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ucker Carlson’s truly terrible week began with a person turning the tables and calling out Fox News’ star propagandist on camera, and ended with possibly his biggest remaining advertiser deciding to leave Fox News altogether.
It started in a bait shop in Livingston, Montana, where Tucker encountered a man, Dan Bailey, who calmly told him that he was “the worst human being known to mankind.” Tucker was all smiles on camera, but later Fox News released a statement implying the TV host was less than thrilled with the exchange: “No public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view.”
The irony is that it was just a few months ago that Tucker had instructed viewers of his show that if they saw a masked child outside they should “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse, and you’re morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.” And Carlson is famous for using his show to target young female journalists, including former Beast Brandy Zadrozny and Taylor Lorenz, but I guess Fox News has different rules for its own hosts, those delicate little snowflakes. Their previous top-rated monster, Bill O’Reilly, made ambushing and harassing people on the street a regular feature, one that launched the career of Tucker wannabe Jesse Watters.
Things only went downhill from there for the frozen fish fortune heir after America heard testimony from the Capitol Police officers who thought they were going to die on Jan. 6, and saw even more footage of the MAGA maniacs looking to lynch Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi and with no compunctions about killing cops in the process. Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, a combat veteran, wept as he told the House Special Committee that he thought “This is how I am going to die” as he and others described fighting for their lives against the violent mob and being beaten even once they were on the ground.
Tucker shrugged, and smirked: “When they lie and they don’t stop lying, when they compare it to the Civil War or 9/11, they make us all very cynical and make us suspect that they are lying all the time. Because actually what happened on Jan. 6, according to video, did not look a lot like Iraq. It’s not Fallujah.”
Speaking of Iraq, when Rush Limbaugh infamously said the utterly deplorable Americans who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib were just “having a good time” and “blowing off steam,” the propaganda pioneer was at least defending the indefensible on behalf of American service members. Carlson, by contrast, was mocking men who serve bravely and honorably, because their lived experience, captured on video, didn’t line up with the fascist narrative he’s promoting for profit. There’s not even a pretend patriotism left for this generation of tough-talking chickhawks, just a cultist’s devotion to Trump’s yuge lie.
And then there’s Covid. Even as Republicans like polio survivor Mitch McConnell pushes Republicans to get vaccinated and Fox News has frantically reversed course to belatedly try and stop killing its viewers as the Delta variant tears through Trump-y true believers in red states, Carlson has doubled down, telling his viewers that “They've been telling us for six months the vaccine is perfect. But clearly, in some cases, it doesn’t always work.” He told viewers they should take it from the guy who created COVID,” before playing a clip of Dr. Anthony Fauci and talking about famous people who’d gotten the virus after being vaccinated.
The end-game seems clear as Tucker is telling his faithful not to get the vaccine, presumably since keeping his viewers—and anyone else they come into contact with—alive would give Joe Biden a win.
This is a sick man, albeit one who I’d bet has protected himself from getting infected. Tucker has refused to say whether he’s been vaccinated himself, but I suspect that he is, just like Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, who was vaccinated in December of 2020, and Donald and Melania Trump, who got their shots in January of 2021.
The bad news kept coming for Tucker on Friday, as the MyPillow guy, easily one of his show’s biggest advertisers as others have pulled out, said he would stop advertising on Fox News after the network—which is contesting a $1.6 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems—declined to run his ad promoting an coming “cybersymposium” intended to promote Trump’s yuge lie.
Does Tucker Carlson, whose top writer was outed as a not-so-secret white supremacist, deserve everything that’s coming to him? Like he likes to say, I’m just asking.
Donald Trump. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: Trump Tries to Defend His Demand
That DOJ 'Just Say the Election Was Corrupt'
ormer President Trump’s efforts to overturn election results late last year by pressuring Justice Department officials may be worse than initially thought according to newly available documents and a report from the New York Times.
In a phone conversation with then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard P. Donoghue and former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Trump suggested that the election should be declared corrupt despite there being no proof of rampant fraud. This new information was made public on Friday when the Committee on Oversight and Reform released Deputy Attorney General Donoghue’s handwritten notes documenting the conversation and helping to fill in the blanks concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results.
The phone conversation in question took place on December 27, 2020 and largely consisted of Donoghue and Rosen advising Trump that they were unable to change the outcome of the election in his favor. According to Donoghue’s notes, Trump reportedly responded by saying, “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen.”
Although Trump and other Republican politicians spent weeks claiming election fraud and cultivating general mistrust, there is ultimately no backing to their claims.
In fact, it was widely seen as one of the most secure elections in America’s history, as Vox’s Jen Kirby reported shortly after the election,
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double-checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result,” the coordinating bodies on election infrastructure and security said in a joint statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
The statement directly contradicts President Donald Trump, who has made unfounded allegations of widespread voting irregularities and fraud. The president is using these claims to challenge the vote counts in several key states that delivered President-elect Joe Biden his apparent Electoral College victory.
Nevertheless, Trump’s attacks on the election results came quickly, even before results had been tabulated, claiming that poll workers were hiding suitcases stuffed with ballots and that election officials manipulated a signature-verification machine used in ballot counting.
Both of these claims have been disproven but this did not stop the Trump campaign and many supporters from bringing their concerns to court in six states and promptly losing over 60 cases including at the Supreme Court. In response to the complaints purporting illicit activity, Attorney General William P. Barr said in early December, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Trump’s claims of election fraud were inaccurate and unlawful
Trump was quick to allege during that December 27 phone conversation that results from the states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, constituted “corrupted elections.”
“We are doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false,” Donoghue said, stating that the DOJ had carried out “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews,” and found that the election was sound. Trump retaliated by asking about ballot fraud in Fulton County and other areas, and when reassured that there was no proof of illicit activity, he asked Donoghue to verify signatures on ballots in Fulton County in person. Trump also claimed that the error rate of ballot counting was 68 percent in the state of Michigan while the department found that it was only 0.0063 percent. “We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal corrupt election,” Trump said, according to Donoghue’s transcription.
Rosen eventually stepped in to explain the reality of the situation as well as the DOJ’s limitations, asking Trump to “understand that the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way.”
But this was not what Trump wanted to hear. “People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in,” said Trump, mentioning Republican then-chief of the Justice Department’s civil division. “People want me to replace DOJ leadership,” a less-than-subtle threat to Donoghue’s and Rosen’s jobs in favor of Clark who had also pushed Justice Department officials to intervene in election results. “You should have the leadership you want,” Donoghue responded.
Although it was common knowledge that Trump was calling the election results fraudulent everywhere from press conferences to Twitter, Donoghue’s notes documenting the phone call are important because of the severity of Trump’s requests.
Upon releasing the documents yesterday, Carolyn B. Maloney, the Chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, issued a statement: “These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency.” Also in the statement Chairwoman Maloney wrote that the committee intends to interview witnesses as part of a larger investigation of the president’s “corruption.”
DOJ decisions could topple Trump’s hope of avoiding accountability
This action is among several recent efforts by the DOJ to investigate Trump’s actions at the end of his term. This week, as Maloney mentioned in her statement, the Justice Department authorized former officials who had worked under the Trump administration to be interviewed, including Donoghue and Rosen. Jeffrey Clark will also be interviewed specifically about his involvement in plotting to replace Rosen in order to further his investigation of voter fraud.
DOJ officials have been given permission by the department to give “unrestricted testimony, ... so long as the testimony is confined to the scope of the interviews set forth by the committees.” This is notable because along with issues relating to voter fraud and overturning the election, the committees to which the officials will be giving testimony are also investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
This is not good news for Trump especially considering a second DOJ decision regarding Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) who is being sued for allegedly helping to incite the Capitol riots in a speech he made to supporters the morning of the riot. Brooks has countered that he is entitled to immunity because he was acting as a federal employee when making the speech. However, Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to corroborate this, leaving Brooks vulnerable. This may impact Trump as he is facing similar charges of incitement and Garland’s decision undermines Trump’s anticipated defense of “executive privilege.”
