Ep. 173 - Inside Mighty Earth: Glenn Hurowitz on Transforming the Meat Industry

Food & BeverageEnvironmental Protection
Written By Paul Shapiro

SHOW NOTES

What if the biggest environmental culprits were hiding in plain sight—right on our dinner plates? While most environmental organizations train their sights on the energy sector, Mighty Earth has taken a bold, and often lonely, stand in confronting the meat industry’s massive role in climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. In this episode, I sit down with Glenn Hurowitz, founder and CEO of Mighty Earth, to unpack why the meat industry typically gets ignored by the environmental movement, and what he thinks needs to be done.

Glenn has spent decades fighting for the planet, from working on federal public policy in Congress to launching powerful corporate campaigns that aim to guide the world’s largest food companies toward more sustainable practices. In our conversation, he explains why mainstream NGOs often shy away from challenging the meat industry, and how Mighty Earth’s strategy—focusing on supply chains, corporate accountability, and the expansion of animal-free proteins—aims to fill that void.

We also dive into Mighty Earth’s campaign to help supermarkets treat plant-based proteins not as niche novelties, but as core offerings. Glenn shares how enhanced meat products (think burgers that are part beef, part mycelium) can be a bigger environmental win than pure plant-based options alone, and why shifting market incentives—not just consumer behavior—is key to making real progress.

If you care about climate action, animal welfare, or food innovation, this episode may challenge you to think bigger—and act smarter—about what it really takes to feed humanity sustainably.

DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

MORE ABOUT Glenn Hurowitz

Glenn Hurowitz is the Founder and CEO of Mighty Earth, and has led environmental campaigns around the world for many years. He is a globally recognized leader on forests, agriculture, and climate change, and running strategic campaigns.

He has played a leading role in transforming several industries, including the 90% reduction in deforestation for palm oil, establishment of new policies and practices for the entire rubber industry, and serious action in meat, steel, and elsewhere. In his previous role as Chair of the Forest Heroes campaign, he and his colleagues won the Benny Award from the Business Ethics Network for their successes in transforming global agriculture. He co-founded Chain Reaction Research, which provides major financial institutions with in-depth risk analysis of companies’ sustainability risk.

Glenn advises philanthropies, governments and non-profit organizations on strategy. Glenn has also worked extensively in politics. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed book Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, Politico, The American Prospect.

He’s appeared on many national media outlets, including CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CBS, and NPR. He is a graduate of the Green Corps fellowship and Yale University, worked previously as Managing Director of Waxman Strategies, among other senior roles in the environmental movement.

TRANSCRIPT

Paul Shapiro: Hello, friend. Welcome to episode 173 of the Business for Good Podcast. Before we get into this episode, I wanna take just a moment to offer a few quick thoughts on my own entrepreneurial journey. One of the reasons that I love hosting this podcast is because I get to shine a spotlight on people who are trying to use their businesses to do some good in the world.

But I really talk about my own business on here, the Better Miko. And the next couple minutes though, are gonna be a brief exception to that rule. If you've been following the alternative protein sector and the broader biotech sector, you've likely seen the wave of challenges that fermentation cultivated and plant-based food startups have faced over the past few years.

As recent ag funder news reporting confirms ag and food tech investment is at a decade long, low. One active food tech venture capitalist this month even declared that food tech investing is quote, maybe as bad as it has ever been. Some days building a startup in our sector can feel like being a player in Squid game with about the same odds of survival.

It is against this backdrop that my company, the Better Miko, recently closed a series A realm, the proceeds of which will be used to scale the Myprotein fermentation platform that we've invented, patented, and optimized over several years. While layoffs and bankruptcies and shutdowns and cash free acquisitions have been rampant in our sector lately.

The better. Miko has never conducted layoffs. Instead, we have tried to be very frugal and we've tightened our boat even further in the last year, all while continuing to make important progress toward our aspirations of slashing humanities footprint on the planet. That's not to say that the other companies who have shut down or gone bankrupt or done layoffs have done anything wrong per se.

Many of them are great companies with really good ideas and people working hard to try to make it work. But it is to say that we have done something that I'm very proud of our team for having accomplished. There are a lot of people in the ecosystem who have reached out to say, congratulations about this series, series A quo, and I certainly appreciate that, but fundraising is never our goal.

This financing is hardly the end of our story. Again, receiving investor dollars is not our goal. It is solely a means to the end of building a profitable business that will help put a dent in the number of animals who are used for food. Imagine, for example, if you need to push a massive boulder up a mountain.

Raising a financial round is akin to having someone provide the gloves and the shoes and the food that you're gonna need to push that border all the way up. But you still need to actually go push the boulder up the mountain, hardly a guaranteed outcome. And that's exactly what we at the Better Meco intend to do.

