


As hundreds of millions of people in China, India, and other developing nations enter the middle class, they're demanding all the perquisites of the Western lifestyle, from hamburgers to new cars. Global energy demand is rising fast, and oil, coal, and gas continue to satisfy most of that need. In the U.S., increasingly severe hurricane and wildfire seasons have already offered a preview of climate change's long-term effects according to the IPCC, the world's economies must cut their carbon output in half by 2030 to avoid passing a critical threshold beyond which the consequences grow rapidly worse.īut if the need to curb carbon emissions is clear, how to do it without torpedoing the world's economy is anything but. Department of Defense, or the big petroleum companies-manmade global warming is a danger on par with no other, threatening to redraw coastlines, spark wars, imperil food and water supplies, alter weather patterns and marine currents, and displace hundreds of millions of people, all within our lifetimes. If you believe the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-or the U.S. You know: carbon dioxide, the stuff that's been building up in the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, trapping solar energy and turning the seas acidic. What the bacteria that make up Novomeal eat is CO2. That part-the nutrients-is why this particular fish food could play such a meaningful role in determining the fate of the planet. The supply of bacteria, on the other hand, is effectively infinite, as long as you have the nutrients to feed them. Feed is the biggest cost of fish farming, a $232 billion global industry, and, given that the output of the world's overexploited oceans continues to decline, it's only getting more expensive. ("Fishmeal is strangely named: It's meal made from a fish, but it also happens to be an important part of a meal for a fish," Tze says.) Novomeal, a nutritionally complete substitute for fishmeal, is made from the proteins of bacteria and other single-celled organisms, incubated in giant steel vessels akin to beer vats, called bioreactors. The key ingredient in the commercial feed formulations used in the farming of salmon, tuna, and other carnivorous species prized by consumers is something called fishmeal, a powder made from the ground-up bodies of tiny fish such as anchovies. That product is Novomeal, a protein developed for use in aquaculture, and the Sea-Monkeys are proof of concept.
