Where’s the Beef in Ecomodernism?

Is it possible to reconcile intensive livestock production with animal welfare concerns? Do we need to?

By Ted Nordhaus

Since the publication of the Ecomodernist Manifesto in 2015, one question that has come up repeatedly has been what ecomodernists had to say about beef, and animal agriculture more generally. Should meat, dairy, and other animal products have a role in an ecomodernist future? It’s a divisive question for many ecomodernists. 

On the one hand, it is undeniable that large scale production of animal protein, and particularly beef production, has a significant negative impact on the environment, from climate change and deforestation to overgrazing and nitrogen runoff. On the other, there is simply no evidence that most people in most places around the world, given the choice, have much interest in forgoing consumption of animal proteins. 

A substantial segment of the global population is still very poor and needs more protein in their diets, as well as other nutrients, such as iron, zinc, and vitamin A that animal products are a one stop shop for. Most parts of the world also have strong social and cultural preferences for animal protein. Efforts to reduce the impact that global agriculture, and particularly livestock production, has on biodiversity, ecosystems, and the climate will almost certainly need to accommodate an increase in either animal proteins or reasonable facsimiles for them, and probably both. 

From an ecomodernist perspective, there are three ways to resolve the conflict between growing demand for animal protein and the impacts that meat production has on the global environment:

1. Intensification: Produce more meat on less land, with fewer inputs, and less pollution, 

2. Substitution: Shift consumption from higher impact sources of animal protein (e.g. beef) to lower impact sources (e.g. chicken and pork) and develop palatable alternative proteins at large scale that can be produced with fewer impacts,

3. Saturation: Reduce the amount of animal protein that people at the high end of the global income distribution, those who already consume more than enough to allow for a healthy and balanced diet, consume.

These strategies are not mutually exclusive. Any successful effort to substantially reduce the climate and ecological impacts of global agriculture will likely need to move the needle significantly on all three. But what is notably not included in this framework is either a large-scale shift to vegetarian or vegan diets or a normative commitment to animal welfare. That’s not because there is no room in the ecomodernist tent for vegetarians or animal welfare advocates. Many self-identified ecomodernists are one or both. But neither should ecomodernism exclude those who believe that continued meat consumption is entirely consistent with a biodiverse future and a stable climate. 

Part of building any successful movement is being clear about what you are and what you aren’t. Who is in the tent and who is not? What are the bright lines that define your movement and what factions within the movement can figure out how to coexist? There are, for instance, both Marxists and socialists who identify as ecomodernists and conservatives and libertarians who do as well. A commitment to cities, dense energy technologies, and intensive, technological agriculture is not, in theory, inconsistent with either state-led or market-based economic arrangements. The same is true of meat consumption and animal welfare. There is nothing about ecomodernism that requires that we banish meat eating to the dustbin of history. A planet with a lot more chickens and corn might not be the idyll that many wish for, but it would clearly be one that would be capable of supporting a lot more people consuming a lot more meat while supporting a lot of biodiversity as well. 

But an ecomodern future might also be one in which plant-based proteins and cultured meat ultimately displace animal protein. Ecomodernism, in my view, should be open to, and can accommodate either future. The bright line, the one that defines who is in the ecomodern tent and who is not, is not meat versus no meat. Rather, in my view, it is agricultural upwinger versus downwinger. 

If you find the domestication, cultivation, and slaughter of animals morally abhorrent and believe the path to eliminating it is through the development of technological substitutes that people prefer, then you are an ecomodernist. If, instead, you believe that climate change or methane emissions or animal welfare concerns require that we ban or heavily tax meat and mandate that everyone become a vegetarian, then you are not. 

Can We Mitigate Climate Change and Protect Biodiversity Without Eliminating Meat Consumption?

As much as 60% of global agricultural emissions comes from livestock production, with a significant majority of that coming from beef and dairy production. These estimates include all greenhouse gasses and incorporate emissions associated with land use change and deforestation as well as the fossil energy inputs associated with growing cattle feed and raising and transporting livestock. 

So score one for vegetarianism right? Not exactly. 

