Assuming a "Tax" is an extra percentage amount on money paid in exchange for goods/services: no this would not tax people for breathing, unless you know of someone who already pays for the privilege of breathing.
I'm fine with that. Breathing is a negative externality. If someone were to actually include breathing, it'd be an incredibly small amount relative to other human activities.
My thought is put a carbon sales tax on things that use carbon based fuels and use that to subsidize alternatives.
So, diesel and gasoline powered cars are taxed. Gas and oil burning furnaces are taxed. Raise the taxes high enough to make alternatives worth it on a capital basis.
Cows consume carbon (grass, organic matter), produce carbon (methane, other organic matter), and are composed of carbon (more organic matter). Isn't the article espousing placing a carbon tax on a form of carbon?
Ya, but why wouldn't you levy this tax equally on all carbon-generative activities? Why single out cows? I'm all in favor of taxing carbon, but we should do it in a holistic way. Not one thing at a time.
Because not all carbon-generative activities also produce methane, which is the real destructive part about beef. Also, some other carbon-generative activities (e.g. driving) are already taxed pretty heavily.
Different emissions have different levels of global warming potential. If carbon dioxide has a global warming potential of 1, then Methane has a Global Warming Potential of 28-36 over 100 years [0].
I wouldn't even single out carbon dioxide per se. If you're going to start an emissions tax and do it right, you might as well target all green house gas emissions and base the tax rate off their global warming potential which takes into account both the energy they absorb and their longevity in the atmosphere.
Why should ease of substitution be a factor? If the goal is to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, a tax on natural gas would give people an incentive to improve insulation or build smaller homes or just turn down the thermostat.
Would it not be easier for us to require that be included in their feed? Everyone gets the beef they want with a small increase in cost to cover seaweed supply chain costs. This does not solve the water pollution or the animal welfare issues of industrial farming (fingers crossed for "clean meat", or vat grown meat), but its a climate change shim.
Don't forget deforestation, which severely amplifies the effects of climate change and the water table, for obvious reasons.
In Australia this is a serious environmental issue and often the cattle industry is fighting to remove or stop land clearing laws being reinstated [1]. It's a disgusting industry on so many levels IMO.
I was thinking about a more interesting policy around this; let’s give everyone a meat quota (at some sustainable level) and allow them to trade their quota for cash or buy more. This would make meat very expensive but would also mean if you are going to bother it had better be good meat and additionally might be a way to supplement the income of poorer families and people... just a thought.
Is meat so different than other carbon producers like air travel, electronics manufacturing, or others? I think what you are proposing boils down to basic income and carbon taxes if you take it far enough.
Meat is at least more complex/interesting in that it can also directly affect things like human health. I see where you're going with this and, yes, reductio ad absurdum it boils down to basic income and carbon taxes, but meat rationing would seem to have a behavior modification component as well that the other two producers you listed don't really have beyond a superficial level.
I have not yet formed an opinion for better or for worse, but thought it key to point out a potential argumentative difference.
> let’s give everyone a meat quota (at some sustainable level) and allow them to trade their quota for cash or buy more
That's not a very good policy. If the point is to reduce carbon emissions and not to get people to eat less meat, then why would you effectively ban technologies that make meat production more carbon efficient?
The point is to make poor people better off, both physically and financially. I’d say a bigger problem here would be the meat black market that would pop up run by criminals...
Ignoring transaction costs, that system is equivalent to a tax where the revenue is dispersed on a per capita basis.
All it does is increases transaction costs for no benefit (that I see). Also, it's pointless to care about the distribution effects of individual policies rather than overall government transfers.
There is a reflexive anti-tax “starve the beast” mentally among many. A common argument is “they claim the purpose of the tax is to [achieve goal X], but really they just want more revenue.”
Even if a cap and trade system is economically equivalent to a carbon tax, it might be more politically palatable because it doesn’t use the tax mechanism.
I was reading an article earlier today about hunters in Australia and the fact that more and more women are taking up the practice. The interesting thing is that they are hunting deer which is considered a feral animal here.
So, as a benefit to removing the feral animal problem, should they not then get a tax reduction for eating meat as they are removing a feral animal from the environment?
We are surely fortunate that the U.S. and Canadian settlers decimated the estimated 60 million head of buffalo ranging North America until the late 1800s. Global warming could have been exacerbated greatly by their continued existence.
A carbon tax on beef would have exactly zero impact on my consumption. It would sure reduce it at the low-end of the economic spectrum, but beyond a certain point it won’t make a difference.
I’m against taxing things because they’re bad for us.
