Banning lab-grown meat is really bad. By Matthew Yglesias

It's stupid, but it's not funny

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

MAY 20, 2024

∙ PAID

Read time: 9 minutes

Florida governor Ron DeSantis banned lab-grown meat earlier this spring, swiftly followed by Alabama. Two states makes this an official trend, but it’s one that the press has mostly treated as a kind of cartoonish culture war story.

And it certainly is, on some level. But I think it also deserves more serious consideration. Cultured meat is still largely hypothetical at this point, but not entirely. It’s received some real investment, and (if there’s anyone reading who works in the rather large universe of climate philanthropy) is an area that deserves more funding. I think it could be a particularly impactful investment for wealthy countries and US states where residents are concerned about climate change but the jurisdiction is too small for local-specific climate targets to make a difference in a global problem.

Because if you managed to create an affordable meat alternative that was functionally identical to animal protein, that could have a gigantic impact on the global emissions trajectory — much larger impact than any conceivable local-only action or activism or advocacy. Right now, Europe is being torn apart by politically unsustainable efforts to force agricultural emissions cuts, when investing significant resources in science would be more sustainable and have a larger payoff.

At the same time, it’s worth acknowledging that proponents of a lab meat ban have a genuine theory of the case, not just a culture war troll.

The concern is that while right now it’s obviously not politically viable to ban meat, it might become viable in the future. Suppose that at some point it becomes the case that cultured beef matches conventional beef in blind taste tests for 90 percent of applications, does slightly worse in the other 10 percent, and it costs about five percent more. Well, at that point you could make a credible case to OIRA that even though banning conventional beef has costs, those costs are offset by the environmental benefits and we should do it. So for some, it’s tempting to get ahead of the issue by banning lab-grown meat now while it’s so expensive and of such limited utility that almost nobody is really focused on it.

To acknowledge that this concern is not crazy, however, is not to endorse it. It’s just to note that it’s worth taking seriously. Florida and Alabama aren’t even states with major meat-producing industries, but now that this is on the agenda, I would expect places with big beef and poultry trades — like Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, North Carolina, and Iowa — to get in on the action. And in almost every state, there is some agricultural activity.

It eventually becomes a pretty simple case of concentrated costs (to meat-producers) versus diffuse benefits to consumers, a scenario in which the government often ends up restraining free markets and productivity. These kind of bad, technology-blocking laws are particularly likely to become entrenched when they have solid right-wing vibes, which is why the agricultural sector in particular is riddled with protectionism and barriers to trade. But we also know the world is full of more-or-less non-ideological rent seeking around things like car dealership franchises and quantity restrictions on the number of medical doctors. The alacrity with which two states are moving to ban a competing technology that doesn’t really even exist yet is a major problem.

And I hope that conservatives and libertarians who care about technological progress and economic growth will see that this is bad news, and urge the political right to re-engage, in a serious way, with finding solutions to environmental issues that are market-friendly and growth-friendly, rather than going for the reactionary sledgehammer.

To see what conservatives are worried about here, consider the situation with electric cars.

Over and above the environmental benefits of electric cars, an electric vehicle has a number of inherent advantages related to the much simpler mechanism of an electric motor relative to an internal combustion engine. Indeed, in some sense electric cars are a 19th century technology that predates the internal combustion engine precisely because of this greater simplicity. Thanks to the ability to deliver a constant stream of electricity via overhead catenary or third rail, electric trains have been widely used technology for a long time and generally have superior performance compared to diesel. The main thing holding up full electrification of national railroad systems is that the up-front fixed costs of electrifying are relatively high. But if the infrastructure exists, an electric train is much better for completely non-environmental reasons. Some cities, similarly, have “trolleybuses” — buses with electric motors that are powered by overhead wire. Objections to this technology normally relate to the aesthetics of the wire, but there is no problem with the bus.

Which is just to say that despite the virtues of electric motors, the big problem with electric cars historically has been the batteries. A battery that is cheap does not hold very much charge. A battery that will provide long range costs a lot of money — and because batteries cannot be recharged as quickly as gasoline tanks can be refilled, having long range is very desirable. The upshot is that for a long time, there were no commercially viable electric cars.

Thanks to steady improvements in battery technology, though, that has changed and EV sales growth has been robust. I don’t think it’s entirely clear what the future trajectory of EV market share would be in a pure market dynamic, but batteries are going to keep getting better, and over the long run EVs will “win.” But how quickly EVs win is a function not only of battery progress, but of how much gasoline costs. When gas is expensive, “this car does not burn gasoline” is a major upside to buying an electric car. When gas is cheap, that’s less true. So the point along the “batteries are getting better” curve at which Americans (especially outside of California) want to buy EVs is further out than it would be in a country with a higher gas tax.

