Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Florida and Alabama ban cultivated meat, published by Ben Millwood on May 30, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This was ~three weeks ago, so I'm a little surprised I couldn't already find anything about it on the forum. Maybe I'm just bad at searching?
Anyway, Ron DeSantis posted the following around the same time as the Florida ban:
https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/1785684809467011431
I suspect the real motivations are more ordinary protectionism, but it seems like potentially a sign that cultivated meat might start getting politicized / embroiled in the broader culture war, though also (perhaps surprisingly) DeSantis has had supportive comments from a Democratic senator (see Vox again).
I'm interested in the extent to which alt-meat startups and policy folk were surprised by this move - whether this represents a more hostile environment than we expected, or whether this was "already priced in". I tried to look at stock prices, but based on some quick searches only found one publically-traded cultivated meat stock STKH, and don't understand enough about the process of when the bill's passing became inevitable to really interpret it.
(Link preview image is bull grayscale photo by Hans Eiskonen)
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