Beef constitutes less than a third of total meat consumption while accounting for most of the emissions and environmental impact. So simply shifting global beef consumption from beef to chicken and pork would very substantially reduce emissions and environmental impacts associated with meat production and consumption. All the more so as most chicken and pork production globally is still relatively low productivity. Achieving higher productivity through more intensive production systems like those common in the United States and Europe, would bring significant further reductions in impacts from such a switch.

Moreover, much of the emissions impact associated with beef and dairy production comes from methane emissions that are produced by enteric fermentation in the digestive systems of cattle as they transform cellulose into energy and a lot of that could be eliminated by simply shifting to more intensive livestock production systems. The prototype for a lot of people of environmentally destructive beef production is a massive feedlot operated by a global corporation located somewhere in America’s flyover country. But intensive livestock production of this sort actually has far lower methane emissions per pound of meat produced than far less productive systems in much of the rest of the world, in which beef is generally pasture finished. And these more intensive systems are actually not the norm at all, accounting for only about 20% of global beef production. 

American style beef production systems get cattle to slaughter weight in half the time or less as more traditional systems. This cuts methane emissions, the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from beef production in half as well because those emissions scale roughly linearly with the lifespan of the animal. And that’s just in the United States, where grassland systems are much more efficient than most other places. Globally, the mean intensity of cattle finished in feedlots is ten times lower per kilogram of meat produced than cattle finished on grassland systems. That’s because not only do feedlot systems get cattle to slaughter weight much faster but they also typically produce a lot more meat per animal and those animals process feed much more efficiently than forage. So even if people continue eating beef in about the same proportion to other kinds of meat as they do today, simply shifting global beef production from low productivity systems to intensive production in feedlots would massively reduce methane emissions from beef production. 

The other major way that beef production contributes to climate change is through land use change and deforestation. Rising global demand for beef has increased pressure to convert forests and other ecosystems to pasture, which results in deforestation and is a major source of global carbon dioxide emissions. Getting cattle to slaughter weight in half the time means that you can raise twice as many cattle each year on the same acre of pasture. So shifting global beef production to intensive production systems would not only reduce methane emissions dramatically but would also very substantially reduce carbon emissions associated with beef production, because each animal requires about half as much land to get to slaughter weight.

Doing so would also dramatically reduce the impact that beef production has on biodiversity loss, which is largely driven by deforestation and agriculture driven land use change.

There has also been a lot of focus in recent years on the potential to improve how we manage pasture land. Rotational grazing and other techniques have been touted as the answer to all manner of environmental problems. Some of this is without question magical thinking. There is no formula for managing pasture that will obviate the clear environmental benefits of using feedlots and grain finishing to get cattle to slaughter weight in half the time, much less turn cattle from carbon and methane emitters to magical carbon removal machines. Even under the best of circumstances, finishing cattle on rotationally grazed pasture land requires twice as much land and takes twice as long. No amount of (often dubious) carbon sequestration on those pastures can overcome that disadvantage. 

But insofar as better pasture management techniques can improve productivity and sequester some carbon on pasture land, those methods are equally applicable to intensively finished cattle. In the popular imagination, industrial agriculture confines cattle in feedlots for most of their lives. But that is not the case. Cattle finished in feedlots will spend the first 12 to 14 months of their lives on pasture. So better pasture management has the potential to reduce the environmental impact of all beef production, no matter how cattle are ultimately finished. 

Improving pasture management is also only one of the ways that better methods and technologies might further reduce the environmental impact of beef production. Most of those further opportunities, against the claims of many environmentalists and animal welfare advocates, will be most effectively realized through intensive production systems. Continuing improvements in breeding, assisted by new genetic engineering techniques, can further reduce the time it takes to get cattle to slaughter weight and increase the amount of meat produced per animal, as well as improve the efficiency of the enteric fermentation pathways through which they convert cellulose in grasses and grains into energy, lowering methane emissions. Feed additives, vaccines, and other interventions that improve the health of cattle, reduce methane emissions and increase productivity. These practices may not add up to a carbon negative cow, but they can significantly cut emissions from beef.  

Feedlots also have the most potential for reducing the impacts associated with manure. Nitrogen runoff and other pollution problems are often construed as problems with intensive systems. But manure is actually harder to manage and control in extensive production systems where individual animals are non-point sources of pollution. Intensive systems turn that pollution into a point source problem, which is far easier to mitigate, through things like methane digestors, technologies that can turn manure into fertilizers that can be much more precisely applied to crop land, and just good old fashioned regulation.

None of this addresses the ick factor that a lot of people associate with the industrial production of livestock. Nor does it account for animal welfare concerns, which are actually a lot more complicated than the simplistic notion that feedlots and other intensive methods of livestock production are charnel horror houses, in contrast to happy cows and pigs and chickens whiling away their days in bucolic pastures. But at the end of the day, whether we raise these animals in pastures, feedlots, or somewhere else, we do so, ultimately, so that we can kill and eat them. And it is clear that as long as large numbers of humans continue to wish to do so, we can produce those animal proteins for 8 or 9 billion meat eaters with a lot less impact on the climate and the environment.

What About Vegetarianism?

The obvious response from advocates of a meat-free future is that all this and more could be accomplished if everyone just stopped eating meat and other animal products. And while this is technically true—assume a vegan can opener and it's easy enough to produce spreadsheet futures in which emissions and other impacts from the global agriculture sector decline dramatically—there is simply no evidence that most people globally will do so willingly. Most surveys peg veganism at around 1% of the global population or about 80 million people worldwide. Many more people are vegetarian, an estimated 1.8 billion. But most of those do so because they are too poor to afford meat. 95% by one estimate, would eat meat if they were able to. 

Consider India, which is frequently held up as proof that much of the world might choose to forego meat eating because cows are sacred to the nation’s Hindu majority,. But while India’s Hindu population doesn’t eat beef, they eat plenty of chicken and lamb, as well as dairy products for which there is no religious or cultural restriction. The reason for low levels of meat and other animal product consumption in India is neither religious conviction nor concern for animal welfare or the environment. Rather, it is poverty, just as it is in sub-saharan Africa and other very poor regions of the world. As people in India have moved from extreme rural poverty to urban, industrial modernity, they, like everyone else, have reliably chosen to incorporate more animal products into their diets and eat more meat. 

So the notion that climate change might be addressed through a large-scale shift to vegan or vegetarian diets simply doesn’t meet the smell test, no matter how many global assessments, peer reviewed papers, and modeled pathways to limiting emissions to 1.5 or 2 degrees claim that it is the only way to avoid climate catastrophe. It is simply not going to happen, at least on any timeframe consistent with the mitigation targets that these claims are tied to. 

By contrast, so-called “reducetarian” strategies hold more promise. While it is unlikely that most people will be convinced to forego consumption of animal products, they might choose to eat less of them. This, in the parlance of ecomodernism, is a kind of demand saturation. And indeed, in many places that is already happening in limited fashion. Over recent decades, beef consumption in the United States and a number of other high income countries has peaked and declined, not driven by either climate change or animal welfare concerns but primarily health and economic considerations. Evidence that red meat is unhealthy has driven many health-conscious consumers to eat less of it. But this has not led to less overall meat consumption. Consumption has shifted from beef to chicken and, to a lesser extent, pork. 

This has been in significant part driven not only by health concerns but also by prices. Chicken and pork are substantially cheaper than beef in the United States and many other places. Dramatic reductions in the price of chicken and pork, ironically, have been enabled by the industrialization of chicken and pork production over recent decades. So the decline of beef consumption and rise in chicken and pork consumption, and the substantial environmental benefits that come with that shift, has been made possible by the bane of animal agriculture in the eyes of many animal welfare advocates, the factory farm.

Revulsion at factory farming has been a convenient way for many animal welfare advocates to mobilize outrage and make the case against consuming meat. But claims that an end to factory farming is necessary to achieve global environmental goals like mitigating climate change and protecting tropical forests are at best misleading. Without very dramatic reductions in global meat consumption, abolishing factory farming would almost certainly increase emissions and tropical deforestation, for the simple reason that it would shift global production toward lower productivity livestock systems. And, as noted above, the prospects of such a decline in meat consumption, given basic global demographic and economic trends, is close to nil no matter how many gory photos of abused animals advocates post on social media. 

At the same time though, similar dynamics as have transpired in the United States over the last four decades may be underway globally. Much of the world has little tradition of beef consumption. So as incomes rise, and meat consumption rises along with that prosperity, the lion’s share of that increase is likely to be chicken and pork, not beef. Rising demand for these animal products from the growing global middle class will, in turn, almost certainly drive increasingly intensive, technological, and higher productivity livestock systems, just as it has in the United States, Europe, and other advanced developed economies around the world. 

So a future in which much of the global population continues to consume animal products, most of it chicken and pork and all of it from highly productive intensive livestock systems, is one that could largely, but not entirely, mitigate emissions from animal agriculture and even return large areas of pasture, range, and cropland to forest and other natural ecosystems. But it won’t satisfy concerns about animal welfare and could make some of those problems even worse. 

What About Alternative Protein?

The other possibility, one that would reconcile the conflict between growing demand for animal protein, the environmental impacts of present day animal agriculture, and animal welfare concerns about intensive livestock production, is a large-scale shift toward plant-based, cultured, or lab-grown proteins. This will require palatable meat-free substitutes that meet the nutritional needs and cultural preferences of consumers all over the world, at a price they can afford and are willing to pay. And while many of these nascent products have made great progress, we are still a long way away from mass market meat substitutes that might move the needle on global meat consumption. 

Despite bold talk from its founder that its original product, the Impossible Burger, would bankrupt the global beef industry by 2035, Impossible Foods, arguably the most successful alternative protein product to hit supermarket shelves in the last decade, is still, at best, a niche product. Overall, plant-based meats still account for less than 1% of total U.S. retail meat sales. If meat substitutes are ever to substantially compete with animal products, it will be due to dramatic advances in research and technology, likely funded by governments.

I look forward to the day that I am able to grill up a laboratory grown ribeye or pork chop, or enjoy a palatable plant-based fried not-chicken sandwich. But in the meantime there are enormous opportunities globally to reduce the environmental impacts and improve the animal welfare of the livestock systems we have. 

From our paleolithic ancestors to today, humans have serially shifted toward animal protein production systems that are less impactful on the environment and better able to meet the dietary demands of growing human populations, from hunting and killing wild animals, often to extirpation if not extinction, to raising domesticated livestock in extensive, pastoral systems to raising or finishing domesticated livestock in feedlots and other confined and intensive systems. I couldn’t begin to parse the various ethical arguments about these different forms of animal protein - in essence, whether it is more ethical to kill and eat a wooly mammoth, a ten point buck, a backyard chicken, or a pig raised in confinement. But each shift in production system has generally been toward more intensive, more technological, and more artificial forms of producing or acquiring animal protein for human diets and it seems to me that the likely end point of that long arc, perhaps in the latter half of this century, is something that looks like a lab-grown ribeye or pork chop. 

Perhaps that will be achieved as many are attempting today, by attempting to grow animal proteins from the cellular level and then figure out how to structure them into familiar and palatable meat products. Or perhaps, to offer one final provocation to my ecomodernist brethren, it will be achieved by continuing technological innovation in existing intensive livestock systems. We already have chickens and turkeys bred with such large breasts that they can’t walk without support. And we’ve demonstrated the ability to breed, with help from new genetic editing technologies, chickens without beaks and cattle without horns. So why not breed a cow or a pig without a central nervous system? I’m not an animal scientist and I have no idea whether such a thing might be possible. But I’m also not sure why it wouldn’t be.

As ever, technological futures are difficult to predict. And where I think the ecomodernist ethic cuts across differences between those who want to improve the livestock systems we have and those who want to replace them with technological alternatives is an understanding that whatever else they are, domesticated livestock are already semi-artificial agricultural technologies, purpose bred over millennia to serve human needs. Continuing to advance those processes, toward more technological, less resource intensive and environmentally destructive, and more artificial agricultural technologies is the way that humans have always met the needs of growing populations, improved nutrition, and increased the environmental and resource efficiency of animal agriculture. Improving the already highly technological livestock systems we have, while continuing to invest talent and resources into a new generation of alternative proteins, is the way forward.