Push our own boulder uphill in the form of successfully scaling and selling out capacity for our first full scale commercial Myprotein fermentor. Words cannot express how grateful I am to better meet co team members, both current and past, who've worked to make this possible. Our customer partners who love using our product, RZA Myprotein, and our investors who've believed in this company during the inevitably wild ride that building a startup entails.

People say that founding a startup will make you sleep like a baby since you'll wake up every two hours and cry. That may often be true. But for the time being, if I'm waking up, it's simply to say thank you to everyone who has believed in and cheered on the Better Meat Co for the past seven years as we try to solve this vexing problem of how we're going to feed humanity without tormenting billions of animals and destroying the planet in the process.

But we are not the only ones. Trying to figure out how to solve this Gordian Knot. This episode's guest is also working every day to mitigate the impact of our species seeming addiction to raising billions of animals for food. While most environmental organizations train their sites on the energy sector, mighty Earth has taken a bold and often lonely stand.

In confronting the meat industry's massive role in climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss. In this episode, I sit down with Glenn Horowitz, founder and CEO of Mighty Earth, to unpack why the meat industry typically gets ignored by the environmental movement and what he thinks needs to be done.

Gwen has spent decades fighting for the planet from working on federal policy in the halls of Congress to launching powerful corporate campaigns that aim to guide the world's largest food companies toward more sustainable practices. In our conversation, Gwen explains why mainstream NGOs often shy away from challenging the meat industry and how mighty Earth's strategy, which entails focus on supply chains, corporate accountability, and the expansion of animal free proteins.

Aims to fill that void. We also dive into Mighty Earth's campaign to help supermarkets treat plant-based proteins, not as niche novelties, but rather as core offerings. Glenn shares how enhanced meat products think burgers that are part beef and part myprotein can be a bigger environmental win than pure plant-based proteins alone.

And why? Shifting market incentives not just shifting consumer behavior is key to making real progress if you care about climate action. Animal welfare or food innovation. This episode may challenge you to think bigger and act smarter about what it really takes to feed humanity sustainably.

Glenn, welcome to the Business for Good Podcast.

Glenn Hurowitz: Thank you so much, Paul. I'm a huge fan. It's a great honor to be here.

Paul Shapiro: I'm a fan of yours. I'm I'm honored to be chatting with you. We've known each other for a very long time. Long before this show existed, long before Mighty Earth existed you were working in Congress for Congressman Henry Waxman when we first met.

And what's funny is at that time I was working primarily as a lobbyist to try to pass new laws and look at how our lives have changed. You went from being in Congress to now being on the outside in a nonprofit, which is where I was at that time. Now I'm running a for-profit company. A lot's changed.

A lot's changed in the 15 or so years we've known each other.

Glenn Hurowitz: Absolutely. I'm glad I gave the impression of being such a skilled and savvy insider that you actually thought I was working in Congress, but I was actually working with Henry outside of Congress Ah, yes. On advocacy campaigns.

And, but I, what I wanted to say about that was. I have been doing this work in the environmental movement for a long time. I took so much inspiration from the work that you did to protect animals, the campaigns that you did, the dynamism, the strategy and we've learned a lot from it. It's been only to the benefit of the planet.

Yeah. So thank you for that.

Paul Shapiro: That's very kind of you and thank you for the correction. You were working for Henry Waxman, but not on his staff. You were an external consultant to

Glenn Hurowitz: him, correct. Okay,

Paul Shapiro: cool. Yeah, so for those who don't remember, Henry Waxman was a congressman from Southern California who no longer is in Congress, but was a champion for many environmental causes while he was in the Congress.

Yeah. Cool. Okay. Listen, I am impressed by what you are doing with Mighty Earth, and I wanna ask you the basic question that I'm wonder all the time about this, which is. Mighty Earth is among the few environmental groups that take the meat industry problem seriously. Most of the environmental groups are not that engaged on this.

You run campaigns on the topic. You've put out a new report recently, asking supermarkets why they aren't taking seriously the methane emissions in their supply chains, primarily from meat and dairy. You are an advocate for alternative proteins and you work with many of those in the alternative protein sector to advance them.

Why is it that you are so anomalous in this? Why aren't the large NGOs in the environmental movement doing more on this issue?

Glenn Hurowitz: Yeah, it's a great question when I ask myself a lot and one that I'm trying to change but it's a little challenging. I think there's a few reasons. One. Most of the environmental groups see themselves as trying to build coalitions that can have the political heft to win.

I also think that there's been what I call an energy fetish. So within the context of tackling climate change, a focus on the energy sector, which is really important. But the reality is that nature, which includes agriculture and especially the meat industry, accounts for something like a third of global climate.

Pollution but gets only about 3% of the finance and resources that is meant to address it. And then of course for me, when you add in the extinction crisis, the destruction of habitat that go, that is if anything even more severe than the climate crisis. And so is the motivation for me. But I think given that focus on the energy sector, it has.

