Here We Go Again

LEE PITTS

Wasn’t it just last week that the beef industry got its tail all in a twist because plant-based meat was going to put us all out of business? Actually, it was more like ten years ago. In 2014, I wrote my first story about fake meat called “Bogus Burger” which was all about what is now called the altMeat movement, as in alternative meat. If I were to write a similar story today about plant-based beef I’d call it “The Flop of the Fakes” because after all the big build up, plant-based meat fizzled out like a leftover can of soda pop the morning after the night before.

Also in 2014, I wrote about a totally different kind of alternative beef in which beef wasn’t replaced by plants but was instead made in a lab. I called that story “The Theoretical Burger” because it was more of a wish than a real product and if it was actually made back then it would have been a white soggy blob that you could have called the “Other, Other White Meat.” Catchy, don’t you think? Although I’m sure that pork producers wouldn’t have been too amused.

We didn’t know a lot about lab-meat back then other than it was raised from stem cells, fed horse fetuses, and grown on Velcro. We didn’t know how many horse fetuses were needed to produce a pound of gain or the lab-meat’s average daily gain. Heck, we didn’t even know what it tasted like. We did know that back then this theoretical burger would have cost $365,000 to produce and you would have had to wait in line a long time to get one. Like maybe a year, which was how long it took to make one.

Oh, by the way, did you want to super-size that?

Now, less than a decade later, two fake-fake meat companies have been given the green light to start selling chicken that was made in a lab. There’s even a restaurant in Israel called “The that was cooked and served in the same building it was made in! And from all reports it looks and tastes just like real chicken which should come as no surprise because that’s exactly what it is - real chicken! The bad news for beef producers is that consumer research indicates that a majority of consumers are willing to try cultivated meat and perhaps even pay a premium for it.

You’re Next collectively, than other farmed animals. And it really irks greenies when they hear claims that “more than one-third of Earth’s ice-free land and tens of millions of acres of rainforest teeming with the bulk of our planet’s biodiversity supposedly have been replaced with fields of chicken feed.”

by LEE PITTS

American Eulogy

Chicken” that allows patrons to dine on lab-made chicken

The future has arrived and meat scientists, or rather meat engineers, say that lab-beef will be the next meat after chicken that will be coming to a store near you. Chicken was first because more people eat more chicken than any other meat in the world. It’s also an environmental issue because chickens supposedly consume more food,

‘We Are Totally Awash in Pseudoscience’: Nobel PrizeWinning Physicist on Climate Agenda

BY NATHAN WORCESTER / EPOCH TIMES

Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser isn’t afraid to go against the flow.

In a July 26 interview with The Epoch Times, Mr. Clauser explained that he carried out his early research on quantum mechanics against opposition from some in the field.

As a young man, he conducted the first experiment to demonstrate the reality of nonlocal quantum entanglement—the linkage between multiple particles across any physical distance. Many years later, that groundbreaking work earned him one-third of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Today, the 80-year-old scientist is up against another establishment. This time, though, he isn’t violating a prediction so as to rule out an alternative explanation to quantum mechanics. He’s violating a taboo that has slowly but surely become one of the biggest in science and politics.

“I am, I guess, what you would call a ‘climate change denialist,’” Mr. Clauser told The Epoch Times.

continued on page 4

But we’re getting slightly ahead of ourselves. Let’s review. It was a decade ago that Dutch scientist Mark Post unveiled the first lab-beef burger on television in 2013. Now, only ten years later, there are more than 150 companies on 6 continents, funded by $2.6 billion, all trying to make meat in laboratories. They all want to take a chunk out of the hide of the $1.7 trillion conventional meat business. And in so doing they say at the same time they’ll be decreasing deforestation, biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance, disease outbreaks, and industrialized animal slaughter.

At this point it’s hard to say whether lab-meat has any better chance that plant-based meat so don’t sell the ranch and sack continued on page 2

Companies With Good ESG Scores Pollute Just As Much As Those With Low Ones, New Analysis Finds

BY TYLER DURDEN / ZERO HEDGE

As if there wasn’t exhaustive enough evidence that “ESG” is nothing but a scam, the Financial Times out in early August with a piece detailing how many companies with good ESG scores pollute just as much as their lower-rated rivals.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you; we have been writing about the ESG con for years now, which along with other “sustainable” investments continues to see hundreds of billions of dollars in inflows from investors.

The FT added to our skepticism by revealing this week that Scientific Beta, an index provider and consultancy, found that companies rated highly on ESG metrics - and even just the ‘Environmental’ variable alone - often pollute just as much as other companies.

Researchers look at ESG scores from Moody’s, MSCI and Refinitiv when performing the analysis. They found that when the ‘E’ component was singled out, it led to a “substantial deterioration in green performance”.

