Just a moment...
stateline.org

“This ban is a massive win for Texas ranchers, producers, and consumers,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement following the bill’s passage. “Texans have a God-given right to know what’s on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It’s plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.”

…

Texas joins Indiana, Mississippi, Montana and Nebraska in enacting new laws this year; Alabama and Florida did so last year. In March, the Oklahoma House approved a similar bill that did not advance out of the Senate this session.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    231·
    3 days ago

    Your entire comment assumes the state of the art for lab growing proteins is static and will not enjoy economies of scale.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
      12·
      3 days ago

      I used to argue with a guy who thought that nuclear was the only power for the future, and things like solar and wind were too small and inefficient to bother with. I always said that he was arguing about a future where none of these solutions had any development or growth

      Sure, back then solar and wind were tiny, but that doesn’t mean that you chuck it all out. You stick with it, do the research, and eventually it becomes a viable option, which is exactly what happened.

      The same will happen with meat. Now it’s cost-prohibitive, but one by one, they’ll conquer the bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and eventually it will become a viable option.

      • ChokingHazard@lemmy.world
        82·
        3 days ago

        That guy was right. And if we completely switched over and ignored the fear campaigns promoted by coal/oil/gas we’d have one of the safest and greenest electrical grids.

        • LousyCornMuffins@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          3 days ago

          i would argue nuclear isn’t the only power for the future, but it’s a great backbone for a flexible green grid also with solar, wind and hydro.

        • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          Not really.

          Yes the fear campaigns have been detrimental and it’s unfortunate that Nuclear has often been set aside over the decades because of the risk of mismanagement.

          However, it’s only part of a reliable electrical grid, it’s not “the solution”.

          In Australia for example, our population density is too low. Too much power would be lost in transmission. Perhaps in a few major cities it might be appropriate but it’s too costly to support a nuclear industry for only a few installations.

          Nuclear might be a great solution in many instances but it’s probably not in Australia.

      • squaresinger@lemmy.world
        4·
        3 days ago

        To be fair: People used to argue that Nuclear would get much cheaper and so cheap and safe that you could even power your car with it. They thought that everyone would have their own nuclear reactor at home giving them close to infinite cheap and clean energy.

        That didn’t exactly turn out that way.

        That’s the issue with using future developments as an argument. We don’t really know where the future leads the technology and which limitations will be overcome with development and which ones won’t.

        There are thousands of cool things that were posed to become the future revolution. Some of them did, many more of them didn’t.

        20 years ago, hydrogen fuel cell cars were to become the future. Now the technology is completely dead.

        From a current tech standpoint economy of scale is not nearly enough to get the price of lab meat to the price of animal meat. The ingredients are just much more complex and thus expensive.

        From a future tech standpoint, who knows? Could be that some revolutionary breakthrough happens. Or could be that it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, it won’t get cheaper.

    • Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      31·
      3 days ago

      I am sure it will enjoy economies of scale. Lab grown meat is currently something like 1000x the cost of animal-grown meat: I am confident they can get that down to 10x, maybe single digits. I am equally confident the inherent inefficiency of growing muscle cells without the integrated functions of the rest of the animal mean the lab cost will never be lower.