Just distracted attention from one of the biggest opportunities to address climate change and protect habitat. The other reason I think, is political caution. There is an incorrect perception in my view, that you cannot challenge the meat industry, that ranchers and farmers are addicted to the way they're doing business.

They're not open to change. If you start saying that the meat industry is responsible for all this destruction, whether persecuting carnivores like wolves and grizzly bears, or just destroying habitat on a vast scale or polluting the water it will be alienating to a lot of Americans. I don't agree with that.

And in fact, one of the fascinating things to me is that when we have run campaigns on the ground, grassroots campaigns in the Midwest, south Chesapeake Bay area. Critiquing the meat industry somewhat to our surprise, we've had farmers coming out of the woodwork to support us. They are really frustrated by the current agricultural system.

They feel locked into it. They see the opportunities for vast improvements that you don't have to destroy so much habitat to feed people. And they've been some of our biggest champions, but I do think that caution one might call it times cowardice ex exists in some groups. And it's a real shame because the meat industry is.

Responsible for such a large amount of destruction.

Paul Shapiro: Yes. So I would agree with your diagnosis here. I'm not quite sure what the prescription is. A lot of these groups, I do think they're afraid of offending their own base, right? Like I've gone to environmental. Fundraisers and they're serving stakes at their dinner.

And I'm just thinking I, how could this be? The problem that I see with this diagnosis though is they're are they afraid to take on the meat industry? 'cause the meat industry is so powerful, but it's not like the oil industry is incompetent. This is a massive industry that they are all too happy to take on all the time.

Oil. E even fossil gas now, and these are really big industries too. And yes, people aren't eating oil on a daily basis in the way that we eat meat on a daily basis. And so it's not as personal or it's at least not felt as personally as people. But at the same time, I just wonder. Like when what is it going to take?

What is the prescription for altering what the large NGOs do on this? Even if they aren't concerned about the treatment of chickens and pigs and cows? Surely they are concerned about the wildlife extinction crisis that you mentioned. Literally dozens of species go extinct every single day, not every year, every day.

Dozens of species go extinct primarily because of habitat loss due to farming, which is nearly entirely due to animal farming, and yet they don't seem to make any calls to raise you or animals for food. So what do you think is the prescription like you've issued the diagnosis, which is, maybe some degree of cowardice, but what is the prescription to give them some spine on this to get them to do more of the things that Mighty Earth is doing?

Glenn Hurowitz: It's a great question and I think, one of the things is just persistent sharing with them the fact that the meat industry is both responsible for so much climate pollution, extinction, but also that transforming it has the potential to solve these problems in a very affordable way. I think you're making it a good point about, why are they willing to tackle the oil industry or the coal industry, but not.

The meat industry in a serious way? I don't think it's that they're concerned so much about criticizing the corporations, but rather a perception that they would alienate people at the grassroots level, either who believe that their steak or chicken dinner would be threatened in some way, or that they would alienate farmers and ranchers.

When it comes to protecting wildlife and carnivores out. In grasslands, the strategy of the environmental movement, not unreasonably, has been partly to work with them to improve ways to scare away wolves, right? So that they don't have to be shot. So it's a very collaborative approach, but I don't think that necessarily gets to the need to make a fundamental transformation in how we consume protein.

I, I do think things that our mutual friend Ari Nessel is doing where he's having dinner, where he is, with allowing people to taste cultivated protein, plant-based protein, inviting environmental leaders, inviting members of Congress from both sides of the aisle are really beneficial to show them that maybe this is not that scary and it's actually delicious.

I also would say that. So much of climate action today is driven by philanthropic investments. And there's a couple of philanthropies that are interested in this issue, like the Bezos Earth Fund, but most of them have really shied away from it. I think if you did have more philanthropies coming out and giving out large amounts of money to environmental groups to advocate on this, there might be more openness.

But I think there still is a process of education and getting over that. What I continue to see is an elemental fear of tackling this industry, despite, in my view, it being primarily responsible for environmental damage on our planet.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. So you know, you, as you were speaking, I was actually coming to a similar prescription that you wound up at, which is at.

The people who are donating to these groups need to tell them, we want you to do this. That's really what it's gonna come to, to in, in effect, these are the shareholders of a company, right? Your donors, not that they literally own the nonprofit organization, but they certainly have influence on what they do.

And you mentioned our friend Ari Nessel, who runs Food Solutions Action, will include a link in the show notes for this episode at Business for Good podcast.com to his organization. But essentially what they're doing is trying to make the advocacy for animal free proteins. Something that's a nonpartisan issue, something that can get backing from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress because this is not only a food security issue, it's also a national security issue that everybody should support.

And so even if they're not concerned about the climate or other environmental impacts, even if they're not concerned about wildlife extinction and biodiversity loss, they may be concerned about our ability to out-compete countries like China, which are racing to own the future of animal free proteins.