Felix Goltz, research director at Scientific Beta told the Financial Times: “ESG ratings have little to no relation to carbon intensity, even when con- continued on page 4

Acommon theme that dominates the conversation of most people my age is that they are glad they’ll be decomposing six feet under the grass and won’t be around to live in the glorious future they created. My fellow senior citizens and I feel bad for the babies born today who, on average, already owe $13,425 in state debt and $78,089 in federal debt. I, on the other hand, wish I was going to be around to witness the carnage and to say, “I told you so.”

I don’t think most younger Americans fully grasp that they’re sleepwalking into the fan blades of a giant green wind machine. As for the 31 trillion dollars they’re already on the hook for, what do they care, just like their $200,000 in student debt, they have no intention of paying it back either. Who cares if the debt is 31 trillion or 130 trillion? If we need more money we’ll just print more.

In their world young people today think they’re all gonna work from home, or sitting at Starbucks, staring at their phone all day doing what they call “work” without a boss looking over their shoulder. Or they’ll make a lucrative living being an “influencer” on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook. The Indians will make a living dealing blackjack, the blacks by playing sports and the illegal Mexicans by doing our dishes and our yard work.

We’re all gonna live in online communities of strangers and when we’re hungry our food will be delivered by Door Dash and Uber drivers and for everything else we need we’ll get it from Amazon and pay for it with Bitcoin. We won’t worry about a steady paycheck because we’ll all be getting reparations checks for something or other, so we’ll just hang around and wait for our inheritance when our parents die so we can inherit their house. And we won’t even have to move from where we’re already living.

All the pollution will disappear because all our factories will be shuttered and one third of the traffic will be parked at Tesla charging stations. We’ll live in a world of renewable energy and zero emissions and when we need more batteries we’ll just buy them at COSTCO. We’ll just continued on page 3

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HERE WE GO AGAIN from page 1 your saddle just yet. But be advised, the people in white lab coats are coming for you.

Cultivating Meat

As with the plant-based beef, there are two heavyweights that seem to be way ahead of the pack when it comes to lab-made meat. With the plant product it was Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods and with lab-made meat it’s Upside Foods and GOOD Meat, which was first seen on restaurant menus in Singapore in 2020. Both Upside and GOOD Meat have received FDA and USDA approval to start selling lab-made chicken in America.

While ranchers would prefer to call lab-based meat just that, GOOD Meat prefers to say their product is “cultivated” as if it was grown in a garden instead of slaughtered in a packinghouse, which seems to be its biggest selling point. According to the company, “Cultivated meat is also sometimes referred to as cultured meat, cell-based meat, clean meat, cell-cultured meat and in-vitro meat, but the correct term is cultivated meat.” The same company also makes plant-based egg products under the JUST Egg brand.

According to GOOD Meat, their research team, “Identified the best chicken cells to produce cultivated meat. These cells are then fed a nutrient-rich broth that includes amino acids, carbohydrates, minerals, fats and vitamins which are the same types of nutrients animals need to grow. The entire process takes place in a safe and controlled environment that looks like a beer brewery.

“After our chicken cells are harvested from the cell culture tank (known also as a bioreactor) they are mixed with co-ingredients and shaped into different meat formats, from crispy chicken bites and savory sausages to more textured products such as shredded chicken or grilled chicken filets. Instead of growing the entire animal, we only grow what we eat. This means we use fewer resources than conventional industrial animal agriculture to grow our meat and we can be more efficient, completing growth in weeks rather than months or years.”

GOOD Meat’s biggest competitor is Upside Foods, a food technology company headquartered in Berkeley, California. The company was founded in 2015 and you may not recognize the name because it was formerly known as Memphis Meats. It seems to be a favorite of the “techies” because it has strong ties to Silicon Valley. So far, 41 venture capitalists have invested six hundred million dollars in the company. What’s interesting to this observer is that one of those investors was the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

How does it feel knowing that the very same USDA that collects one dollar from you every time a beef animal changes hands to promote beef turns around and invests in a company that is trying to develop an alternative product that will put you out of business?

The Secret Sauce

David Kay, Upside Foods’ director of communications, told Health Magazine that not one chicken was killed to produce its lab-based product. With Upside, “It all starts with a cell sample from a live chicken. We take a cell sample from an animal or fertilized egg and extract the cells that have the ability to grow into animal tissue or meat. From there, we put those cells into a large stainless-steel tank called a cultivator that resembles beer-brewing equipment. We then provide the cells with the nutrients they need to grow and multiply.”

According to Health magazine, “The manufacturing process begins with acquiring and banking stem cells from an animal. Similar to what happens inside an animal’s body, the cells are fed an oxygen-rich cell culture medium made up of basic nutrients such as amino acids, glucose, vitamins, and inorganic salts, and supplemented with growth factors and other proteins.”

