The problem with certain questions - from the purely journalistic point of view that is - is that the answers aren’t very interesting. So, this in The Times was always potentially going to be rather boring:
Should there be a tax on meat?
As the correct answer, in all its full finery, is “No, stop being an idiot and don’t drivel” that’s a fairly short article. And, for those who don’t know, we scribblers tend to get paid by the number of words in the piece we present.
Mr. Farmer was obviously going to be against but they did manage to find someone willing to drivel in public:
We ask a farmer and an economics expert if the environmental impact of animal products merits a higher price tag
Sigh.
Sanchayan Banerjee, assistant professor of behavioural and environmental economics at Vrije University Amsterdam
They had to go some way - and some distance down the totem pole - to find someone willing to drivel for publicity. An assistant professor in the next country over - Ho Hum.
Taxing meat is inevitable if we are serious about solving the climate problem. Yet governments across the world shy away from it.
Ghastly nonsense.
Yes, yes, climate change and all that. But that’s not, in fact, the only argument he’s making:
Meat has a negative impact on the environment and our health, and demand is predicted to increase, with over-consumption in many countries. We have largely relied on soft policies to mitigate this, such as “nudges”, which change the way information is presented to improve behaviours,
That’s attempting to mould society to some structure imagined by assistant professors in the next country over. To which the correct answer is, fuck off, obviously. They’ll be making us choke down raw herrings next.
This is also fun:
Criticism of a meat tax is often unwarranted — it could be designed to be effective and fair for shoppers, for example by earmarking revenue back into the community.
What, like tax doesn’t come back to the community? Cash lifted off us just disappears off into the aether then? If true that would mean we’ve a larger problem than mere cow burps.
Adding a carbon tax to meat would reflect the damage caused by its consumption and production.
Ah, now that’s sensible. -Ish. But still wrong. Because, obviously given the above he’s already told us, the carbon tax upon meat would not be at the rate and or level that includes the societal costs of the emissions embedded in meat. But in order to beat climate change that’s what we do want - and also all that we want.
As the Stern Review pointed out, $80 per tonne CO2-e and the job’s a good ‘un. Sure, there might the the odd loose end still to tidy up after that but that’s the first essential and also the one doing all the heavy lifting. Add the carbon tax - to everything that emits - at that right rate and we gain the correct amount of climate change.
As the Stern Review also points out there’s no reason this needs to result in a larger state. So, cut other taxes to meet this new revenue being raised. It’s a *revenue neutral* carbon tax which is the solution.
Now note the “correct amount” of climate change. We are not trying to impose a carbon tax which eliminates change at all. Instead, we’re being adult and acknowledging that our aim is to maximise human utility (welfare, if you like) over time. Over generations of time. So, things that are very expensive - in terms of human welfare, forget cash, that’s just the method of counting - don’t get done, not if they only result in marginal gains in welfare. Things that are cheap to do - in terms of welfare - but which bring substantial rewards do get done. And the definition of what’s a benefit, what’s a cost (say, 15 minute cities, EVs, vegetarian diets and all the rest) gets decided by the 8 billion of us as we face the true costs of our actions.
So, stick the costs of climate change into the price system. We’re not trying to raise money to fight it, we’re trying to make people face the true costs of their actions. And that means that we end up with the “right amount” of climate change which maximises human utility over generations of time.
Now, OK, you can argue that the right amount is none but that’s very expensive indeed and insists upon a very high carbon tax. Which people won’t allow you to impose. Which does mean that folk think that no climate change is not utility maximising as they’re not willing to carry the costs of it. Greenland melting and covering Lowestoft might be something people care about, vaguely, but not enough to make a steak cost £100 (everywhere, not just at Salt Bae’s).
But more than this. We don’t want to tax proxies - meat, or travel, or beer. We want to tax the actual emissions. For that’s the way to push innovation into producing what we still desire - meat, travel, beer - in ways that don’t produce those emissions. Which is what solves the climate change problem - the human utility without the climate change.
With meat, for example. Pasture fed clearly has some different level of emissions than lot fed. Pigs are different from beef, both from chickens. Some say that pasture is actually carbon negative - more carbon ends up in the soil than methane emissions from ruminants produces. No, I don’t know, but some do so say. Concentrating on taxing what produces the emissions means that we end up concentrating upon those differences. We might even end up with cheap meat - cheap because it doesn’t carry the tax - and expensive meat from other production methods because of the tax.
All of which is absolutely fine - because this is what we’re actually trying to do. Change the behaviour of 8 billion people. The only thing faced by all 8 billion is the price system. Humans do less of more expensive things. QED. We’ve got to use the price system to beat this particular collective action problem.
BTW, the actual tax rate might not be that large. Wholly pasture fed beef (so, excluding anything from land use changes as there aren’t any, this is also before any carbon accumulation in the soil) would be about 6kg CO2-e per kg of edible beef. At $80 a tonne CO2-e that’s, erm, 35 pence on a kg of beef. Which, if we’re talking about edible beef is a rounding error, no?
Now. I get a lot of grief for supporting a carbon tax. I’ve been mentally invaded by the woke or something. But to me the grand joy of it is not only that it’s actually the right solution it’s also incredibly cheap. No, really, bear with me.
UK emissions are of the order of 500 million tonnes CO2-e a year. That means the correct carbon tax revenues would be some $40 billion, call that £30 billion a year. We already tax petrol and diesel that much. No, really, £30 billion a year, easy. So we’re already carrying a tax burden, upon emittive things, the size of our entire righteous carbon tax burden. Which leads me to a joyous conclusion. All we’ve got to do is reorganise that tax burden already being carried and we’re done, we’ve solved climate change. Because that is what the lesson of Stern and Nordhaus and the IPCC is. Which leads to:
“You’re right, climate change, problem. Nobel, Stern, IPCC, have a carbon tax. Great, we’ve a carbon tax. Now fuck off, problem’s solved.”
Works for me to be honest. And the alarmingly wonderful thing about this is that it’s actually the right, correct, efficient and effective answer too.
As I keep nagging Greenies, that is the correct method: tax the problem, not the method. We didn't outlaw fireplaces in the 1950s to get clean air, we put a price on emitting smoke. The Scots, though, have decided to go against that and are actively outlawing fireplaces.
Unless there are farmers feeding their cattle on coal or something, every carbon molecule 'emitted' by livestock was originally captured from the atmosphere by the plants they consume. It's called the carbon cycle, and we learnt about it at school (those of us who weren't on a Klimastreik that day, anyway).
If all farm animals magically vanished overnight, the vegetation they eat would continue to grow and eventually die, to rot and emit CH4/CO2 produced by fungi and microbes rather similar to those that exits in a cow's various stomachs (which is what allows them to digest cellulose in the first place). You might want to argue that CH4 is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, but it's persistence in the atmosphere is much shorter (months rather than centuries), so any extra CH4 vs CO2 is very much a second order effect.
Thus Moonbat and the other ecoloons who measure all the carbon emissions of livestock and try to conflate that with carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are barking (possible up the wrong tree, but definitely barking).