And so that, that's what they're doing. And I think. That's a good example of a nonprofit organization that's really helping to advance the alternative protein space. And I hope that can come to pass. But in order to, it, let's just say, the head of some of the top environmental groups are listening, the heads of them are listening.

Regale us for a moment, Glenn, with what you're actually doing. Tell us about some of the work that you're doing with regard either to JBS or others in the meat industry, and what are the successes or advances that you've had on this that they could take heart from and maybe try to emulate?

Glenn Hurowitz: Exactly and I think it's not only the success, but the fact that we're still here.

We don't seem to have alienated a large amount of people. If anything, we've attracted grassroots support from many who are really frustrated at the meat industry. It's a great question in that sense. So we are, our flagship campaign is working to transform the. The meat industry our overall mission is to protect nature and climate.

And within this, we've decided this is the single most important thing that we can do as an organization to help. Our core focus has been on changing the private sector because of political polarization on this issue, the utter capture of government, both in the United States and many other countries by the meat industry.

We have seen that the need to change the private sector itself as the primary vehicle through which we think that transformation will happen. So we've done campaigns to change the industry in multiple ways. One is to break the link between agricultural expansion and deforestation, getting companies to expand onto the world's billion plus acres of previously deforested land instead of channeling their development onto intact ecosystems.

That's really. Important work for nature and has the great benefit of protecting forests and all the animals that live within them. But I would be the first to admit that as important as it is, it doesn't fundamentally change what's wrong with the meat industry, the vast inefficiency of using.

Land to inefficiently feed animals for human protein is an avoidable crisis. And so what we have done to go beyond that is ask retailers for instance, to boost their sales of, and marketing of, and investment in, plant-based and other alternative proteins. That means things like not relegating, plant-based protein to an obscure corner of the freezer aisle, but rather putting it next to the meat products.

It means not using meat as a lost leader to bring people into supermarkets. One of the challenges that the alt protein companies face is that, you can see 99% rotisserie chicken advertised. So there sometimes. Supermarkets actually taking a loss on the meat products that's attempting to get people into the supermarket.

And then there's up to a hundred percent markup on plant-based products and. We're also asking 'em to set goals, by 2030 to sell 50%, 60% plant-based protein. And we've had some success in persuading some supermarkets so far, especially in Europe to make some of these changes. We've seen companies like Aldi, little Aho del Hayes, Tesco, make some of these marketing commitments and it is causing a difference the US.

Retailers need to do more. Because ultimately what we're trying to do is send a demand signal that allows the all protein industry to reach a scale by 2030 by 2040 that can have the cost of meat across the board, not just in a few product categories. Beat that of industrial meat and have a consistent positive.

Taste, experience. And we think one important element in achieving that is having a really powerful demand signal. We also think that hopefully, we'll, if you see major supermarkets say We're gonna be ramping up our purchases, our sales of plant-based meat and alternative protein, and. That will send an important signal to investors that they should be putting more money into this sector.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, for sure. And the sector certainly needs more investment dollars. It's quite a famine and it's a very wintry atmosphere for the in terms of venture capital for alternative proteins these days. Very unlike it was, let's say in 2021. And, you raise an interesting point, Glenn, about what these supermarkets are doing or could be doing and I have.

Long argued that the alternative meat should be in the meat section, right? Not in the ghetto, in the frozen section where you mentioned but I also think they should be in the meat itself, right? There's no reason that if you're gonna put impossible burgers in the meat aisle, why not put plant-based meat in the meat itself and create these hybrid products that'll allow people to enjoy their meat?

While also having a lower footprint item. I know you agree with this, but I just wanna point out there's so much more meat purchased than plant-based meat, that if we were able to reduce the total amount of animal meat that is in meat, it could be quite a powerful example and could really help make quick changes in denting the total demand for animal farming.

Glenn Hurowitz: A hundred percent and inspired in part by discussions I had with you about this topic. We are including that in our goal. When we're asking companies to be selling 50%, 60% plant-based protein by 2030, part of the way they can meet that is through blands mixing in plant-based protein with regular meat.

And, it's interesting I think it's been. A bit of a battle to get people to understand that, that it's as beneficial actually as selling pure plant-based protein. Especially when you're looking at getting the industry to scale. And it's something that we're continuing to work on and bring up in our meetings with both the big retailers, but also the meat companies themselves.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. You have a lot of people who think of like these hybrids as a half step, so to speak. Yeah. And I, I would argue that it is actually not. Not only is it not a half step, it's a bigger step. I'll give you an example. Imagine today you walk into Burger King. You have a couple options.

You can get the impossible Whopper, or you can get the conventional Whopper. And according to news reports, the highest selling for impossible locations is about 2% impossible whoppers. Now, for the sake of this thought experiment, imagine all of that is displacement to beef. No vegetarians are ordering it.

