Have you ever heard of “lab-grown meat”? Researchers are saying it’s the future and the best way to solve world hunger. It’s also supposed to be one of the many catalysts which will save the environment. But is that true?

A recent study suggests that lab-grown meat could cause more damages to the planet than real meat over the long term. Right now we do know that meat farms produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, and this helps to increase climate warming around the world.

Now the big difference between real meat and lab-grown meat is the fact that producing real meat releases methane into the atmosphere, which can last up to 12-years. However the production of lab-grown meat tends to release CO2, and that could last up to a millennium. Which is clearly not desirable.

“For the most conservative cultured meat footprint used here, which still had a lower carbon dioxide equivalent footprint than any cattle system in the study, the long-term temperature impact of production is dramatically worse than any cattle system,” according to researchers from Oxford Martin School.

The best way to fix this problem is for lab-grown meat factories to invest heavily in renewable low-carbon energy sources. But doing this is easier said than done, therefore, we should expect any progress on this front to take a long while. So probably the best solution is for us all to reduce our consumption of meat of any kind – real or fake – significantly.