Adding to the former president’s woes, the Justice Department released a memo on Friday requiring the Treasury Department to turn over Trump’s tax returns to the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee.
“The Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has invoked sufficient reasons for requesting the former President’s tax information. Treasury must furnish the information to the Committee,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Dawn Johnsen.
Trump’s refusal to release his full tax returns has been viewed as a strategy to keep his business affairs, namely those involving his family company, the Trump Organization, private. Under this order he is now required to release this information to the committee, the primary stated reason being to ensure that he has not taken advantage of US tax laws.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks with reporters, Thursday, June 17. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
ew York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) said on Sunday that there would be “more than enough” votes to prevent a bipartisan infrastructure bill from passing the House without a massive companion spending bill that Democrats hope to pass through reconciliation.
During an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Ocasio-Cortez told host Jake Tapper that if the Senate doesn’t pass the reconciliation bill, the House “will uphold our end of the bargain and not pass the bipartisan bill until we get all of these investments in."
“So, we really need to see that language and see what's put in there ... when it reaches the House,” Ocasio-Cortez told Tapper. “Bipartisan doesn't always mean that it's in the interests of the public good, frankly. Sometimes, there's a lot of corporate lobbyist giveaways in some of these bills.”
Ocasio-Cortez said "a very large amount of the Progressive Caucus" in the House would oppose the bipartisan infrastructure package without the reconciliation bill.
"The total amount is about 90. I am not the whip of the Progressive Caucus,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But what I can tell you is that it's certainly more than three. And it is in the double digits, absolutely.”
“Enough to prevent it from passing?” Tapper asked.
“More than enough,” Ocasio-Cortez replied.
The progressive lawmaker also noted the "tight margin" in the Senate.
"I respect that we have to get Sen. Sinema and Manchin's vote on reconciliation," she said, referring to Senate Democrats Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are working to add the finishing touches to an infrastructure plan that would total over $1.2 trillion in an eight-year span.
A woman wearing a mask. (photo: BBC)
n Thursday night, the Washington Post resolved some of the mystery of why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had suddenly changed its mask guidance with little explanation. It turned out that an internal CDC document had indicated that the delta variant of COVID-19 was likely both more dangerous and more contagious than previously thought.
The document warned that there was evidence that vaccinated people who became sick from the delta variant shed as much of the virus as the unvaccinated. On Friday afternoon, the Post reported that a CDC study bore that out: Vaccinated people carried just as much virus as unvaccinated people. The study found that three-quarters of an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts—an outbreak that began with July 4 celebrations—had been vaccinated.
“This finding is concerning and was a pivotal discovery leading to CDC’s updated mask recommendation,” the CDC director said in a statement.
To make sense of just how concerning this news is, Slate spoke with Dr. Larry Corey, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Slate: How surprising is this news?
Larry Corey: I would call it a teaching moment. And a learning moment that density is the fuel of the virus. Potentially density is the enemy of the human. And indoor crowding, especially celebrations in which you’re speaking, drinking, and unmasked, are still high-risk situations. There’s a threshold for everything.
How should people understand this news?
OK, we have an outbreak here. That reminds us that all vaccines, no matter how good they are, can be overpowered. There can be limitations. Having said that, it’s still an infrequent event. When we look at the data out of the United States, for the last month in which delta has been the overpowering variant, 99 percent of the hospitalizations were in unvaccinated persons.
Here we have some hospitalizations in which people were vaccinated. But having said that, they did well from a hospitalization perspective. And no one died. So, I do think that it is a sort of teaching moment that we’re not invulnerable, that delta is a formidable variant, and that high-risk indoor exposures can overpower vaccination. I don’t even look at it as a durability issue [with the vaccine], because it appears that the vaccination was within less than 100 days of the second dose for the vast majority of people.
So in terms of how vaccinated people should modify their behavior, you’re mainly saying to avoid crowds indoors?
To avoid indoor events with high density. I will say personally, when I’m going to the grocery store now, or indoor shopping malls, I’m wearing my mask.
What would you say to people who are worried less about their own personal safety and more about giving COVID to someone else?