It's only people who would've gotten the conventional whopper get the impossible. So you get a 2% reduction in beef demand. But now imagine that if in addition. To offering the impossible whopper. You also make the conventional whopper, let's say 20% not animal meat, right? All of a sudden you have 10 times more mission advancement, right?

You have 20% instead of 2% reduction, and you don't rely on people consciously making a switch to buy this more expensive product. That to me is not a half step. That's a dramatically bigger step, and I think there's an argument to be made that enhancing meat with either plant proteins or mycelium proteins or others.

Is a really compelling strategy, just in the same way that for the past 25 years, hybrid cars have been an important part of the strategy. And I didn't hear any environmentalists saying, oh no, don't, don't support hybrids because it still uses fossil fuels. Today there might be some people who say that with their prevalence of bvs, but certainly there weren't saying that when the Prius came out.

Glenn Hurowitz: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that currently bevels this sector, which I don't think is inevitable, that will endure forever, is. A desire for purity on behalf of almost every interest, whether it's the vegan advocates or the meat industry itself, that the. Pragmatic vision that you've outlined, which is the kind of vision that actually got clean energy to scale from, having solar and wind be substantially more expensive than fossil fuels 20 years ago to now being cheaper across the board.

Is has been hard to get to be widely accepted. I think that's one of the things that we're trying to say is that we should be at our organization we say we're obsessed with impact. We try to keep the focus on the results and not so much the process of getting there. And I think this is one critical issue where anal analogies like the one you made, are so compelling.

If you're actually interested in protecting nature and climate, or improving animal welfare because. For an acre of rainforest that's under threat from a bulldozer it doesn't care if the reduction in meat consumption comes from a pure plant-based product or mycelium based product. Or from mixing a plant-based burger whi into meat.

Paul Shapiro: E Exactly right. And in fact, they would prefer that 10 times fewer Exactly. People. Exactly. Precisely. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that I find compelling about what you're doing are these targeted approaches saying, we want you to set a percentage that you expect to decline. And that, to me is comparable to what happened with Queen Energy, where companies made targets.

They said, by this year we're gonna be using X percent. Clean energy or X percent less of fossil energy. And one of the concerns that I've had, and I've been guilty of participating about this in the past, is that I used to believe that merely offering more plant-based options was a good enough outcome.

And the problem is that there's not really a lot of evidence that merely offering it. Necessarily cuts into the demand for meat, right? If it's not offered in the right place or the right way, or at the right price or at the right product, you don't really know how much tangible reduction there is. And that's the whole goal is reduction in meat demand.

And so if instead of saying we want you to offer plant-based options, the goal is, we don't care how you get there, but by this year it should be 50% less meat or whatever the target is. That to me, seems a lot more beneficial and tangible for the environmental impact.

Glenn Hurowitz: Yeah, and what we've seen is that when companies really try to sell a product, they typically succeed.

They have enormous marketing expertise and resources and. It is to me a bit hypocritical. If a company says, oh, we're offering plant-based options and no one's buying them, and then you look at their actual practices and they're using meat as a lot loss leader or relegating the products to the freezer section, they're not using the tactics that they're so good at to get you to buy.

A two liter bottle of soda or a Kit Kat bar or a hamburger when it comes to plant-based products. So I think what we have seen actually is that particularly the European supermarkets that have embraced these goals have been effective at boosting sales. And in fact, I just returned from the uk It is extraordinary to me there how much the mainstream supermarkets, Tesco, Sainsbury's, et cetera.

Our marketing, both plant-based products and then blending in plant-based protein into meat. They are the chief evangelists in Britain for a plant-based diet. And they're doing it because they have figured out how to make money selling at a mass scale, not just as a niche market plant-based protein.

Yeah. And so you've seen significant declines in Britain. Of meat consumption as a result. And I think it's a model that could pretty easily be replicated. I also would say that. One of our hopes is that you can create a critical mass and so that it becomes a race to the top. Where this is seen as a market segment that companies from a commercial motivation are competing to dominate.

I don't think that is happening quite yet in the United States, but it is increasingly happening in other parts of the world.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, Vox did a really interesting piece on Germany looking at what some of the reasons why meat demand is declining in Germany. 'cause meat demand is going up nearly everywhere in the world, right?

China, India, Brazil, even the United States record per capita meat consumption right now. Now, to be fair, it's not so clear that is. Necessarily 'cause people were eating more meat or because it's an increase in pet keeping, which is not differentiated by the USDA statistics, which is pretty interesting.

More, more pet keeping means more meat, obviously. Since nearly all dogs and cats eat meat, and so there is that. But at the same time, it's very clear that meet demand is declining in places like Germany and France. And Fox did a really interesting piece that we'll link to in the show notes for this episode where you can read some of their theories as to why, and they're talking about the supermarkets, just like you're mentioning Glenn, and some of the strategies that the major supermarkets are engaged in.

