Our appetite for meat is costing us dearly. Animal agriculture is among the leading causes of deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation, and meat is responsible for almost 60 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from all food production. If nothing changes, the food sector will soon account for almost half of the world’s total emissions budget. Assuming we wish to contain global warming to only 1.5°C by 2050—the recommendation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—trying to meet this goal without addressing animal agriculture would require other sectors to reduce emission beyond realistic levels.
Global meat consumption, meanwhile, has dramatically increased over the last few decades and is still on the rise, projected to grow by about 14 percent by the end of this decade. On the other hand, phasing out animal agriculture entirely, over the next 15 years, could stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of carbon emissions, according to a model run by researchers at Stanford and Berkeley. Less drastic and more realistic action would still be beneficial. According to a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, just by swapping a fifth of meat for microbial proteins we could halve deforestation and related carbon emissions by 2050.
Such needs breed opportunity for the many companies willing to try their luck in this space, and one of those is a startup called Air Protein that was founded by scientist turned entrepreneur, Lisa Dyson. She has a PhD in physics from MIT and has worked at Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, and the Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab, where she met fellow scientist John Reed. In 2008, the pair founded Kiverdi, a company that now holds dozens of patents on technologies to turn recycled carbon dioxide into alternative fuels.
In 2019 they spun off Air Protein, which is based on the same idea of turning captured carbon into something useful. Their idea draws its inspiration from 1960s NASA studies about the challenges of feeding astronauts during hypothetical journeys to other planets. It turns out, there’s an almost logical solution: “If