The acquisition of asymptomatic infection is possible with vaccination. How frequently that occurs, how frequently you actually get infected and transmit it, we actually don’t know. We have a study or two in the field that may allow us to grab a handle on that, but that’s a couple months away. So I have to say, I don’t think we have the data to quantitate that. I think that keeping an eye on the ball, vaccines are meant to reduce the severity of disease and the medical complications of the disease. The vaccines against the initial variant even prevented you from getting ill at all at 94 percent. So, OK, with delta, that may drop into the 80s, to 85 percent. But that’s still 98 percent against hospitalization and death. We’ve got to understand that’s the goal. That was always the main goal of vaccination.
Would you say you have any other sort of big, outstanding questions?
I also say that at the moment I don’t think this outbreak says anything about booster shots, because even if we boosted, we wouldn’t know whether it would change any of this. Would it protect you from nasal colonization even better? We don’t actually know that at the moment. I don’t think this outbreak reflects upon that one way or the other.
How worried should people be right now?
I don’t think that the sky is falling. I think it is a moment to understand that you need to be prudent, even if you’re vaccinated. Vaccines work. They clearly do work, and the data from the United States continue to show that if you’re vaccinated, the likelihood of you getting hospitalized or dying from COVID goes down by 99 percent. But nothing is infallible. You take an enormous number of people and pack them into an indoor room, we can get transmission.
A prisoner. (photo: Shutterstock)
Curtis Crosland spent years trying to prove his innocence. A review of his case found that the information proving his innocence was on file the whole time.
urtis Crosland of Philadelphia spent over 30 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Now, after a review of his case, he’s a free man once again.
CNN reports that the 60-year-old Crosland’s conviction was overturned in June with help from the Philadelphia Conviction Integrity Unit. In 1991, he was found guilty of the 1984 murder of local store owner Il Man “Tony” Heo based on testimonies from two witnesses who later recanted their statements.
Not only that, but the CIU’s review of Crosland’s case also found that Philadelphia’s police department and district attorney’s office had the evidence that proved his innocence on file the whole time. There was also no evidence, physical or otherwise, that connected Crosland with Heo’s murder.
From a CIU news release announcing Crosland’s exoneration:
Citing the CIU’s “exhaustive and dedicated investigation” of this case, the federal court agreed that evidence regarding the lack of credibility of two prosecution witnesses was not turned over to defense counsel at the time of trial, as is constitutionally required, nor was evidence disclosed by the Commonwealth that showed the Philadelphia Police investigation initially focused on another suspect.
Crosland told CNN that his case is another sign that the country’s criminal justice system needs reform.
From CNN:
He maintained his innocence while in prison and filed multiple petitions, acting as his own lawyer, which he says he learned to do while studying law books in the prison’s library.
“You have poor, indigent men that have no access to have a good defense. The system should be designed that every man be treated equally,” Crosland said.
Crosland said he went to court every year during his time in prison to assert his innocence, but faced closed doors from the courts. “I don’t think I ever had a full night’s sleep, but I always told myself the day I’m exonerated I’m going to get my full night’s sleep,” he said.
Crosland said his faith in God kept him strong — but that prison was still a “hellish” struggle every day.
The CIU said Crosland’s case was the 22nd exoneration the unit has supported since its creation in 2018. Data from the National Registry of Exonerations shows that he is among 67 others who have been exonerated so far in 2021.
According to the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, government misconduct and false testimonies from informants are two of the six most common reasons behind a wrongful conviction in the United States.
Rodney Everett and Delores Tilghman, the informants who provided the false statements that led to Crosland’s conviction, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that they felt the police coerced them into lying.
From the Inquirer:
“It was just very brutal. They threaten you. They will use your family and they will tell you what they will do to your family, taking your kids,” said Everett, who testified at Crosland’s preliminary hearing but said he repeatedly tried to recant. “When you tell the truth, they don’t care. They’ll accept the lies, but they won’t accept the truth.”
