how can we find ways to reduce those methane emissions in either case. Grant Swartzwelder, founder of OTA Environmental Solutions and ESG Dynamics, based in Dallas, Texas, joins Cleaning Up to tease out the problem.

Episode Update (Dec 2024)

The 3.2% figure refers to the relative warming impact of coal-fired power generation versus national gas with a given level of leakage on day one - when all of the methane is still in the atmosphere. As methane decays in the atmosphere faster than CO2 is absorbed, the “breakeven” level of fugitive emissions increases as you look at longer periods. If you take the standard 100-year warming period, fugitive emissions from natural gas would need to be around 8% - well above those measured in the US – for gas power to be as bad as coal power. At 20 years the figure is around 4%. (source: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1202407109)
The 4.8% figure has been modified by Professor Howarth subsequent to the release of the episode, based on critiques received when it was in pre-print. Criticism continues, however, and one proposed corrected analysis shows that 100-year GHG intensity of LNG that are at most 15% below the lowest general estimates for coal-fired power. (source: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/a-major-paper-on-liquified-natural-gas-emissions-is-riddled-with-errors)