The livestock lobby is waging war on ‘lab-grown meat’. This is why we can’t let them win | George Monbiot

For many years, certain car manufacturers sought to obstruct the transition to electric vehicles. It’s not hard to see why: when you have invested heavily in an existing technology, you want to extract every last drop before disinvesting. But devious as in some cases these efforts were, they seem almost innocent in comparison with the concerted programme by a legacy industry and its tame politicians to suppress a far more important switch: the essential transition away from livestock farming.

Animal farming ranks alongside fossil fuel production as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth. It’s not just the vast greenhouse gas emissions and the water and air pollution it causes. Even more important is the amount of land it requires. Land use is a crucial environmental metric, because every hectare we occupy is a hectare that cannot support wild ecosystems.

Wild ecosystems are crucial for the survival of most species on Earth, and of Earth systems themselves: for example, the rainforest and cerrado of South America help to regulate weather systems . The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed above all by cattle ranching , whose expansion is driven in part by the foodie fad for “grass-fed” beef. The cerrado is being trashed primarily by soy farming to produce feed for pigs and chickens.

Feeding ourselves with animal products is a fantastically profligate and inefficient way of using land, swallowing at least four times as much as all the other food we grow while providing just 17% of our calories. More than any other factor, it drives the destruction of forests , wetlands, savannas, rivers and other habitats . Weaning ourselves off these products is as important as weaning ourselves off oil, gas and coal.

How can this be done? Moral suasion – seeking to convince people to switch to a plant-based diet for ethical reasons – is going nowhere: globally, meat-eating continues to rise while the percentage of vegans remains in low single figures in all but a few countries . I’ve long been convinced that the only effective strategy is to produce alternative products that are in effect indistinguishable from meat, dairy and eggs, but are cheaper and healthier. Around the world, scientists and startups are working on it.

There is a wide range of developing technologies, which are often misleadingly reduced to “lab-grown meat” or “cell-cultured meat”. What these terms originally meant was growing whole cuts in a bioreactor on a collagen scaffold. After initial enthusiasm, I came to see this as a dead end : it is simply too complicated and too expensive. Now the terms are often used to cover all new alternatives, including far simpler and cheaper technologies such as brewing microbes .

Such new-protein technologies are the leading threat to the global livestock industry, because they could be used to replace animal sources for everything from cheese and ice-cream to sausages, burgers, eggs, fish and steak, as well as creating a vast new range of foods we cannot yet imagine. Because the protein content is so high and the range of microbes so great, some of these foods could be produced with less processing than the animal-based products they compete with. Unhealthy components such as saturated fats can be excluded, and healthy ones, such as long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, can be bred in.

Related: Eating light: Finnish startup begins making food ‘from air and solar power’

Last spring Solar Foods, the company in whose lab I first ate a pancake made from bacterial protein, opened its first factory , near Helsinki. The transition to such new-protein sources could be as profound in its impacts as the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture. If done right, it could massively reduce demand for land and farm chemicals.

Unlike farming, it could ensure that neither inputs (such as fertiliser) nor outputs (such as manure) leak into ecosystems. It could greatly reduce demand for fresh water: indeed, some microbes can be grown in saltwater. It could allow food to be produced in places that can no longer feed their people, as there is insufficient fertile land and rainfall. In doing so, as long as governments prevent large corporations from monopolising the new technologies, it could greatly enhance food security and food sovereignty.

If you doubt the potential of these technologies, you have only to look at the effort deployed by meat corporations and their tame politicians to shut them down. At the behest of livestock lobby groups, lab-grown meat has been banned in Florida , Alabama, Italy and Hungary. Politicians in France , Romania and other US states are seeking to follow suit.

Given the confusing terms used in these laws, legislators don’t appear to be entirely sure what they are banning. But some officials are trying to ensure that the entire new-protein sector is stopped in its tracks. An attempt by the EU to green the food supply by encouraging alternative proteins was crushed by the agriculture commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski.

Governments seeking to ban alternatives to animal products have scarcely sought to disguise their motivation: protectionism. Several politicians and officials have openly admitted that they’re trying to defend established industries – meat and dairy – against competition. In every other sector they claim to favour “free markets”, and protectionism attracts major penalties. In this sector, it is enforced by legislation.

Now, according to Greenpeace’s investigative outlet, Unearthed , a new campaign funded by the livestock industry and fronted by a former meat executive is pressing for an EU-wide ban . As the far-right Hungarian government has the presidency of the European Council, the campaign could succeed. The UK government’s support for new proteins is a very rare benefit of Brexit.

None of the US and EU moves are subtle. They’re the exercise of brute legacy power. They are reinforced by an outrageous allocation of public spending. Research published in the journal One Earth found that the US government spends 800 times more on subsidising animal products than on subsidising new proteins, and the EU spends 1,200 times.

A new investigation by Kenny Torrella for Vox magazine reports that, far from contesting this anti-environmental market rigging, some of the leading environment groups in the US – WWF, the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund – are participating in meat industry greenwashing campaigns. Why? The answer seems to be sheer cowardice: their justifications suggest they are terrified of upsetting livestock farmers. Greenpeace UK is highly unusual in seeking to defend the new technologies against the old ones.

We should recognise self-serving corporate propaganda when we see it, confront protectionism and neophobia, and support the technologies that could be our last, best hope of averting environmental catastrophe.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist