I agree that meat farming, at least in the factory-style, is horrific. But this solution seems like it might make things worse.
If there's a meat tax, then farmers will have an incentive to cut even more corners, which might lead to even more cruel conditions.
Instead, maybe it makes sense to set a price floor for any operation over a certain number of animals. (IE, if you have more than 200 animals on your farm, you can't charge less than $10 a pound or something).
If they could cut corners they would already. Battery cages are a prime example. At least in the UK free range only took off when consumers pushed for it.
Countries should cease trying to increase their populations at the expense of quality of life. This is but one example of many where quality of life suffers and Soylent Green diets are suggested to accommodate the infinite growth crowd. I have a better idea - rather than creating a society that looks like some dystopian nightmare, we simply keep populations in check with the environment.
Or government could let people decide how many children they want to have and let them pay for their kids. It will automatically solve the problem in the long run. Governments trying to control it will lead to problems like they have in China (because having children was largely de-incentivised, they are going to have a big hole in the working population soon and have a lot of old people to support) and Europe (because they are incentivising population growth now, they are bound to increase a generation of population burst which will be a problem in the long run).
I'm sceptical about this, for a couple of first-year-physics reasons.
1. Matter is conserved. Before carbon can be farted out of a cow, it has to get in to the cow from somewhere else. I expect most of it was in the atmosphere a year beforehand, then got absorbed by pasture grass and eaten. So this year's farts will end up in next year's cows, and aren't like fossil fuel emissions.
2. Methane decays to carbon dioxide in a decade or two, so today's methane emissions are not really a worse problem than today's carbon dioxide emissions.
1. The CO2 issue is not that the cow eats carbon and its manure turns back into CO2. The issue is the land use changes and fossil fuel-derived energy used in the production and transportation of feed. Because the feed to usable meat ratio of beef is somewhere between 7:1 to 20:1, this is significantly more impactful than other foods.
2. CH4 may not have a long half-life, but it has 29x the warming potential of CO2. Methane is thought to contribute about 20% of the current anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. Because of the anticipated positive feedbacks from warming, this is very important indeed.
Before carbon can be farted out of a cow, it has to get in to the cow from somewhere else.
In particular, it comes from the plant matter they digest. Which would otherwise be holding onto those carbon atoms, by and large. (Or releasing them to other organisms via natural decomposition processes). You know, like trees do.
Instead being shot into the atmosphere through the cows' hind quarters.
Citation needed? Others have already provided citations against your claim and the naive reasoning makes it seem obviously untrue: industrial livestock are fed industrial crops and so are worse than eating industrial crops oneself, and probably by a factor of at least 2.
My data-free immediate thought was, '...but industrial meat farming uses N times as many resources [land, water, petrochemicals] to produce the same number of nutrients/calories...'
Now I am interested if this is in fact true. I have certainly heard this argument made, and it is often alluded to e.g. in describing the problem in China of producing enough meat to satisfy an increasingly affluent society (the subtext being, 'with the same constrained resources').
Woo... 2 degrees. We can totally consider establishing settlement in Mars but God forbid there is 2 degree change in climate on earth. It will be uninhabitable. NOT.
>Agriculture consumes 80 percent of water in the United States.
Oh yeah, because we were otherwise going to drink the river... or maybe it disappears when it is used in agriculture. Except it doesn't. Water is the most recyclable resource there is.
>carbon output from food production has increased by 47 percent from 2000 to 2012 — that’s an increase of 150 million tons of carbon dioxide
Except carbon that is emitted to the atmosphere doesn't stay there. It's called carbon cycle. If we are producing more meat, we will also have to produce more food for the animals... which comes from plants... which take CO2 from the atmosphere to grow.
You're fooling nobody. Don't get into our kitchen.
Could some countries realistically just phase out (outlaw) most classes of meat production and consumption? IMO that's much more interesting than any taxation/disincentivization scheme.
I feel like this problem would solve itself if livestock producers were encouraged (read: mandated) to move from factory farming to more traditional ranching. Lower density of livestock, more humane conditions, at least some carbon offset from pastures, etc. Prices might go up, which will likely hurt low-income carnivores, but that'll be the case with the proposed taxation approach, too.
Well, not really. meat is horrible in many ways, and the very few systems that aren't bad for the environment won't scale.
If all pasture was magically turned into carbon sinks (in my home country about 5% of natural pastures could be called carbon sinks. in some countries it is almost as high as 30%) we would still have to cut our meat consumption considerably - and that would be for sustaining the meat consumption of today and not meet the growing consumption in Asia.
[+] [-] jMyles|9 years ago|reply
If there's a meat tax, then farmers will have an incentive to cut even more corners, which might lead to even more cruel conditions.
Instead, maybe it makes sense to set a price floor for any operation over a certain number of animals. (IE, if you have more than 200 animals on your farm, you can't charge less than $10 a pound or something).
[+] [-] milkey_mouse|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ozy123|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kephael|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khattam|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepto|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisrod|9 years ago|reply
1. Matter is conserved. Before carbon can be farted out of a cow, it has to get in to the cow from somewhere else. I expect most of it was in the atmosphere a year beforehand, then got absorbed by pasture grass and eaten. So this year's farts will end up in next year's cows, and aren't like fossil fuel emissions.
2. Methane decays to carbon dioxide in a decade or two, so today's methane emissions are not really a worse problem than today's carbon dioxide emissions.
[+] [-] jlmorton|9 years ago|reply
2. CH4 may not have a long half-life, but it has 29x the warming potential of CO2. Methane is thought to contribute about 20% of the current anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. Because of the anticipated positive feedbacks from warming, this is very important indeed.
[+] [-] gaur|9 years ago|reply
Hmm... I guess I'll trust the experts quoted in the article rather than some rando's vague impressions of first-year physics.
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
In particular, it comes from the plant matter they digest. Which would otherwise be holding onto those carbon atoms, by and large. (Or releasing them to other organisms via natural decomposition processes). You know, like trees do.
Instead being shot into the atmosphere through the cows' hind quarters.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VT_Drew|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaroninsf|9 years ago|reply
Now I am interested if this is in fact true. I have certainly heard this argument made, and it is often alluded to e.g. in describing the problem in China of producing enough meat to satisfy an increasingly affluent society (the subtext being, 'with the same constrained resources').
Going to poke around a bit...
[+] [-] khattam|9 years ago|reply
Not to me, but let's see.
>2 degrees carbon budget limit
Woo... 2 degrees. We can totally consider establishing settlement in Mars but God forbid there is 2 degree change in climate on earth. It will be uninhabitable. NOT.
>Agriculture consumes 80 percent of water in the United States.
Oh yeah, because we were otherwise going to drink the river... or maybe it disappears when it is used in agriculture. Except it doesn't. Water is the most recyclable resource there is.
>carbon output from food production has increased by 47 percent from 2000 to 2012 — that’s an increase of 150 million tons of carbon dioxide
Except carbon that is emitted to the atmosphere doesn't stay there. It's called carbon cycle. If we are producing more meat, we will also have to produce more food for the animals... which comes from plants... which take CO2 from the atmosphere to grow.
You're fooling nobody. Don't get into our kitchen.
[+] [-] mirimir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auganov|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krisdol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] paulddraper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Johnny_Brahms|9 years ago|reply
If all pasture was magically turned into carbon sinks (in my home country about 5% of natural pastures could be called carbon sinks. in some countries it is almost as high as 30%) we would still have to cut our meat consumption considerably - and that would be for sustaining the meat consumption of today and not meet the growing consumption in Asia.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pvaldes|9 years ago|reply