Eating beef, particularly industrial beef, also disproportionally damages the health of the bottom 2/3. Taxing it addresses several issues at once and hastens the day people eat less of it in favor of healthier and more environmentally friendly alternatives. It also raises awareness of just how much industrial farming contributes to greenhouse gases. Most people don't know.
I'm nowhere near becoming vegetarian or biking everywhere, but I have all but given up beef for this reason. Eating a quarter-pounder is similar to burning a gallon of gas, which is shockingly worse than most other meats. Ars Technica had a good writeup awhile back:
OK sure, do we also put carbon tax on wheat, and other vegetables? ~750 million tons of wheat is produced yearly, vs ~260 million tons of beef. Excepting the case of perennial plants, unused parts of vegetables (e.g. wheat straw) have a hefty carbon footprint. BTW, rice is a case in itself.
From my understanding (which could be complete and total junk science/quackery)... wheat and other vegetables are carbon neutral. CO2 is extracted from the atmosphere, and used to grow the plants. Even unused parts (wheat straw) are a type of carbon "sink" in that the atmospheric carbon is trapped in organic matter which can be "upcycled" into paper products, etc.
I believe this thought process is why corn-ethanol was so hyped, as it was sold as a 'net carbon zero' fuel.
Not looking for a flamewar here, and I would be grateful if you could correct any misunderstandings I may have. I've got an 8th grade science-fair level of education on this one, so I'm more than open to your thoughts!
Beef has a vastly larger carbon footprint per KG than any grain. It's the least environmentally efficient protein source there is. And that's not even factoring in wasteful and excessive use of antibiotics, pollution of water sources etc.
Thank you for this table. Yet, the footprint size you measure will depend on what you are counting. We eat meat mostly for protein; and for that beef is about 10x more efficient than wheat, and 3x more efficient than lentils by weight. Also important is when you stop measuring, ie scope: irrigation, forest clearing, fertilizers, are no small damage in terms of causing climate change, reducing carbon sequestering ability of nature. The point of taxing is to make long term invisible costs visible; if anything, industrial agriculture has been disastrous for environment; if the goal is to keep this damage in check, singling out beef as a target for taxing doesn’t make any sense.
If carbon is harmful, I don't see why we should play favorites. The environment doesn't care where the carbon comes from. Put a tax on everything in proportion to its carbon production. Meat, vegetables, electricity bill, airplane tickets, etc. And this includes the disposal as well as production.
I'm increasingly convinced that carbon taxes, as well as cap-and-trade schemes, would end up being gamed like any other tax systems. They would create substantial complexity and harm the economy without reducing emissions by as much as expected.
Cap-and-trade worked well with acid rain. As with any policy if it is not written well, is poorly enforced, or poorly implemented it will likely fail. It can be implemented well.
The U.S. Acid Rain Program begun in 1995—the best example yet of how the cap-and-trade idea can work—saw allowance prices drop from more than $1,500 to less than $1 based on changes first proposed by the Bush administration. And acid rain may be less but it has not gone away.
The article indicates a reduction in acid rain. It furthermore indicates that much of problems with cap and trade stem from poor execution. Anything will fail if it is poorly executed, written to allow loopholes, or is poorly regulated. I think the problem is poor governance and a populace that allows such to happen. It can work.
If the tax was placed as a fixed cost per pound of cattle product, regardless if its prime steak or pink goo, it would be a hard tax to game: In the end all meat products are packaged and a weight placed on it.
That might create odd effects. Consider. What if, right now, cows are raised using feed that's a inedible cast off of food grown for human consumption. If you tax all meat equally the incentive to do that would be reduced. You might as well raise cows on food that is fit for human consumption if it marginally improves the quality of the cow because you're paying the same tax either way.
Clearly you haven't read the kids book "Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type". Rather good, in my opinion, and actually touches on organized labor of all things.
It is good for the environment if it reduces the amount of beef eaten, but, on its own, it is not good for the environment. It is easier on the environment than beef. Chicken and turkey are easier on it than pork. Fish is easier on it than chicken.
Stop trying to manipulate people with morality based taxes. Actually try and solve the problem. These people don't care about the environment. Otherwise they would completely cut subsidization to wheat & corn. Then farmers would stop feeding their cows those things, thus reducing mono-culture pollution.
Make feeding them corn illegal. The cows would be healthier and they wouldn't need to subsidize pharmaceuticals for antibiotics to keep cows alive.
This isn't about morality or feeding wheat and corn to cows. It's about the greenhouse gas production inherent to raising beef. There's no way you're going to sustain the current volume of beef production on free range grazing alone. Industrial feeding techniques are required.
