Some people on Twitter have a fight with Bill Gates again.
Microsoft MSFT,
The founder who became a global health philanthropist discusses ways to deal with climate change in his new book, “How to avoid a climate disaster: the solutions we have and the advances we need”, which hit stores on Tuesday. And among its calls for action: switch to synthetic beef to reduce methane emissions, also known as the gases that cattle and sheep release when belching or expelling gases.
While Burger King QSR,
has experimented with adding lemongrass to the diet of some of its cattle herds to limit methane emissions that contribute to climate change, and researchers are feeding seaweed to cattle in Maine and New Hampshire in another attempt to reduce the methane that these herds release. it is simply a biological fact of life that bacteria in cattle’s digestive tract release methane as it breaks down food. “I don’t know if there will be any natural approach to this,” said Gates.
Your solution: the richest countries should keep beef, period, and switch to vegetable or synthetic proteins.
“I think that all rich countries should switch to 100% synthetic meat,” Gates told Technology Review. “You can get used to the difference in taste, and the claim is that they will make the taste even better over time. Eventually, that green award is modest enough that you can change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to change demand entirely. ”
Many Twitter readers are not yet ready to give up their hamburgers and steaks completely. So that led to Gates’ Twitter trend on Tuesday afternoon, while critics criticized him.
Even Gates acknowledged that this idea is difficult to swallow. “Telling people, ‘You can’t have cows’ – talk about a politically unpopular approach to things,” he also told Technology Review.
Some other critics also questioned why Gates should dictate what countries should do to deal with climate change when a new Nation report named Gates as one of the world’s largest carbon emitters. He notes that he lives in a 66,000-square-foot mansion outside Seattle, and his private jet consumes 486 gallons of fuel every hour he flies.
It is certainly not the first time that Gates has been burned on social media, as he found himself at the center of several conspiracy theories debunked during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the reaction against his synthetic meat plan, however, the global hunger for plant foods continues to grow. Morningstar predicts the vegetable meat market will reach $ 74 billion in 2029, compared to $ 12 billion in 2019. And Beyond Meat BYND,
is working with McDonald’s MCD,
and Yum Brands YUM,
Fast food chains Taco Bell and KFC will launch vegetable sandwiches and other alternative meat items this year.