Is lab-grown meat better for the environment?

The objection

“All those bioreactors guzzle electricity. Lab meat will be worse for the climate than a cow in a field.”

The answer

The objection rests on something real. Lab-grown meat, also called cultivated meat, is animal cells multiplied in steel tanks, and the biggest sources of its emissions are the energy that keeps those bioreactors at the right temperature and the energy used to make the ingredients of the cells’ growth medium, according to a life-cycle assessment by the Dutch consultancy CE Delft that drew on data from more than 15 companies, five of them producers (Sinke et al., 2023) [1]. It was commissioned by the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that works to make alternative proteins, cultivated meat among them, as affordable and appealing as conventional meat, and by GAIA, a Belgian animal-protection group that runs campaigns. Staff from both co-wrote the paper, though CE Delft says it did the research independently [2][3].

Even on renewable power, lab-grown meat needed more energy than any farmed meat in that study: 164 megajoules per kg, against 104 for beef from beef herds and 23 for chicken. It also scored worse than all four farmed meats on emissions that can cause cancer, on toxicity to life on land and on use of mineral resources [2], and CE Delft’s 2021 report traced the toxicity to people mainly to mining and processing raw materials for electricity generation and infrastructure [3]. A 2026 review of the life-cycle studies likewise found high industrial energy demand and a climate result that turns on the energy source, with results varying widely by how the meat is made and what goes into it [6].

Is lab-grown meat better for the climate than beef?

Lab-grown meat would emit far less than beef from beef herds, about 92% less on renewable energy in a 2023 CE Delft projection for commercial-scale production in 2030 [2]. That is 2.8 kg of CO2-equivalent per kg against 34.9 kg, with renewable power used in the factory and in making the growth medium [2][3]. The beef was modelled on efficient Western European farms that by 2030 run on renewable energy and cut the methane from cattle digestion by 15% [2][3]. Beef from dairy herds came to 8.9 kg, so the cut against it was about 68% [2]. Made with the global average energy mix that the International Energy Agency projected for 2030, lab-grown meat came to 14.3 kg, still well below beef from beef herds but above beef from dairy herds in these 2023 figures, although CE Delft’s 2021 report had ranked it below dairy beef [2][3]. It would also need about a tenth of the farmland that beef from beef herds does [2].

Could lab-grown meat end up worse than beef?

It could, if producers keep growing cells in a medium refined to pharmaceutical grade. A 2025 life-cycle assessment by researchers at the University of California, Davis, which modelled near-term production, put emissions at 246 to 1,508 kg of CO2-equivalent per kg when the medium’s ingredients were purified to the standard of laboratory and pharmaceutical cell culture, 4 to 25 times the median for retail beef of about 60 kg (Risner et al., 2025) [4]. Without that purification, they ran from 12 to 75 kg. The authors had no data on that purification, so they estimated it with a single assumed factor of 20, and the high figures rest on that assumption [4]. They called the move to food-grade ingredients a significant challenge, and described even their figures as minimums, partly because they leave out building the factories needed to scale up [4].

The gas itself matters as well. Lab-grown meat’s emissions are mostly carbon dioxide, while cattle give off more methane and nitrous oxide [1], and methane does not build up in the air the way carbon dioxide does. Modelling warming up to 1,000 years ahead, Lynch and Pierrehumbert (2019) found that under sustained high consumption lab-grown meat warms the planet less than cattle at first, but the gap narrows and in some scenarios cattle end up causing far less warming; whether lab-grown meat is better for the climate depends on decarbonised energy and on the production systems actually built [5].

Is lab-grown meat better than chicken or pork?

Against chicken and pork from the most efficient farms, only on clean energy, and even then it roughly ties with chicken on climate. CE Delft’s 2.8 kg on renewable energy sat just above the 2.7 kg it projected for chicken and below the 5.1 kg for pork, while on the projected 2030 average energy mix lab-grown meat emitted more than either [2]. Those are best-case benchmarks, for farms running on renewable energy and feeding soy with no emissions from clearing land [2]. Against the global average footprints for chicken and pork in a 2018 analysis, the 2021 report found that lab-grown meat could compete once more than 30% of its energy came from renewable sources [3], and the authors concluded in 2023 that how it compares with chicken and pork depends on the energy mix [1].

That projected average mix is a little cleaner than the world’s power supply in 2025. It assumed renewables would generate 36% of the world’s electricity by 2030 and coal 29%, while in 2025 renewables generated 33.8% and coal 33.0%, according to the energy think tank Ember (2026) [2][7]. Lab-grown meat’s clear advantage is land: it turns crops into meat almost three times as efficiently as chicken, the most efficient farmed animal [1], and needed just over a third of chicken’s farmland in the projection [2].

Is lab-grown meat greener than plant protein?

Not in CE Delft’s analysis, where the lowest environmental impact belonged to the plant proteins it used for comparison (2021) [3]. Tofu and a wheat-based meat substitute had carbon footprints 2.5 to 4 times lower than lab-grown meat’s and overall environmental scores more than 3 to 7 times lower, and the authors judged lab-grown meat unlikely to compete with them; on land use alone, lab-grown meat made with renewable energy beat tofu [3].