Bill Gates has a lot of money and free time, especially since his wife Melinda left him, but filling it has not been a problem. He has dedicated at least some of both to finding ways to make you offset his carbon footprint. Climate Change concerns him, and he thinks we would benefit from finding ways to make more food with fewer emissions.
Gates has been linked to bug protein projects, lab-grown meat, and now butter substitutes crafted by scientists that use CO2 as an ingredient and which Gates’ claims are just as tasty as the real thing.
[A] California-based startup called Savor has created an animal-free butter from carbon dioxide that it claims tastes just like the dairy version.
The secret ingredient is the same one that makes humans crave cheeseburgers and bacon: fat. But Savor’s team doesn’t need livestock to create this component. Instead, it uses a thermochemical process that pulls carbon dioxide from the air and combines it with hydrogen and oxygen to create fat synthetically.
This fat is then turned into butter by adding water, an emulsifier, beta-carotene for color and rosemary oil for flavor. In the end, “it tastes like butter,” Kathleen Alexander, Savor’s chief technology officer, says to New Scientist’s Madeleine Cuff.
I’m no chemist, food scientist, atmospheric, or other, but it sounds like someone wants to use you to sequester CO2. If that’s your thing or you don’t care, I say have it. The same could be said for lab meat, plant meat, or whatever other chimera pops up to compete in the marketplace, and there’s the rub—one of them. These innovations are proposed in the wake of or in tandem with policies that make it harder for the real thing to compete.
Bill Gates isn’t just investing in ideas. He is actively creating price pressures that impact his competition, and planting the Climate Change flag doesn’t justify the meddling. There is ample science contradicting that narrative. Evidence that CO2 is not a significant, if any, driver of changing climate. That it is chemically impossible ever for it to be, mitigating the idea that it needs to be reduced or sequestered while additional science tells us that more CO2 is better for the agriculture necessary to make plant-based non-animal replacements.
I’d also challenge the idea that even as believers, these lab projects have smaller carbon footprints. To date, many of the “innovations” in greening are less green than doing nothing, and we can’t ignore the partisan movements whose end-game environment is more political science in pursuit of economic change than about the air or the earth.
I am not, however, opposed to Billy Butter on any other terms. Margarine has been around for decades and has spawned numerous “spreads,” making various claims, all together on a refrigerated shelf in your local grocery. If Gates-backed Savor can craft a tasty alternative at a competitive price and it’s not harmful to humans (independent non-government Non-Gates-funded testing would be nice) then giddyup.