I do think one of the differences is there that there's just a lot more climate concern in Western Europe than there is in the United States. So the supermarkets are responding to that in part, right? It's not that they are necessarily caring so much about animal welfare. It seems to be a lot more climate related, I think.

But I'll tell you a quick story. I was in London and I walked into KFC to look at what was on their menu at. Corn, QUON. The mycelium based product is sold in London, KFC, at price parody with the chicken that they're selling. And getting to price parity with beef, which is much more expensive than chicken, is very hard to do for the alternative printing companies.

But corn is doing it on chicken, a much cheaper meat. And that, to me was among the greatest. Sites I had ever seen in my life. I felt like I had gone to Mecca and seen this amazing future. Amazing where mycelium is as cheap as commodity chicken. It was incredible.

Glenn Hurowitz: That's awesome.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah,

Glenn Hurowitz: that's, no, it is exciting.

It's like when you're in Europe, it's like being in a different world and it is in a culture that historically was as meat oriented as the United States. And so that kind of change is possible. And to give a little note of optimism, that was essentially the same pattern that we saw with clean energy where Germany and other countries started offering.

Loans, financing subsidies for clean energy first when it wasn't that economical and they helped bring down the global economics of scale of clean energy. And with that price decline, then American companies jumped on. We're able to invest and build profitable businesses. For clean energy.

So I, my hope is that alternative proteins can follow the same path. I do think that they will need a push just as clean energy needed a push. We needed the Sierra Club and others out there pushing to shut down coal fire power plants, advocating for companies to make specific commitments to clean energy purchases.

If anything, we need that even more when it comes to all proteins because the, this industry has so many benefits. It needs that political and commercial push. And that's what Mighty Earth is trying to provide. Yeah, I think you're, one thing you said at the beginning was there's not that many others doing it.

We do feel relatively lonely in this venture right now. Because even in the alt protein community, I think there's a lot of valuable study of what causes people to choose to buy. Plant-based protein versus meat, behavioral tweaks, those are all great. Also, important research and development by, how you can make alternative protein more affordable.

I think that is all helpful. The only argument I would make is that it's really hard for philanthropy alone with the relatively limited resources they have. To make the kind of difference that private sector investment can in either in changing the economics of and so what we're trying to do is really leverage the power of the private sector by getting them to make the commitments, getting them to deploy it.

We have found success in that in other sectors, like getting companies to mandate an entity, forestation or creating demand for green hydrogen steel and bringing down the cost of those products. Of sustainable production that way. We need to see that same kind of thing in the all protein industry.

Paul Shapiro: So let's talk about that, Gwen, you're talking about getting the private sector to do certain things that'll be environmentally friendlier. We've already talked about what you want supermarkets to do, but you're probably more well known for your campaign that's targeting JBS, the biggest meat company on the planet.

And the question is, what can they do? If the CEO of JBS came to you and said, Gwen, what specifically should I be doing differently? Aside from saying get more into animal free proteins, what else would you offer?

Glenn Hurowitz: Yeah, so we have three very specific things and we have had a fairly in-depth discussions with JBS about these but they have not come yet to a satisfactory conclusion.

So number one is. And deforestation. And JBS is the largest meat company in the world, is also probably the largest driver of deforestation with, we've documented hundreds and hundreds of thousands of acres directly linked to their supply chain of the Amazon and other ecosystems that they've just used.

Bulldozers, their suppliers have used bulldozers to just wipe off the planet. What we are trying to get them to do is the same thing that the palm oil industry has done, which used to be the largest deforest in Southeast Asia. Pulp and paper industry, rubber industry, and even parts of the Brazilian soy industry itself say we are not gonna buy from suppliers who engage in deforestation, period.

What we have found over and over again is in. Enforcing that policy leads suppliers to very quickly realize that they can make as much, if not more money by targeting their development onto degraded lands. This is low hanging fruit. It should be done. It's been done in many industries, and now we need the meat industry as conservative and.

In some cases backwards as it is to embrace this important but really easy change. The second thing, we do want them to make, basic improvements in regenerative agriculture. To tackle methane emissions to tackle the water pollution. We see the meat industry not even doing basic things like good manure management or leaving.

Buffers of native vegetation next to waterways. And so in the Midwest you see the soil eroding off into the streams, fertilizer off eroding into the streams, and creating these massive dead zones that kill aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere. And then third, we're asking them to invest themselves in all proteins.

One of the interesting things. With the meat industry is that almost all of the major meat players have invested in all protein companies. They're doing it in part to hedge their bets because they see maybe potentially 10 years from now, people will really wanna buy all protein at scale. And if we're only invested in industrial meat, we won't be able to compete.