Many of the ingredients that make up this “meat stew” are the same ones fed to real animals in feedlots including corn, soy, pea, wheat, soybean and corn oil and a cocktail of minerals and vitamins. Yeast is added and the concoction is fermented. The meat attaches itself to what scientists call the “scaffold” which can be formed to any shape, to resemble a chicken tender or a top sirloin. According to GOOD Meat, “Thousands of dishes, ranging from crispy strips and curries to skewers and salads, have been sold in Singapore and have received universally high marks from diners. Nearly everyone who tries it says the same thing: it tastes delicious, just like chicken.”

That’s because it is!

A Green Dream

The mandatory media frenzy about lab-meat is in its earliest stages. Scientists in lab coats say that cultivated meat, IF produced using renewable energy, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 92 percent and land use by up to 90 percent compared to conventional beef. They plan on doing all this and still sell it for the same price as conventional meat products. And don’t forget, not a single bird is slaughtered in the process.

Remember that “theoretical burger” we mentioned a decade ago that had to sell for a third of a million dollars to break even? Since 2018, GOOD Meat has achieved over a 90 percent reduction in total production costs. Mosa Meat, a lab-meat meat company in the Netherlands, announced in 2020 that they had reduced their input costs by 88 fold and it only takes a month from stem cell to drumstick.

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Chicken was picked to go first because it’s the world’s most-consumed meat, according to GOOD Meat. “It stands to reason therefore that chickens also consume more food than other meat animals” and they contend that “more than one-third of Earth’s icefree land and tens of millions of acres of rainforest teeming with the bulk of our planet’s biodiversity have been replaced with fields of chicken feed.”

According to GOOD Meat, “Consumers have already reacted positively to cultivated meat since GOOD Meat’s launch in Singapore. According to research conducted by a leading global management consulting firm, 70 percent of Singaporeans who tried

GOOD Meat said it tasted as good or better than conventional chicken and nearly 90 percent said they would substitute conventional chicken with cultivated chicken.

Elliot Swartz, PhD and Claire Bomkamp PhD, who have given us the most in-depth look at lab-based meat writing for The Good Food Institute said, “The main reasons people are open to cultivated meat are because it provides a transformative solution to pressing problems, such as addressing global hunger, reducing environmental degradation, mitigating concerns about animal welfare and is anticipated to reduce the possibility of foodborne illness.”

“The most common method to acquire starter cells is by taking a cell sample from a live animal, which can be performed using minimally invasive methods. In some cases, these cells may also be acquired by biopsying a recently slaughtered animal where the tissue is still viable, which could be important for determining compliance to religious laws (e.g., halal, kosher). In all cases, the acquired cells originate from healthy animals alongside extensive documentation that ensure the quality and traceability of the cells.”

“Cell engineering can take place in the form of adaptation or genetic engineering. Genetic engineering entails permanent changes by either removing, rearranging, or introducing DNA. While some cultivated meat companies have stated they do not plan to use genetic engineering, several others have filed patents describing various engineering approaches.”

According to Health Magazine, “Cultivated meat is made of the same cell types that can be arranged in the same or similar structure as animal tissues, replicating the sensory and nutritional profiles of conventional meat.”

So What’s Not To Like?

Having made all those claims, it’s very possible that just as with plant-based meat, lab-meat may be nothing more than just another foolish and foodish fad. Peter Hart of Food and Water Watch is not yet sold on the concept. “The idea that we can build massive laboratories that grow animal cells into food sounds like the stuff of science fiction. At this point, it is mostly just that. The truth is, there are a host of concerns when it comes to lab-meat. The production process requires heavy use of antibiotics and hazardous materials. Diseases can spread throughout a facility or into the product during that process. And there are also as yet unknown health and safety risks for humans eating cultured meat.”

Hart continues, “Tech-happy investors and industry evangelists like to paint a cruelty-free future. In their vision, cultured meat grown in steel vats erases many of the worst aspects of Big Ag, like dangerous slaughterhouses and polluting factory farms. Instead, we’d be fed by laboratories churning out animal protein, indistinguishable — or so we’re told — from the real thing. But this is hype that far outpaces reality. Millions of Wall Street dollars have been invested in an array of labmeat startups. Those startups have regularly promised breakthroughs that have not materialized.”

Even if the greenies get behind lab-meat in a big way Hart says that “lab-meat likely won’t help us stop climate change.” In fact, Hart suggests that, “Scaling up production may actually be worse for the climate than the status quo. We are talking about industrialization, after all. These facilities would require enormous amounts of energy, likely from fossil fuel sources. One study found that mass production of lab-meat would have substantial ecological impacts — perhaps even more than livestock farming. And a few new, niche ‘meat’ choices won’t make factory farming disappear.”

