(WT) – Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in a new interview that all rich countries should transition to 100% synthetic beef in order to significantly curb the greenhouse-gas emissions driving climate change.

In an interview published Sunday by MIT Technology Review, Mr. Gates, who is now co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and chair of the investment fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said the U.S. switching to plant-based meats like those sold by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat will be “required” for saving the planet.

“As for scale today, they don’t represent 1% of the meat in the world, but they’re on their way,” he said. “And Breakthrough Energy has four different investments in this space for making the ingredients very efficiently. So yeah, this is the one area where my optimism five years ago would have made this, steel, and cement the three hardest.

“Now I’ve said I can actually see a path. But you’re right that saying to people, ‘You can’t have cows anymore’—talk about a politically unpopular approach to things,” he said. Mr. Gates said poor countries like in Africa won’t be able to completely transition to synthetic beef and that “we’ll have to use animal genetics to dramatically raise the amount of beef per emissions for them.” READ MORE