I think part of it is probably also a little bit of greenwashing. And but we are trying to get them to make commitments to increase that. So far I think we've had modest success there. JBS has invested in what, at the time at least, was the largest cultivated meat facility in the world in Spain.

But we are trying to get them to get to 10% at least of all protein production so they can contribute as well to allowing this industry to reach scale. Okay. It's frustrating because we've made such rapid progress across many industries in driving reductions in deforestation, decarbonization.

It has been slower with the meat industry. They are more destructive than the rest of agriculture combined. I think unfortunately the leadership is a little slower. I think over the last few years we have finally got started to make some commitments. We've seen five or six supermarkets for instance make significant commitments to selling all proteins, and then hopefully they are going to make the same kind of requirements on all protein investment that they do on zero deforestation of JBS and other major meat companies.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, let's hope so. So those are three noble goals, right? So you've got no more deforestation changing the way that they farm and then investing in animal free protein technologies. I do wanna ask you. Gwen, we had Mike Greenwald, the author of, we Are Eating the Earth on this show a couple months ago, and he makes an argument in his book that basically regenerative agriculture doesn't really have any evidence backing it to suggest that it's really regenerating much.

It's not really repatriating carbon from the atmosphere into the soil. And he, he does argue that there are some things that you can do to increase efficiency. In animal farming like sil pasture for cattle and so on. But that a lot of these regenerative or kiss the ground, so to speak, like type strategies are not actually scientifically proven to work.

Yeah. What do you say to that? Are you, do you think he's right or do you have a rebuttal to that claim?

Glenn Hurowitz: No I fundamentally agree with that, which is why so much of the focus of our meat transformation effort is focused on boosting all proteins. I would say that there are some pretty heinous practices right now that you could change that would yield some benefit.

So I don't, we call them regenerative, but they're very basic, like not destroying the native vegetation next to a stream. Not. Putting too much fertilizer on your land which then runs off into the waterways and creates these dead zones. Better manure management. So these are basic low hanging fruit opportunities, but according to all the studies, at best, they allow emissions and destruction from the meat industry to flat line but don't actually cause a decline to, to do that, you actually have to increase the.

Percentage of all proteins that people are consuming. And that's why that has been the number one solution that we are promoting. We're not, we're not opposed, we support people taking like these other common sense steps to improve farming, but it's not the main solution. I do think I wouldn't put stopping deforestation is clearly a and destruction of other native habitats is just clearly an absolute good that.

Can happen is extremely affordable. But yeah the, unfortunately, I, I don't think that the regenerative agriculture solutions are transformative in the way that shifting to all protein is.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah I certainly would agree with that. I have sometimes referred to some of these regenerative tactics as like mythic culture.

It's almost it's almost like mythical that they think this is, this has somehow proven to work. I'm not saying all of it, but I think a good amount of it is,

Glenn Hurowitz: yeah, a

Paul Shapiro: concern for me. And at the barest minimums. I agree with what you're saying, which is that, just eating fewer animals would be a lot better, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And

Glenn Hurowitz: You hear people say, oh. I really care about nature. I eat grass fed beef. And when you actually look at it first off all beef start their lives and spend most of their lives on pasture, which means that they are driving a lot of pressure on native ecosystems because they consume so much land for a very limited amount of calories.

And I think this is this idea, this myth that, doing something that people think of as regenerative, which is just having cows graze on grass on its own is gonna reduce their impact is, yeah. Baloney. It needs to be tackled and challenged. I also, one other thing that we are trying to bring more attention to is the fact that in the United States in particular, the.

The cattle industry is the leading persecutor of wildlife. So they both, shoot whole wolf packs and grizzly bears to d defend their flocks. And not every rancher does that, but a lot of them do. We see tens of thousands of coyotes killed either directly by ranchers or they actually enlist the USDA to do their dirty work for them.

And this is a very visible impact of. The fact that grass fed beef is actually not so green is the slaughter of wildlife that it perpetuates.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, I totally agree with you. In fact, in a era where cutting government programs is in vogue right now, I've often wondered is Wildlife services going to get the access?

The USDA program that you're referring to, obviously that goes out and slaughters. Native wildlife to, at the to benefit ranchers. But yeah, even from a climate perspective it's very clear that grass side beef is worse. There's more methane that is produced from this, unfortunately. And anyway I think that you and.

Mike Reinwald would have a good conversation on this 'cause I think you guys will find a lot of common ground actually. But I think if you wanna listen to that episode, go and check it out. We'll quote a link in the show notes for this episode as well. But Gwen, I wanna ask you, you've been.

At the game of protecting the planet for many decades, you're a veteran of politics and policy. You wrote a book that we'll link to call it Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party that came out in about 18 years ago or so, where you profile various democratic politicians. So you either who you either exalt or derived for what they did in their time and power.

