Food without agriculture
If it takes more than a calorie of fossil hydrocarbons to produce a calorie of food, should we just eat the oil directly?
After years of revision and review, our paper on Food without Agriculture has finally appeared in Nature Sustainability.
The whole thing is a climate-change-centric analysis of Savor’s approach to making fats.
One fun aspect of the analysis was in the climate impact per calorie of food from different sources:
Most people focus on the potential for making these fats with captured CO2, as Savor is doing.
But since you respire ~1/3 of a gram of CO2 per calorie you eat, but the average calorie of energy on U.S. electric grid was associated with >1/3 g CO2 emissions, for now it’s better to make these foods from fossil methane than it is to make them from CO2.
Of course, both methods are vastly better than producing fats from plants or animals. Climate-wise, you're better off eating fats made from coal than you are eating palm oil.
There’s so much to like about the Savor approach. It seems obvious that ‘baseload calories’ like fats for baking should be made this way. Great taste, unmatched scalability, vastly lower CO2 footprint than conventional agriculture, vastly less land required, vastly less water use, producible virtually anywhere and from a variety of feedstocks even in a warming world... and still certain to be controversial when they roll out.
[Edit 8/10/2024— also noted in Cipher].