[toasterlovin]

There's a really handy way to estimate the amount of resources that go into (and thus, the environmental impact of) making a product:

Its price.

When these are significantly cheaper than beef, then it'll be safe to state categorically that they are better for the environment. Until then, it's mostly a game of "pay attention to these metrics that favor my product and ignore the metrics which favor the competition".

[lrobinovitch]

That is false. Almost always, cheaper != environmental. Environmental practices often cost more, and this gets passed on to the consumer.

Case in point, soy gets 8% the share of agricultural government subsidies while feed for animals gets 34%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...

Price only reflects what consumers are willing to pay and the effects of subsidies, NOT the environmental impact...

[rgbrenner]

but environmental impact is often an externality that isn't included in the price.

If you ignore that, you get all kinds of obviously wrong things: a cheap gas guzzling car is cleaner than a tesla; natgas for electricity is cleaner than nuclear. etc. And worse, when you start talking about tech that hasn't scaled up yet.. if you go back 10 years, you would get: solar panels are worse than burning coal.

The price is not an indicator of environmental impact.

[be-ez]

The price of beef does not include the environmental impact so I'm not sure this is a good indicator of the impact of making a product. Beef/Milk in the USA is also subsidized...

[ajross]

Beef is expensive though! I don't think people are reading the grandparent post carefully enough. I think the point is correct.

Obviously at the margins there are costs to environmental impact that may or may not be realized in consumer pricing and there's lots to argue about on the regulatory side.

But in general, if you have to "equivalent" products shipped and produced in bulk, and one costs 4x as much as another (roughly where "beef vs. soy protein" lands for the consumer), it's a really good bet that the cheaper one involved less energy to produce.

[gbear605]

Or there are significant fixed costs that have not been amortized - for example, R&D for an entirely new type of burger. It’s very possible that the materials cost (growing ingredients + manufacturing) of the impossible burger is less than the materials costs of a beef burger while still costing more in a store.

[toasterlovin]

Not the person you're responding to, but their grand parent. If you look at food costs at the grocery store, it's pretty clear that a plant based burger which is cheaper than a beef based burger is possible in theory. And I actually believe that this will happen eventually, but I was responding to somebody who was stating categorically that these burgers were more environmentally friendly than beef burgers. My point was simply that that's probably not the case today.

And to speak to your point specifically: if it were simply a matter of reducing per-unit R&D costs by achieving economies of scale, they should be selling below cost so that they can grow unit volume. It's hard to achieve economies of scale when your product is more expensive than the competition.

[cwyers]

This is only true if there are no significant externalities.