Everett refused to testify at Crosland’s trial, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, but his earlier statement was read into the record. After Crosland’s conviction was overturned, Everett was granted immunity to testify at the second trial but recanted on the stand.
Yet Crosland was convicted again by a second jury.
As for Tilghman, she said detectives came to her home and woke her up, threatening to arrest her if she didn’t testify.
“It was him or me,” she said. “They were threatening me with putting me in jail. ... They can make that happen. I seen them make his life disappear with one witness.”
She said she’d long regretted her role in the case and was glad to learn of Crosland’s release.
The Inquirer reports that the evidence found by the CIU putting the credibility of the informants in question included a failed polygraph test and a statement from Everett’s wife saying he had identified someone else as Heo’s killer.
More from the Inquirer:
“To me, it’s a case that has all the telltale signs of a wrongful conviction,” CIU supervisor Patricia Cummings said. “You have a case that was cold. Then you have snitches involved wanting something in their case, and then the historical lack of understanding and appreciation of [disclosure requirements].”
It’s a sad truth that there are likely countless other wrongfully convicted people incarcerated in the country’s penal system. Over 2,800 have them have been exonerated since 1989, according to the data from the National Registry of Exonerations, with an average of nine years of their lives lost behind bars.
But Crosland told CNN that he’s not wasting any time in getting caught up with his loved ones after being away for so long:
He has now returned home to his five children, fiancée and 32 grandchildren. “It’s a great feeling to still be dad, to be wanted and desired, and open arms to receive you, that’s been the greatest part of being exonerated, that I come home to a loving family that wants and needs me,” said Crosland.
Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar's armed forces, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing delivers his speech at the IX Moscow conference on international security in Moscow, Russia June 23, 2021. (photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko/Reuters)
In a speech on Sunday, Min Aung Hlaing repeated a pledge to hold elections by 2023 and said his administration was ready to work with a future regional envoy on Myanmar.
The announcement and speech came exactly six months after the army seized power Feb. 1 from a civilian government following elections that were won by Aung San Suu Kyi's ruling party but that the military said had been fraudulent.
Min Aung Hlaing has chaired the State Administration Council (SAC) that was formed just after the coup and that has run Myanmar since then, and the caretaker government will replace it.
“In order to perform the country’s duties fast, easily and effectively, the state administration council has been re-formed as caretaker government of Myanmar,” a newsreader on state Myawaddy television said.
In his speech, Min Aung Hlaing repeated a pledge to restore democracy, saying, "We will accomplish the provisions of the state of emergency by August 2023”.
He added: "I guarantee the establishment of a union based on democracy and federalism."
Shortly after the coup, junta leaders promised new elections within two years. The reference on Sunday to August 2023 was interpreted by some local media as extending that time frame by six months.
Min Aung Hlaing also said his administration would work with any special envoy named by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
ASEAN foreign ministers are to meet on Monday, when diplomats say they aim to finalise a special envoy tasked with ending violence and promoting dialogue between the junta and its opponents.
The army seized power after Suu Kyi's ruling party won elections that the military argues were tainted by fraud. It has said its takeover was in line with the constitution. The country's electoral commission has dismissed the fraud allegations.
After the coup, Suu Kyi, 75, was charged with several crimes. Her trial on charges of illegally possessing walkie-talkie radios and breaking coronavirus protocols is scheduled to resume on Monday.
MONTHS OF PROTESTS
The military authorities have faced months of protests, strikes that have paralysed public and private sectors, and a resurgence of armed conflicts in the borderlands.
The authorities have branded their opponents as terrorists.
"At present, the whole country is stable except for some terrorist attacks," Min Aung Hlaing said in his speech.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners activist group has accused the armed forces of killing 939 people in suppressing dissent since the coup and said at least 6,990 military opponents have been arrested.
The military said the number of protesters killed is far lower and members of the armed forces have also died in violence. It said its response has met international norms in the face of threats to national security.
Coupling crop cultivation with livestock, including cattle, pigs or sheep, allows farmers to close the loop on the nitrogen cycle and reduce reliance on synthetic fertilizers, the production of which is associated with huge greenhouse gas emissions. (photo: Chiot's Run/Flickr)
ew and emerging technologies could pave the way to net-zero carbon emissions agriculture in the next two decades, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last month.
