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Cell-based meat approved in the US for the first time ever

Earlier this week it was announced that the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared UPSIDE Foods’ cultured chicken safe to eat. This approval came in the form of a No Questions Letter from the FDA in response to the application for GRAS, or Generally Regarded as Safe, status submitted by UPSIDE Foods. …

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How Synthetic Industries Replaced Natural Sources and Transformed the World (The Pattern of Disruption, Part 3)

  When people figure out how to do something that previously only nature had done, this new technology can completely transform the possibility space for a sector while making old ways of doing things obsolete – and all in a surprisingly short period of time. While the time can be very long between when an …

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How to go vegan without really going vegan: precision fermentation, cellular agriculture and the disruption of food

  Last year, the folks at Our World in Data published an article and some graphics about how human diets affect land use. The conclusion, as you can see on their chart below, is that if everyone in the world ate a vegan diet – one without any animal products at all – global agricultural …

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Emmanuel Macron, the President of France

France is Forgetting the Most Powerful Force in the Universe (The Pattern of Disruption, Part 2)

Europe is amid an energy crisis of epic proportions, with a shortage in the supply of fossil fuels causing painfully high energy prices. And today, French President Macron wants to revitalize nuclear to solve this challenge. But if you understand the pattern of disruption, you will see why this might not be so straightforward. When …

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a man in a cave

The Pattern of Disruption

The first in a new series about how the ‘pattern of disruption’ explains how our societies and economies change and evolve, and where they might be heading. It’s often assumed that ‘disruption’ is a uniquely modern phenomenon. But it’s not. Technology disruptions can be found at the heart of major societal and civilizational upheavals going …

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Rethinking the Jevons Paradox: Why more clean energy efficiency is good for the environment

  “What about the Jevons Paradox?” This is a common refrain in environmental discourse. It’s another way of asking, “won’t new technology always just create more problems than it solves?” William Stanley Jevons was an English economist and mathematician who noticed in 1865 that, paradoxically, the consumption of coal actually increased when technological progress improved …

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JP Morgan’s misinformation on the clean energy disruption – a handy guide

  The JP Morgan Asset and Wealth Management Annual Energy Paper is one of the most influential publications among global investment and business leaders in the energy sector. But JP Morgan Chase’s 2021 Annual Energy Paper is a deeply flawed piece of work that promotes some serious misinformation about the clean energy transformation, reinforcing the …

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The Protein Universe: To an Infinite Protein Palate and Beyond, Thanks to Precision Fermentation

According to a new report by the Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return (FAIRR) initiative, a global investor network that aims to put factory farming on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda, animal agriculture is deeply unprepared for the transition to a sustainable food system. But there is one interesting silver lining: 28 out …

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How to Achieve Rapid, Cheap Energy Decarbonization Using the RethinkX Clean Energy U-Curve

We are witnessing the start of the most profound disruption of the energy sector in over a century. Like others throughout history, this disruption is the result of a convergence of several key technologies – namely, solar photovoltaics, onshore wind power, and lithium-ion batteries (SWB). A 100% SWB energy system is possible as soon as …

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Restoring Our Faith in Progress: Part 2 – How Science Justifies Optimism

This is part 2 of a series. See part 1 on ‘How Prosperity Solves Problems’ Understandable despair    The trouble with climate change – as I explained in Part 1 of this series – is that the incumbent authorities to which the public looks for guidance, including most especially the scientific community, have failed to provide …

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