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Ask HN: Why aren't governments subsidizing meat-substitute products?

4 points by arduinomancer ↗ HN
The other day I read two statistics that were really surprising.

One is that 15% of greenhouse emissions are from livestock [1].

The other is that apparently Beyond Meat results in 90% less greenhouse emissions compared to regular meat [2].

I'm not a vegetarian but this got me thinking, logically why aren't governments subsidizing stuff like Beyond Meat/Impossible similar to how electric cars are being subsidized via rebates?

Is it just not worth it/too small of a gain compared to other climate change contributing factors?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-livestock-emissions/fighting-global-warming-one-cow-belch-at-a-time-idUSKBN1K91CU

[2] https://www.beyondmeat.com/mission/

6 comments

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[dead] policipal
Why aren't governments subsidizing artificial breasts, I mean artificial carrots? Because the real thing is better.
version_five
I agree. But I think research into meat substitutes that are actually taste, texture and nutritionally equivalent to meat (identical, in case I missed an attribute) is still a good thing. I love meat, it's nutritious and its tasty (because as a human I've evolved to feel rewarded when I eat it). But to me there is nothing inherent about eating an actual animal (other than the fact that I can do it myself and not rely on some factory or process) that matters. So if something is as tasty as meat and doesnt also have estrogen or some other thing I don't want in it, I'm fine with that. So far this hasn't happened and there's a lot of pretending to be happy with substandard substitutes. It would be nice to see the industry get better.

That said, I dont really believe in government subsidies, if anything I'd ask why are other agricultural industries being subsidized. There may be good food security reasons, or it may just be vote buying.

yuppie_scum
Then agriculture lobby is a way bigger and more powerful part of the apparatus than most people realize.

Anything that can be viewed as stealing jobs or revenue from farmers and giving it to big tech is politically unviable at least in the USA.

drooby
Alternatively they could stop subsidizing the meat industry… they won’t do that though because they’ll lose key voters.
bediger4000
There can't be many "single issue meat voters". What you mean to say is "they'll lose key money from lobbyists".
dane-pgp
I don't want to invalidate your statistic, but it's worth considering another estimate, that meat and dairy consumption account for 0.4 tonnes out of the 2.2 tonnes CO2 equivalent per person emissions from food[0] in the UK.

That's 18% of food related emissions, or 8% out of the estimate 5 tonnes of total emissions per person in the UK.[1] Another estimate says that in 2017, all of agriculture was responsible for 10% of emissions.[2]

My conclusion is that some governments are implementing policies that limit the climate impact of meat and dairy production, but subsidizing alternatives to meat can only reduce demand for it so much, and there are probably more cost-effective things to subsidize. I don't know what the figures are for those other approaches, though.

[0] https://www.carbonindependent.org/18.html

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-kingdom

[2] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0742/production/...