“Stories about the FDA’s ‘approval’ of lab-meat remind us that overhyped tech fixes fall far short of actually fixing our food system.” In fact, Hart concludes, “There remain substantial doubts that lab-grown meat will ever economically compete with conventional meat. For now, there is a single location in the world where you can purchase an order of lab-derived chicken nuggets. It’ll cost you $23 and a plane ticket to Singapore.” ▫ take the used-up batteries back or store them with our spent nuclear fuel rods we don’t know where to warehouse.

The letters “USA” won’t stand for the United States of America anymore but “Unlimited Sprawl Area” because everyone will live in the office buildings made vacant when everyone started working from home. President Biden’s 30x30 dream will be realized when at least 30 percent of U.S. lands will be conserved by 2030 so busloads of Japanese tourists with cameras dangling from their necks will be running from packs of wolves, marauding bears and hungry mountain lions in our national parks. Our borders will remain open to ensure we’ll have someone to raise our kids.

Getting rid of all fossil fuels because of climate change will bring families closer together as we burn furniture and three generations snuggle together to share body heat. It will be just like camping! (But don’t forget to be on the lookout for the aforementioned wolves, bears and lions.)

The future we’ve created will be a kinder, gentler and smarter world as everyone will be female and boys will be boys no longer. Instead, they’ll grow their own boobs, have their plumbing rearranged and have their appendage removed. (Ouch!) As for making babies, well, maybe we didn’t do a very good job of explaining the birds and the bees to our kids. And perhaps we should have come clean about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy too. As for our birth rate dipping below “sustainable” levels, well, again that’s what the open borders are for and why our Congress looks like an LGBTQ+ parade.

If, and when, there is a World War III it will all be conducted by soldiers at keyboards with joysticks, drinking 5 Hour energy drinks, just like playing a violent video game. As for this great experiment we called America, we’ll finally come to the realization that the grand experiment just didn’t work and we’ve been the big bully on the block far too long.

The only advice I have for our inheritors is to bone up on your Chinese, North Korean and Russian.

His training in science makes him “a little bit different” from some others, he said.

The physicist, who also won a third of the Wolf Prize for his quantum mechanics contributions, shared some of his views on climate during a recent speech in South Korea soon after his election to the CO2 Coalition’s board of directors.

‘Dangerous Misinformation’

“I believe that climate change is not a crisis,” Mr. Clauser told the audience at Quantum Korea 2023.

He also described the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as “one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.”

Mr. Clauser elaborated further on his views in his interview with The Epoch Times.

Contra the IPCC and other major institutions, he argues that climate is primarily set by what he refers to as the “cloud cover thermostat,” a self-regulating process whereby more clouds start to enshroud the Earth when the temperature is too high and vice-versa. Although he accepts observations showing that atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, he said he believes that gas’s effect on heat transfer is swamped by a great natural cloud cycle.

“[The carbon dioxide] may or may not be made by human beings,” Mr. Clauser said. “It doesn’t really matter where it comes from.”

The physicist said he believes that objective science on climate has been sacrificed to politics. The preeminence of politics is all the worse, he said, because so much money has already gone to climate initiatives.

“We’re talking about trillions of dollars,” he said, adding that powerful people don’t want to hear that they’ve made “trillion-dollar mistakes.”

Concerns about such mistakes may have been relevant after Mr. Clauser was slated to speak before the U.N.’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) on July 25.

In recent years, the international economic and monetary agency has focused heavily on the climate. Officials have laid particular stress on international carbon taxes.

“The latest IMF analysis finds that large emitting countries need to introduce a carbon tax that rises quickly to $75 a ton in 2030,” the agency’s website on climate mitigation states.

Just days before his talk was to take place, the Nobel laureate received alarming news.

Mr. Clauser told The Epoch Times he had received an email indicating that the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) director, Pablo Moreno, didn’t want the talk to go forward that day.

In an email, an IEO senior official told The Epoch Times that Mr. Clauser’s speech “has been postponed to reorganize it into a panel discussion.”

“We are working to reschedule it after the summer,” the official wrote.

No New Date Set

For now, a new date hasn’t been set.

Mr. Clauser pointed out that a past attempt at a vigorous, transparent debate over climate change—namely, the “red team, blue team” exercise proposed by Obama administration veteran Steve Koonin in 2017—was ultimately scuttled during the Trump administration. When Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt sought to carry out the exercise, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly shot the idea down.

In the eyes of some observers, the stated postponement looks more like a straightforward cancellation.

“Dr. John Clauser, Nobel Prize Recipient for Physics, 2022, & Board Member of the CO2 Coalition, has been summarily canceled as a confirmed speaker on July 25 at the International Monetary Fund. They say his speech is ‘postponed’. Don’t hold your breath!” Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace and now a high-profile climate skeptic, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Mr. Moore is a former chair of the CO2 Coalition.