A host of new and emerging agricultural technologies lie on the horizon that could revolutionize how we think about food production, but a separate report published in the journal One Earth suggests that low-tech solutions could be just as effective.
Agriculture and food production account for 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making these sectors critical in efforts to address our current overshoot of the climate planetary boundary. They are also having profound impacts on freshwater, biodiversity, and nitrogen and phosphorous nutrient cycling — each of them planetary boundaries that we must balance if we are to keep conditions on Earth habitable for generations to come.
Yet, within the agri-food problem may lie a golden opportunity for climate solutions: That’s because the productivity and, ultimately, the profitability of agri-food systems are based on photosynthesis, a process that removes CO2 from the atmosphere, and our agricultural lands have huge potential to become a net carbon sink and contribute positively to addressing the climate emergency.
Novel tech’s key role in curbing carbon emissions
In a perspective article for PNAS, Daniel Northrup and colleagues compared projected greenhouse gas emissions from different agri-food technologies with current emissions for maize cultivation.
They found that a combination of novel technologies — including digital agriculture, crop genetics, and electric vehicles — implemented as part of a three-phase transition could achieve a 71% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from row-crop agriculture in the next 15 years. At the same time, these practices aim to build soil carbon stores, which could pave the way to net negative emissions from the sector.
The first phase would optimize current agri-food technology by employing digital agriculture to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizer used on crops by applying smaller amounts more precisely, a method that could cut emissions by 23%.
Next, existing technologies would be replaced with low-emission equivalents, including green methods for synthesizing fertilizers, and replacement of fossil fuel-powered farm equipment with electric equivalents run by renewables. This step could include selective breeding or genetic engineering for certain crop traits, such as improved nitrogen absorption through plant roots.
The final step in the agri-tech transition would involve a full redesign of the agricultural system, making use of swarms of small agricultural robots to practice automated precision agriculture with high-performing crop varieties, guided by distributed sensors. An advanced agricultural system like this might reduce carbon emissions by more than 1,700 kilograms per hectare, according to the study.
“The report focused on one of the most common cropping systems on the planet — high intensity maize — and worked out a pathway to dramatically decarbonize,” explained Northrup.
He argued that high-tech solutions can speed humanity’s transition to more sustainable crop cultivation that maintains vital ecosystem services like carbon sequestration and water filtration. “Because these tools can comfortably operate within current agricultural markets, they are a great place to build trust and converge on sustainable [agricultural] solutions,” he said.
Livestock decarbonization solutions
But crops tell only half the story, defining half the problem and half the solution: 50% of agricultural emissions come from animal production, and new technologies can help here, too.
In a separate study, also published in the journal PNAS, a team led by Arren Bar-Even at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Germany investigated how microbial protein could be used to reduce the environmental footprint of meat production and offer a healthy, sustainable, vegan protein for human consumption at the same time.
Microbes have been cultivated for protein production for both feed and food since the First World War, and a recent renaissance in the field has seen many companies developing microbial systems to produce this “single-cell protein” (SCP) as a source of animal feed, fish feed, and commercial food products. Typically, companies use methane or agriculturally grown sugars to cultivate bacteria intended for feed and food, but production of both substrates is associated with accompanying environmental impacts.
However, the new study found that those impacts could be bypassed by single-cell protein cultivation powered by solar panels. This new technology, dubbed photovoltaic single-cell protein (PV-SCP), could achieve up to 10 times higher protein yield per unit of land than staple crops like soybeans, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from land conversion and synthetic fertilizers.
“Engineering [and] electrochemistry are very good at certain things, and biology is very good at other things, and if we take the best of both then we can unlock new possibilities that were not available before,” said study lead author Dorian Leger, now an intern at the European Space Agency.
The process works like this: Electricity from a solar farm is channelled to an electrochemical unit, which uses CO2 captured from the atmosphere to produce an energy-rich growth medium for microbial protein, which can then be converted into animal feed or further purified as an edible protein for a variety of human foods. The resulting protein is highly nutritious and meets the recommendations of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for healthy amino acid composition, as well as being rich in B vitamins.
