Ted Nordhaus

Opinion contributor

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of the ways in which contemporary environmental thought and advocacy are simply bad for the environment than the recent effort by Friends of the Earth to sideline the Impossible Burger, the first meat substitute that has succeeded in roughly approximating the taste and texture of beef.

In a world in which beef consumption is expected to rise dramatically, the development of meat substitutes that consumers might accept as tasting as good or better than the real thing is one of the Holy Grails for both addressing climate change and protecting rainforests and other ecologically critical habitat. Agriculture remains by far the single largest human impact upon the environment and livestock production, due to both pasturing and feed production which account for the lion’s share of agriculture’s impacts on the planet.

Meat substitutes still have a long way to go, but the Impossible Burger has succeeded in getting close enough that many prominent chefs have begun serving it in their restaurants. The trick is a protein called heme, which gives beef some of its color and meaty flavor. Impossible Foods has developed a process to produce animal-free heme by adding a heme-producing gene from soy roots to yeast.

And yet, at the moment that a Silicon Valley start-up has developed a palatable substitute for meat that many consumers appear ready to accept, Friends of the Earth has attacked Impossible Foods for producing a product that it claims could have adverse health effects on consumers, because the yeast that produces heme has been genetically modified.

There is no actual evidence that heme produced in this way might have negative effects. But for FOE and other GMO opponents, the absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. Nor must the wildly speculative risks they invoke be considered in the context of the well established environmental and health risks associated with beef production and consumption.

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Environmental opposition to the Impossible Burger is not particularly exceptional. Environmental groups like FOE have for decades used the same tactics to demonize nuclear energy and intensive agriculture and to block urban housing, infrastructure, even renewable energy development. The targets vary but the tactics are the same: identify speculative or infinitesimally small health or environmental risks, exaggerate those risks wildly in the media, ignore or downplay trade-offs and the far greater and more prosaic risks associated with present day production, cherry pick small scale examples of alternative production systems and massively extrapolate them to the state, regional, national, or global level to claim that no trade-offs exist and that an environmental free lunch is not only possible but imminent if only we all would throw off the yoke of nefarious corporate interests that are determined to poison us for profit.

The consequences have been not insignificant. Clean energy as a share of both US and global energy production has been stagnant for two decades as exaggerated public fears of nuclear accidents, stoked consistently by anti-nuclear environmentalists, have played a significant role in decisions to shutter nuclear fleets in Germany, Japan, and California. Africa has struggled to raise agricultural productivity as greens have banned genetically modified products from European markets while demanding that Africans stick with “appropriate technology” — meaning low productivity organic farming systems — rather than modernize its agricultural sector in order to meet growing food demand without converting its forests to farms and increasing bushmeat hunting.

Environmental opposition in the developing world to roads, dams, and large-scale agriculture, often in the name of indigenous communities that they claim to speak for, haven’t stopped many of those nations from building new infrastructure or expanding agriculture, but have made it harder to plan for that inevitable development in order to minimize environmental impacts. Cities like San Francisco have become havens for the wealthy, meanwhile, as NIMBY activists invoke environmental arguments, often with support of local and regional environmental NGO’s, to block new housing development.

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Without question, there are more pragmatic quarters of the environmental movement. Groups like the Nature Conservancy increasingly work with governments in the developing world to plan for infrastructure development rather than attempting to stop it. NGO’s such as the World Wildlife Fund are engaging with companies and producers to improve their supply chains to reduce environmental impacts, for example by not sourcing from recently deforested land. The Environmental Defense Fund some years ago launched a major initiative to minimize the impacts of the shale gas revolution rather than banning it, implicitly acknowledging that cheap natural gas has played a major role in declining carbon emissions in the US power sector. Some green groups in a few specific places have quietly acknowledged that shutting down nuclear plants is a bad idea in a world where global emissions need to be dramatically cut in order to meaningfully address climate change.

But those groups have had little appetite for policing the claims of their more ideological brethren and on questions like GMO’s, industrial agriculture, nuclear energy, and carbon capture and storage, have mostly not been willing to acknowledge that large-scale, high-productivity, intensive food and energy systems will be necessary to preserve the environment while meeting human needs on a planet where 7 going on 9 billion people rightly desire to live modern lives. Instead, environmental groups continue for the most part to promote solutions that are demonstrably not up to the task of addressing the growing environmental challenges that humanity faces and in many cases, will actually make those challenges worse.

Leaving an ecologically vibrant planet to future generations will require a drastically reformed environmental movement, one ready to make its peace with modernity and technology and abandon pastoral nostalgias and utopian fantasies for solutions that may be less satisfying but more durable. That will require many more Impossible Burgers and a lot less impossible environmentalism.

Ted Nordhaus is the co-founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and a co-author of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. Follow him on Twitter: @TedNordhaus

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