Yes you can. Stop farming corn. Start farming grass. If we committed to it, it'd be possible. But it isn't BECAUSE of the government. And no this isn't about greenhouse gas production. If they cared, they would stop fracking for gas, releasing enormous amounts of methane and pollution a 1000 times worse.
They just don't care about cows. Or health. Or the environment. Or even science. We've already figured out how to solve this issue. This isn't it. All they've figured out is how to get more taxes.
These are morality taxes based on nonsense that would solve nothing. It blinds us to how we're farming wrong.
There is such a big hoohaa over CO2 emission. We have much more pressing concerns and about things that we cannot control. Yet there are no mitigation efforts even being discussed.
The problem area is the changing magnetic fields of this planet. If any of the scenarios play, even the least problematic, then we are going to be in more trouble, more quickly than we will ever be with CO2 emissions.
The Van Allen belts are a highly protective shield for this planet from highly energetic radiation (solar and cosmic). If these belts ever get destabilised then we (most life will be affected) will being facing more serious health and well-being problems than what we would ever have from CO2 emissions.
All that the CO2 debate is about is distracting the general populous of this planet from more immediate problems. The beneficiaries of any carbon trading or taxation regime are not the general population.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadSo, diesel and gasoline powered cars are taxed. Gas and oil burning furnaces are taxed. Raise the taxes high enough to make alternatives worth it on a capital basis.
I wouldn't even single out carbon dioxide per se. If you're going to start an emissions tax and do it right, you might as well target all green house gas emissions and base the tax rate off their global warming potential which takes into account both the energy they absorb and their longevity in the atmosphere.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
(warning: autoplay) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10811-014-0487-z
Would it not be easier for us to require that be included in their feed? Everyone gets the beef they want with a small increase in cost to cover seaweed supply chain costs. This does not solve the water pollution or the animal welfare issues of industrial farming (fingers crossed for "clean meat", or vat grown meat), but its a climate change shim.
In Australia this is a serious environmental issue and often the cattle industry is fighting to remove or stop land clearing laws being reinstated [1]. It's a disgusting industry on so many levels IMO.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/05/global-d...
I have not yet formed an opinion for better or for worse, but thought it key to point out a potential argumentative difference.
You're just giving an equal handout (that's equivalent to cash) to everybody.
That's not a very good policy. If the point is to reduce carbon emissions and not to get people to eat less meat, then why would you effectively ban technologies that make meat production more carbon efficient?
All it does is increases transaction costs for no benefit (that I see). Also, it's pointless to care about the distribution effects of individual policies rather than overall government transfers.
Even if a cap and trade system is economically equivalent to a carbon tax, it might be more politically palatable because it doesn’t use the tax mechanism.
So, as a benefit to removing the feral animal problem, should they not then get a tax reduction for eating meat as they are removing a feral animal from the environment?
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/Catt/Catt-01-31...
I’m against taxing things because they’re bad for us.
There are other prime carbon tax choices that place the tax burden higher up the income scale. We should be starting there.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/emissions-eschmissio...
I believe this thought process is why corn-ethanol was so hyped, as it was sold as a 'net carbon zero' fuel.
Not looking for a flamewar here, and I would be grateful if you could correct any misunderstandings I may have. I've got an 8th grade science-fair level of education on this one, so I'm more than open to your thoughts!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/21/giving-u...
Here is some info for you
http://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html
There are some examples in this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gaming-carbon-mus...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program
The article indicates a reduction in acid rain. It furthermore indicates that much of problems with cap and trade stem from poor execution. Anything will fail if it is poorly executed, written to allow loopholes, or is poorly regulated. I think the problem is poor governance and a populace that allows such to happen. It can work.
Make feeding them corn illegal. The cows would be healthier and they wouldn't need to subsidize pharmaceuticals for antibiotics to keep cows alive.
They just don't care about cows. Or health. Or the environment. Or even science. We've already figured out how to solve this issue. This isn't it. All they've figured out is how to get more taxes.
These are morality taxes based on nonsense that would solve nothing. It blinds us to how we're farming wrong.
The problem area is the changing magnetic fields of this planet. If any of the scenarios play, even the least problematic, then we are going to be in more trouble, more quickly than we will ever be with CO2 emissions.
The Van Allen belts are a highly protective shield for this planet from highly energetic radiation (solar and cosmic). If these belts ever get destabilised then we (most life will be affected) will being facing more serious health and well-being problems than what we would ever have from CO2 emissions.
All that the CO2 debate is about is distracting the general populous of this planet from more immediate problems. The beneficiaries of any carbon trading or taxation regime are not the general population.