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What Florida Republicans have against cultivated meat
In the Free State of Florida, Republicans have banned woke public investments, woke racial education, and woke books in school libraries. Now they’re trying to ban woke meat.
Legislation that would criminalize the sale of cultivated meat grown from animal cells is wending its way through the state House and Senate, even though cultivated meat is not currently for sale anywhere in Florida — or, for that matter, anywhere else. Governor Ron DeSantis, eager to start owning libs again after his fiasco of a presidential campaign, has said he’s on board with banning the new technology, even though the federal government has already signed off on meat grown in fermenters rather than feedlots as safe.
So what’s the beef?
The cattle industry has always had outsized clout in Florida politics — the term “cracker” originated with whip-wielding Florida cattlemen — and some Republicans hope to curry favor with the state’s ranchers by strangling potential competition in the cradle. But the crusade against cultivated meat is mostly just the latest skirmish in the DeSantis culture war against what he considers a progressive plot to make Americans feel guilty about the status quo.
In his only public comments about cultivated meat — sometimes described as “lab-grown meat,” although the ultimate goal is to grow it in breweries — DeSantis made it clear that his main objection to the nascent industry is that its leaders hope to limit animal agriculture’s damage to the climate and the environment. To the governor, growing meat outside an animal is just like taking “environment-social-governance” considerations into account in investment decisions or teaching “critical race theory” in the classroom, a left-wing assault on tradition.
“They really want to go after agriculture because they blame agriculture for global warming,” DeSantis said. “You need meat, OK? Like, we’re gonna have fake meat? That doesn’t work. There’s a whole ideological agenda that’s coming after a lot of our society.”
Setting aside the merits of the governor’s anti-woke crusade against “ESG,” “CRT,” and gay-themed books in public libraries, the cultivated meat and seafood entrepreneurs trying to harness capitalism and technology to disrupt a trillion-dollar industry notorious for government influence-peddling don’t see what’s left-wing about innovation or competition. They don’t want to be part of any culture war, and as the legislative ban has been moving through Tallahassee on party-line votes, they’re trying to remind Republicans that they’re supposed to be against the nanny state.
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, for instance, a key supporter of the ban, actually boasts on his website that he’s “stood up to politicians who treat Floridians like children incapable of making their own choices.”
“How does banning our products promote consumer choice?” Blue Nalu CEO Lou Cooperhouse, whose San Diego startup is cultivating bluefin tuna toro, told me. “It’s un-American and un-Floridian to stifle innovation and attack free-market principles.”
It is true that cultivated meat has extraordinary potential to limit the impacts of animal agriculture, which now uses one quarter of the land on Earth and is by far the leading driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss. But even if you don’t care about the climate or the environment — or the looming public health crisis created by the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, or the tens of billions of animals who get slaughtered every year — there’s a compelling business proposition behind cultivated meat: Animal meat is inefficient. Why waste feed, land, water, energy and other resources helping livestock stay warm, poop, burp methane, have babies and do other things that don’t produce meat?
That’s why a part-time futurist named Winston Churchill, not usually considered a wokester, predicted in a 1931 essay titled “50 Years Hence” that “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing.” But it’s now 93 years hence, and while more than 150 startups around the world have begun growing chicken cutlets, burgers, pork meatballs, salmon nigiri and even woolly mammoth meat from cells, they’re not yet doing it inexpensively enough to compete with conventional meat and seafood.
Last year, the Bay Area startups Upside Foods and Good Meat served America’s first cultivated chicken to restaurant patrons in San Francisco and Washington, but only for a limited time to a very limited number of diners. (Some journalists have tried it, too, and I can report that both companies make chicken that tastes like chicken.) For now, you can’t buy cultivated meat anywhere on Earth, and while its costs have plunged more than 99% in a decade, many skeptics doubt that it will ever get cheap enough to make a dent in the 350 million tons of animal meat that the world consumes every year. In the past few months, Wired, Bloomberg, and The New York Times have all published quasi-obituaries for the industry.
Plant-based meat, hailed five years ago as the next big thing in food, is also struggling mightily. Global sales have stopped soaring and are actually declining, and industry darling Beyond Meat’s stock price is down more than 95% from its peak. Meat substitutes have faced a flurry of attacks — some from meat-industry water-carriers, some from natural-food ideologues, and some reflecting genuine discomfort with the idea of eating so much technology — as “ultra-processed foods” with long ingredient lists.
But the problems meat substitutes are designed to address are not going away. Cattle burps (and, to a lesser extent, farts) produce methane, while manure is a major source of nitrous oxide and water pollution, and the world is on track to deforest another two Indias worth of land by 2050 to satiate humanity’s meat tooth. DeSantis may think it’s silly to blame agriculture for global warming, but overall, it generates a fourth of global greenhouse gas emissions, most of them from livestock. It’s not yet as big a problem as fossil fuels, but it is a big problem. And since meat consumption is expected to rise at least 50% by 2050, the problem is getting worse.
Meat alternatives made from plants, fungi, or animal cells can use far less land and generate far fewer emissions than meat made from slaughtered animals, which is why supporters see them as the agricultural equivalent of solar, wind, and other clean-energy alternatives to fossil fuels. Cleaner meat should receive the kind of public support that governments have long provided to cleaner energy, they argue — which has started to happen in the European Union, China and even the United States, which provided $10 million for a cultivated meat research center at Tufts University early in the Biden Administration.
Obviously, it isn’t happening in Florida. Cultivated meat lobbyists have been passing around a clip from a Chinese newspaper gloating about the Sunshine State’s restrictions, saying they will help ensure Chinese domination of the new industry. Rini Greenfield, who runs an ag-tech venture fund called Rethink Food in Miami, told me the ban would send “a clear message to technology companies to take their operations elsewhere.” In fact, every venture that testified against the bill was based in California, the state DeSantis constantly cites as the epitome of woke.
But culture wars are bad for business, no matter where you’re headquartered. The industry doesn’t want to be making Bidenburgers any more than the electric vehicle industry wanted to manufacture Obamamobiles. Today, they’re not selling to anyone, but someday, they want to sell to everyone.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”