Now as it happens, burning gasoline is genuinely bad for the environment — it puts soot into the air and contributes to climate change. However you feel about driving an electric car, it would be much better for you if other people drove EVs and made the air cleaner. Which is just to say that while gasoline is useful, on net, there are negative externalities associated with it. So my preferred approach would be a higher gas tax (we can split the revenue between rebates and deficit reduction), which would accelerate EV adoption, and then we can let battery improvements play out however they play out. But getting congress to pass laws is hard. It’s easier to get the EPA to write rules that sort of opaquely encourage automakers to price vehicles in such a way as to accelerate EV adoption. That’s what environmentalists are pushing for, tempered to an extent by the Biden administration’s political prudence. Exactly how tough a rule ends up getting adopted is a function of the relevant science, but also, in part, a function of how much progress is made in batteries. The better EVs are, the better the cost-benefit of forcing people to buy them looks. Which means that if for whatever reason you are deeply committed to driving incredibly long distances at the fastest possible speed, it’s genuinely bad for you for EVs to get better, because that will lead to stricter rules.

Narrowly speaking, I agree that this innovation/regulation cycle is pretty dysfunctional. I would much rather price water appropriately, and let people buy whatever appliances they want, than force consumers to adopt water-efficient appliances via Energy Department rules.

That being said, we all have our distinct factional roles to play in the great dance of partisan politics. My role as a moderate, neoliberal-inclined Democrat is to urge Democrats to be a little more chill about the regulatory activism, a little more attentive to the political and substantive costs of paternalism, and a little more open to market mechanisms. But this works a lot better if you have partners on the other side. The big political debate of 2025 is going to be about extending Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. Republicans and Democrats are agreed on a very expensive extension of the middle class1 tax cuts, and Republicans want to add another very expensive extension just for rich people on top of that. They want to pay for this through some mix of higher deficits (which will mean higher interest rates under these macroeconomic circumstances) and cuts to Biden low-carbon energy subsidies.

In a better world, at least some Republicans would be offering to replace energy subsidies (which cost money) with emissions taxes (which raise money) in order to do a bigger tax cut. But Republicans currently lack any faction that advocates for taking the existence of pollution seriously, which makes it challenging to find smarter ways to address it. For all the reasons that it’s good YIMBYism is bipartisan, it’s bad that environmental issues have become purely partisan, because it becomes very challenging to do market-based reforms.

And what we now have with the lab-grown meat bans is a step even further away from the ideal path, where on the one hand the left tries to use regulatory fiat to force the path of progress and on the other hand the right tries to use regulatory fiat to halt progress.

The good news about the left’s vision of this is that at least you really can point to areas like LED lights where, after a period of initial grumbling, the technology really did improve rapidly enough that these days nobody is sad we don’t have hot, inefficient incandescent light bulbs. But the bad news is that the vision of using regulation to fend off progress also has plenty of success stories! Here in the United States, we are badly behind the curve in terms of using elevators and multi-story buildings to alleviate land scarcity. Compared to Europe and Asia, our building codes require needlessly large, expensive elevators that are purchased in unreasonably thin markets. And on many other measures, the Europeans are worse than us! They won’t eat genetically modified food! On both sides of the Atlantic, we’ve regulated nuclear fission to near-death in order to benefit fossil fuel companies. So far, nothing too terrible has happened with vaccine policy, but we are also moving backwards there despite impressive technical progress.

As I said in “What The Right Gets Right,” one of the main virtues of conservative politics is a general disposition toward believing that innovation, commerce, and growth are good.

What you see in the turn against alternative meat is a move to abandon that in favor of culture war trolling. You see something similar in conservative hostility to electric cars. You see it in the Trump/Heritage hostility to zoning reform. And I worry that we will see it if self-driving cars keep expanding — manly men who wouldn’t let their wives drive them around aren’t going to let a computer do it either.

Because conservatives are conservative, they rationalize hostility to progress and growth as advocacy for local control or concern about hypothetical liberal overreach. I’ve tried in this piece to bend over backward to emphasize that I don’t think the latter concern is totally crazy. But reacting to the concern that progress might lead to demand for more regulation by trying to make progress illegal is, in fact, genuinely crazy. There are better ways to address these concerns, and beyond that, even when the overreach does occur, it’s still the case that on balance it is good to have progress. If nothing else, you can ride electoral backlash and overturn the liberal rules. But if you go down the road of banning new stuff based on vibes, you open the door to endless rounds of rent-seeking and corruption.

It’s a really bad trend, and even though it is pretty silly, it’s not funny at all.