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Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's another good example. Tax that, and you create an incentive to either eat "dumber" meat like fish instead of pigs, or meat where you've avoided the "sin" altogether. Such as lab-grown meat.
So, why would that be a negative outcome?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course the remaining sin being treating animals like a commodity, making them suffer, driving them around in crowded conditions for hundreds of miles... It‘s not just the environment that suffers from our industrialized way to produce meat
I feel the same way about vegetables. Cutting down in the prime of their life, and shipping them to stores across the country packed in crates. It's unconscionable.
Taking your logic, I can extend your argument in the opposite direction towards humans. But I have a feeling no one would condone that!
But does it change the taste of the meat? This is the real question and a deal breaker for many. Grass fed meat is gamy than grain fed/finished, so I can imagine seaweed imparts an fishy taste to the fat and probably to the milk also.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That gets a bit more complicated though, greenhouse gas emissions through burping is just one of the many impacts cattle have on the planet: land usage, water usage, manure (harms water supplies, runoff, release gasses, etc), and then you have the knock-on impacts of all the feed that needs to be produced to feed them.
This was ops point, if you tax the emissions only people can innovate and reduce emissions in all these areas to the same effect.
This could also have a knock-on affect of encouraging _more_ cruelty (if that's even possible at this point).
This is a perfect example of why "sin taxes" like the proposed tax on meat[1][2] to fight climate change are a bad idea. You need to tax the externality (greenhouse gas emissions), not an activity which currently causes such emissions, because then you don't have any incentives left (such as in this case) for industries to reduce those emissions. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-tax... 2. h…
Some externalities are hard to tax. For example, consumption of red meat probably increases cancer risk [1]. We can't introduce a tax on cancer, but we still want to reduce the occurrence of cancer, so all that's left is taxing red meat. [1]: http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
This is a perfect example of why "sin taxes" like the proposed tax on meat[1][2] to fight climate change are a bad idea. You need to tax the externality (greenhouse gas emissions), not an activity which currently causes such emissions, because then you don't have any incentives left (such as in this case) for industries to reduce those emissions. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-tax... 2. h…
Some externalities are hard to tax. For example, consumption of red meat probably increases cancer risk [1]. We can't introduce a tax on cancer, but we still want to reduce the occurrence of cancer, so all that's left is taxing red meat. [1]: http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
But secondly that WHO page is frequently cited by people who apparently haven't understood the numbers behind it. It's not worthwhile to tax meat as a cancer risk because the health impact is a rounding error.
According to the WHO:
> about 34 000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.
That's the population of a village worldwide. To turn that into a death rate for the world population in 2015 is 34000/7400000000*100000 = 0.45.
That wouldn't even make it onto this table[1] of most common worldwide death rates. You can see rates like 15 for diabetes, and 115 for heart disease, both of which are strongly linked to diet.
If everyone in the world adjusted their diet so they wouldn't be overweight or obese, but kept eating processed red meat, then diet-related illnesses would be rare enough that nobody would even bother talking about them, as opposed to being the one of the leading causes of death in the western world.
Citing a WHO report which says that evidence of carcinogenicity is strong without context is correct but misleading. As that page points out you can have strong evidence but tiny effect sizes.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That gets a bit more complicated though, greenhouse gas emissions through burping is just one of the many impacts cattle have on the planet: land usage, water usage, manure (harms water supplies, runoff, release gasses, etc), and then you have the knock-on impacts of all the feed that needs to be produced to feed them.
Your point is correct, but you can apply it in the other direction; adding a sin tax also has knock-on effects and often produce unexpected market distortions. I think your point just argues for pricing in more externalities, rather than abandoning the goal of pricing them and using even more opaque sin taxes instead.
I suppose you're saying we should tax usage of these things based on calorie produced?
I wonder if it affects the flavor of the milk.
For sure it does. People in Europe pay a premium for "high mountains cow milk" ("Alpenmilch"). I had the impression that US milk has no taste but always thought it's just in my mind. But when I was in Colombia I met a guy from Switzerland who studied in Canada and said:"Oh wow, the milk here really tastes good like in Europe. Not like in Canada." So the milk in Europe and North America must indeed taste different. It…
In Northern California, Saint Benoit [2] markets Jersey cow milk and yogurt. The flavor of their milk is incomparable to all others I've ever tried stateside.
I've been seeing this same story for what feels like a decade now. Anyone know why this hasn't been implemented yet?
>Anyone know why this hasn't been implemented yet? The same story for anything. The market pressure to precipitate this change isn't there yet.