The team modeled the energy efficiency of PV-SCP compared to staple crops and found that the technique could generate 1.2 kg of protein per square meter of land per year — 10 times more than the highest-yielding crop alternative, soy, which outputs 0.115 kg of protein per square meter per year on average.
Rapid implementation of this technology could potentially mean the salvation of the Amazon rainforest and Cerrado savanna in Brazil, where vast areas of native vegetation are being converted to soy annually.
“To put it mildly, plants’ photosynthetic machinery is mind-blowingly impressive, yet I’m not that surprised that human engineered systems can outperform them from an energy efficiency point of view,” said Leger.
Microbes can direct most of their energy into producing protein, whereas crop plants, like soybean, must invest additional energy in root systems, leaves and other non-edible components, he explained. SCP also sidesteps an important trade-off faced by plants between photosynthesis and water loss, because microbes can be grown in closed vats where almost no water is lost due to evaporation. So the process protects another planetary boundary: our freshwater systems.
New focus on old, low-tech agricultural techniques
Despite a great deal of excitement, research and investment into novel agri-technologies, some experts say the same end goal could be achieved with existing, low-tech solutions. The key: closing the loop on the agricultural nitrogen cycle.
Another new study, published in the journal One Earth, reports that by implementing three simple principles, Europe could feed its growing population, break its reliance on imported feed, and achieve a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
The three principles: reducing human consumption of animal products, implementing organic crop rotation systems, and reconnecting livestock and cropping systems via manure.
“The surprise is that, with organic farming, without any synthetic fertilizer, by just reconnecting livestock and by adapting our diet to health standards, we can feed everybody,” said study lead author Gilles Billen, a biogeochemist and emeritus research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS by its French acronym) in Paris.
The researchers calculate that regionally appropriate crop rotation systems, directly linking crop cultivation to livestock, could meet the protein requirements for 600 million Europeans in 2050, when the population is expected to peak.
“By making use of legumes — those plants able to fix atmospheric nitrogen into proteins in their roots — as the head of the crop rotations, you can bring lots of nitrogen naturally to the soil,” Billen said. Diverse crop rotations like these also reduce pests and diseases that thrive in the uniform conditions of agricultural monocultures, thereby reducing or eliminating the need for pesticides — addressing another planetary boundary, polluting novel entities.
It’s all about nitrogen
Rather than relying on new technology, Billen’s scenario would see a return to agricultural principles that were commonplace just a century ago, but which would now be boosted by modern agro-ecological know-how.
Europe was then dominated by mixed crop and livestock farms, recycling livestock manure to fertilize a diverse rotation of crops, including nitrogen-fixing legumes like clover and alfalfa. Those old ways were exploded by the discovery of the Haber-Bosch chemical process in 1909, which uses high pressures and temperatures to extract nitrogen from the atmosphere — a technology that revolutionized agriculture by making cheap synthetic fertilizers readily available.
By 2015, the Haber-Bosch process was feeding an estimated 44% of the world’s population. The catch: for every ton of nitrogen extracted, Haber-Bosch uses a ton of fossil fuels and releases 1.87 tons of CO2. This single industrial process is responsible for an estimated 1.2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The irony is, after expending so much energy to process that nitrogen, much of it never makes it into our crops.
“The plant-soil interface is very inefficient in terms of how it deals with nitrogen; only 50% of the nitrogen we apply as fertilizers is ending up in our food,” explained Leger.
The rest becomes pollution — washed into waterways where it can cause harmful algal blooms, or released from the soil back into the atmosphere. Here, it acts as a potent greenhouse gas, with 265 times the climate-warming potential of CO2. In fact, humanity’s abuse of the nitrogen cycle has already resulted in one of our worst overshoots of a planetary boundary.
“Although often overlooked, our influence on the nitrogen cycle is much greater than the one we have on the carbon cycle, and this depends massively on how we produce our food,” said Silvio Matassa, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Naples in Italy and co-author on the PV-SCP study.
