The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Climate Change and Land report, released on August 8, is predictably grim. Agriculture, forestry, and other uses of land account for a quarter of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

As land use and climate changes both intensify, the capacity of the land to act as a carbon sink and provide ecological services diminishes, dramatically increasing the odds of a global food crisis. What’s telling about the report is that it explicitly recommends a dietary shift to primarily “plant-based foods . . .  and animal-sourced food produced in resilient, sustainable, and low-GHG emission systems.”

What the report doesn’t say is that there’s an alternative to reducing meat consumption that doesn’t require any animal agriculture at all. We could grow all our meat in labs, freeing up much of the 80 percent of the world’s arable land currently devoted to raising and feeding livestock. And no one is talking about the fact that this lab meat doesn’t have to be owned and operated by Silicon Valley or giant agro-industrial corporations.