Achieving Net Zero in 25 years would need a “complete transformation” of the UK’s agricultural and food system that would in effect mean a diet devoid of beef, lamb and all dairy products, according to the latest work from the Government-funded UK FIRES. Look at the research that governing elites commission and read, not what they say. UK FIRES takes an absolute view of Net Zero and bases its work on existing technologies, not the pie in the sky inventions still to come and the whacky schemes that cannot reach economic scale. UK FIRES is an influential body since it takes a rare honest approach to Net Zero. Among the horrors outlined in its latest report is a future reliance on highly-processed food – industrial test-tube sludge in other words. Using labs to produce just 0.4% of the projected demand for meat in 2030 would involve a capacity “20 times that of the current pharmaceutical industry”, observe the authors.
The need to collapse the existing agro-food system is said to present opportunities for the creation of “hybrid” food products. Animal fat, presumably from non-belching beasts, can be processed to give “definitive flavour and mouth feel of meat” and these can be combined with plant-based ingredients. Alternative proteins (not detailed, but there is much support elsewhere for fly larvae and mealworm flour) might be used in highly processed foods. In future, notes UK FIRES, processed plants might include ingredients from precision fermentation or cultivated fats. These are all held together by half of the chemistry lab including stabilisers, colourings, E numbers and preservatives – though UK FIRES inexplicably fails to give the detail on this. And not forgetting masses of salt and sugar, a common staple of so-called healthy processed foods designed to give them a semblance of pleasant taste.
Utterly disgusting – readers might prefer to lay in stocks of the dog’s kibble as a healthier and more appetising alternative.
The land currently occupied by productive and generational farmers would see “radical shifts”. The required changes to achieve absolute Net Zero emissions from food systems “would present many opportunities”, argues UK FIRES. There would be competition for “environmental services” and this presumably would include such “opportunities” as nature-destroying wind turbines and solar dead zone parks. Rewilding and carbon capture or sequestration are mentioned. Planning and support for land use “transformation” is said to be needed, and it is said to carry the promise of “large social and environmental benefits”. At this point, it might be observed what a grand start the current anti-farmer Labour Government has made by slapping a recent 20% death tax on small family farms that are passed onto the next generation, or not as the case may now be. That should help clear a bit of space for the new enclosing aristocracy, the subsidy-hunting windmill rentiers.
UK FIRES is funded by a £5 million Government grant and its team of academics is led by Professor Julian Allwood, Professor of Engineering and the Environment at Cambridge University. In the past, its absolutist work forecast a world where Britain would lose 75% of its energy, where flying and shipping along with beef, lamb and dairy would be banned, while bricks, concrete and glass would almost cease to exist. These are all reasonable forecasts if hydrocarbons are suddenly removed from a modern industrial mix. But the academics’ brutal appraisals scare the horses at a time when the British Prime Minister is telling porkies that Net Zero will not affect people’s lifestyles.
The message has probably gone out to tone it down a bit on the banning front, so the latest report on agricultural and food supply is more nuanced. So it is more that we can transform food supply, it will all be a great adventure and economic opportunities will be created everywhere – that sort of guff, straight out of the Ed Miliband songbook. Slashing farmland acreage but boosting pharma-food is supposedly meant to reassure, although such reassurance is unlikely to survive when confronted with reality.
However as we have seen, the authors behind UK FIRES are Net Zero absolutists and the message is still that all greenhouses gases must be removed from agriculture. UK FIRES says this is a complete transformation, which is one way of describing a societal and economic disaster in the making. Artificial fertilisers which use hydrocarbons to add nitrogen to the soil have massively boosted crop yields around the world over the last few decades. Without their use, food supplies would halve, leading to mass starvation and death. With restrictions on the use of imported goods that have connections to hydrocarbons, Britons would gradually starve to death in their millions. Net Zero fanatics, which sadly include many British legislators, somehow draw other conclusions, the better we assume to sustain their virtuous egos.
Meanwhile they are unlikely to be interested in the science around nitrous oxide, the gas produced by the fertiliser. It has warming properties, which in common with other greenhouse gases tend to ‘saturate’ at certain levels, a natural process in the infra-red spectrum that has helped regulate the Earth’s climate over the last 600 million years. A recent paper from four distinguished scientists noted that the atmospheric concentration of N2O was only 0.34 parts per million (ppm) and it was growing at just 0.00085 ppm a year. The entire global food supply is being put at risk for warming identified by the scientists at 0.064°C per century.
Interestingly, the press release accompanying the UK FIRE report highlights the complete elimination of greenhouse gases from British agriculture by 2050, but the actual work fails to address a world without artificial fertiliser. This is somewhat surprising given the vast increases in plant vegetation that will be needed for the new food labs. A number of gas-eliminating technologies are mentioned but it is admitted that they are not currently feasible, while more precision fertiliser application is noted. As if this latter action has not already occurred to commercial farmers. The UK FIRES of old would have made a no-nonsense banning statement, but it seems the current authors, like most other Net Zero cranks, simply ignore the issue. There is of course a good reason for doing this since there are no solutions, except human hunger.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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