“One of the most terrible consequences of the generalization of the use of Haber-Bosch nitrogen synthetic fertilizer is the fact that it made possible to completely disconnect cereal cultivation and livestock farming,” said Billen. As production was scaled up, farmers in the most fertile regions focused on cultivating highly productive cereal crops, pushing livestock farming to less fertile regions and to where it became necessary to import feed.
“That [agricultural specialization] leads to a terrible disfunctioning [because] you are not able to close the biogeochemical cycles,” he explained.
By closely pairing livestock and crop cultivation in the modeling study’s 2050 scenario, Billen and colleagues were able to dramatically reduce reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in favor of manure and legumes, resulting in a 57% reduction in nitrogen emissions.
Other sources of waste nitrogen could also be redirected toward agriculture. For example, wastewater purification plants are legally required to remove nitrogen to prevent it entering streams and rivers; once extracted, it is released back into the atmosphere as nitrogen and the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.
“That’s completely crazy, of course, because it’s the same nitrogen; you can reuse it as long as you want by simple systems and you don’t need this energetic input and you can avoid the associated greenhouse gas emissions,” Billen said. “That’s why it was completely obvious for us to integrate [recycling wastewater nitrogen] in our scenario.”
Reusing the nitrogen filtered from domestic wastewater back into the industrial agricultural system could be an environmental and economic win-win, saving roughly 2 tons of fossil fuel for every ton of nitrogen recycled.
Changing diets, changing the world
Experts interviewed for this article agree that a reduction in the dominance of animal products in Western diets is a necessary change if we are to feed a growing global population with a healthy, sustainable, and equitable diet.
The proportion of animal protein in European diets has increased from 35% in 1961 to 55% in 2013, but nutritional science suggests that reversing this trend would have significant health benefits. For example, the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems recommends a reference diet containing 33% animal protein. Billen’s scenario uses a diet composed of 30% animal protein, with the rest of human requirements met by cereals, fruit and vegetables, and grain legumes such as beans, chickpeas and lentils.
“You cannot hope [to feed] all the world population [in] 2050 with a diet as rich in animal proteins as it is [today in] Europe or the United States,” said Billen. “Between 30-40% [animal protein] is the maximum allowable as what I call an equitable diet — a diet that can be shared by all populations in the world,” he explained.
“I’m not opposed to livestock, nor do I think we should aim to eliminate all livestock farming, but we probably need to strike a more delicate balance than what we’ve done up to date in the West,” agreed Leger.
Currently, “30-40% of all land is being used for agriculture, and yet there’s something like 800 million people — one in 10 people — that are undernourished,” he noted. “Although we’re projecting that there’s going to be problems in the food system in the future, clearly there are already limitations to what we can achieve [now], and despite these limitations it already has a huge environmental burden, so we need to do something.”
High-tech and low-tech solutions are often considered separately, but integrating these approaches could be the fastest route to agricultural sustainability and lowered carbon emissions. Imagine a future agricultural system combining digital agriculture (such as automatic crop monitoring and robotic fertilizer application), with regenerative practices (like legume-based crop rotations and mixed crop-livestock systems), all supplemented by renewables-driven microbial protein.
“I would find it very cool if PV-SCP could be integrated into farmland, so that it could work in conjunction with crops [and] with nature, so that it shares land with insects, animals, and plants,” said Leger.
High time for an agri-food paradigm shift
Rethinking the global food system is essential if we are to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global average temperatures to an increase of 1.5-2° Celsius (2.7-3.6° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. A sobering fact: current trends in greenhouse gas emissions produced by our business-as-usual global agri-food system are sufficient to blow humanity’s entire carbon budget before 2063.
With a century of investment in the current industrial agricultural system, it won’t be easy to radically change course, but “there are moments in history where you are forced to change paradigm and that’s urgent now because of the climate urgency, and biodiversity loss,” said Billen. Fortunately, he believes the tide of opinion is starting to turn, concluding, “I am an optimistic guy.”
This article was origonally published on Mongabay
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