“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.”
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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.
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.