But aside from your book, Gwen. Aside from reading, fear and Courage in the Democratic Party, are the resources that you would recommend for people who want to learn more where we're, of course going to your website I'm sure is gonna be helpful, but are there any things that you think people should check out if they want to do something to help the planet that you would recommend?

Glenn Hurowitz: Yes. Certainly, yeah, get, please come get involved and support mighty Earth. I'd also say another book that I read recently, which I found encapsulated the vision of Shifting to All Proteins and Rewilding the World was called Regenesis by the journalist George Monio. And it.

Articulates a vision of, how England, which is famously dependent on food imports and fought two world wars, partly around that issue. Doesn't have to be if it consumed less meat. He's British, so he focused there. That's really this whole idea of food self-sufficiency disappears if we shift to all proteins.

One of our newest efforts is not just avoiding damage stopping deforestation, although we are very much continuing that, but actually healing the damage of decades of destruction. And so we've undertaken a big rewilding initiative to bring back animals like mountain lions east of the Mississippi.

We support the effort to bring back the California Brown Bear to California from which it has been extirpated and a lot of other noble rewilding initiatives.

Paul Shapiro: Still on our flag. Just nowhere else, right? Exactly right. It

Glenn Hurowitz: is. And and I'm here in Vermont and the Catamount, which is a local name for the mountain lion, is the symbol of Vermont.

And there are no catamounts here. So it's the same thing. But we're working to build support here and elsewhere in the east to bring back this symbol. And so what Monio articulates is that. You can return so much of the earth to wilderness to provide habitat for highly endangered species to flourish and suck gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere.

I think the, there's a lot of steps you can do to, to, to undertake that, that are easy, like channeling agricultural development onto to degraded land. But the single biggest step would be dramatically reducing the amount of land taken up by. Our consumption of protein. And the way to do that is by plant-based protein, mycelium cultivated meat.

And so that's a vision that we really embrace and I found to be a beautiful articulation of some of the principles that, that we pursue.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned Regenesis. 'cause I read that book and absolutely loved it. I thought it was such a good one. And I endorsed that book as well. So thank you for recommending that Glennn finally.

There are many companies that are trying to do something good in the world that are making palm oil and bioreactors, or are trying to create beef without cattle, or are creating plastics from fermentation or whatever it is, right? My question for you is, what should somebody be doing? If somebody is listening to this right now and they're thinking, I wanna start my own company to solve some environmental problem, what problem would you Glennn advise that listener to try to take on?

Is there something that hasn't been done sufficiently yet that you think more Reeses are needed into doing something that would do x?

Glenn Hurowitz: Yeah. First off, I would say we need more all protein investment in companies, but I think that message has come through loud and clear, both on this edition of the podcast and elsewhere.

So I'll talk about something in another related area of our work, which is providing finance to nature. So nature represents 37% of the solution to climate change and yet gets less than 3% of the financing because of the energy fetish that I mentioned at the beginning because climate change is seen as exclusively a problem of fossil fuels and, there is. Paradoxically, despite all the political headwinds right now, more momentum for large scale nature finance than there ever has been. The government of Brazil proposed this maxi mechanism called the Tropical Forest Forever facility that will leverage the resources of the world's sovereign wealth funds and other investors to make nature finally worth more alive than dead to value.

All of the. The resources, the services that Tigers and elephants and sloths and provide to us, to the atmosphere and the trees that surround them in a way that, that they aren't so fundamentally to shift the economics that drive the destruction of nature right now. And. That may come to fruition soon.

There's a lot of other positive initiatives for nature finance that I'm quite hopeful about, and that creates a big economic opportunity because this these policy concepts are happening at a very high level about creating these big funds. But in order to work, they're gonna be, have to be deployed on the ground.

And so we are working across. Rainforest countries and as well as in North America with pretty small companies right now that are doing their best to deploy modest amounts of finance to do good work protecting nature. But there needs to be a flourishing in that field and I am seeing a coming wave of resources that would make that possible so that, developing more nature finance companies that can profitably but responsibly drive conservation, restoration of nature is one of the biggest opportunities I see emerging.

Okay. Outside of all proteins.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, very cool. It's actually pretty coincidental that you mentioned this because recently I was reading United Nations report that was entitled, trends in Innovations in Nature Finance, what to Look Out For in 2025. So I'll include a link to that UN report in the show notes for this episode at Business for Good podcast.com.

But for now, Gwen, thanks so much for all that you're doing to use Mighty Earth as a vehicle to help reforest the planet. And stop deforesting, reforest it, and totally slash the number of animals who we are using for food in the process. I appreciate all you're doing and we'll be continuing to root for your success.

Glenn Hurowitz: Awesome. Thanks so much, Paul.

Paul Shapiro
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Ep. 172 - Turning Waste into Bioplastic Gold with Genecis CEO Luna Yu