I thought the problem with ethanol is that petrol is just cheaper and so engineers design ICE's to run on petrol. But if petrol became prohibitively expensive, engineers could design ICE's that run on ethanol, even if it would still be a step back from petrol. Hell, small jet engines in cars have been done before, albeit experimentally, so they can certainly be done with today's tech, and they run on ethanol just fine.

As far as lab-grown meat goes, couldn't they just genetically engineer farm animals to have only the most rudimentary brains, so that there's no suffering involved? They would basically be GMO zombies and that would be creepy in its own right, but for anyone concerned with animal welfare that seems like the most obvious solution. Or maybe just lobotomize them when they're young, even simpler, albeit still creepy.

That disturbing possibility aside, fungi are a lot more like animals than like plants, even though they don't move, so with some infernal GMO sorcery there's gotta be a way to develop mushrooms that taste just like meat, have the same protein content, even the same iron content. You could literally splice animal DNA to make meat mushrooms, with something similar to blood, because blood is one of the key things that makes meat delicious.

I thought the problem with ethanol is that petrol is just cheaper and so engineers design ICE's to run on petrol. But if petrol became prohibitively expensive, engineers could design ICE's that run on ethanol, even if it would still be a step back from petrol.