6 ms·

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 u

by sparrc 8y ago

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.

theptip 8y ago
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.
- sparrc 8y ago
  True but I think some of these issues are also fundamentally harder to tax. Everything uses land and water, the problem is how much cattle use per calorie produced. I suppose you're saying we should tax usage of these things based on calorie produced?
  - avar 8y ago
    Nothing needs to be taxed based on calorie produced. For the purposes of sustainability you tax externalities. Whether that's releasing carbon into the atmosphere, or whatever it costs to fix the land or water you're polluting. If you're polluting as much as your neighbor but producing fewer calories you'll make less money, so market forces will take care of that and you'll be more likely to go out of business. There's no need to tax anything based on caloric production for the purposes of taxing pollution. That of course assumes that you're producing the same product as your neighbor, but maybe he's making dogfood and you're making Kobe beef. Then it's OK for your business if you're producing fewer calories per unit of pollution.
    - sparrc 8y ago
      Right, my point is that producing any type of meat consumes excessive amounts of land vs other forms of producing food, I guess what I'm asking is: how do you classify 'land' as an externality?
      - avar 8y ago
        With per-acre property taxes. If you need 10x the land to produce a kg of beef v.s. a kg of lentils you'll pay 10x the property taxes, which'll be worked into the price of your product. The question of e.g. water consumption or pollution is a separate question. It's possible to pollute a lot in a very small area, and that should be priced accordingly.
        sparrc 8y ago
        Fair enough, I see the logic behind what you're saying, but taxing that as an externality would require a massive change in the way farmland is managed and taxed in most of the western world. I'm not saying this is right, but farming is such a difficult and low-margin occupation that most countries have policies of helping farmers and having low to no taxes (even to the point of giving cashback in the EU) on land classified as "farmland" So "sin taxes" would be a way of targeting some of the biggest problems (meat) without completely restructuring the food and taxation system around the world.
        avar 8y ago
        The "sin taxes" would just be another and less efficient form of restructuring. You'd reduce meat consumption, thus screwing over some polluting farmers, but also equally screwing over other farmers who pollute less to produce the same product. But on the topic of say EU farming subsidies: You'd still raise the taxes dramatically to price the externality of pollution, but could just on top of that decide to give tax rebates that would amount to the same net subsidy. The reason it's important to do it that way is two-fold.: First you want to as a matter of public policy see how much you're actually paying for this subsidy. E.g. corporations in the EU usually pay a reduced VAT rate via rebates, we don't pretend that the concept of VAT doesn't apply to them. We could see that we like farming so much that we're spending however many billions of EUR/yr on offloading pollution on future generations. Secondly because such a tax subsidy could be structured to give more money to farmers if they pollute less, instead of them coming out even if they continue doing what they're doing now. Right now a farmer who releases way more CO^2 than his neighbor doesn't pay any more taxes, maybe you'd like to keep it that way for political reasons, but we could at least structure it so that his neighbor makes money by polluting less.
aplummer 8y ago
This was ops point, if you tax the emissions only people can innovate and reduce emissions in all these areas to the same effect.
- sparrc 8y ago
  But how do you tax the potential land usage? Are you saying we should tax farmers based on how many acres it takes them to produce a calorie? This could also have a knock-on affect of encouraging _more_ cruelty (if that's even possible at this point).
  - aplummer 8y ago
    I think we should tax them based on emissions which includes deforestation / clearing yes. Separately I would definitely like to see animals regulated with X land per animal like free range chickens are regulated. Given the current state of pig farming I don’t think we can physically go worse than status quo. I understand “tax emission” has many edge cases and will be tough to nut out without a general rule being possible, but it’s really important the cost of polluting is actually paid for with dollars and this is what we pay politicians to do every day (despite what it looks like).

by sparrc 8y ago

theptip 8y ago

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.

sparrc 8y ago
True but I think some of these issues are also fundamentally harder to tax. Everything uses land and water, the problem is how much cattle use per calorie produced. I suppose you're saying we should tax usage of these things based on calorie produced?
- avar 8y ago
  Nothing needs to be taxed based on calorie produced. For the purposes of sustainability you tax externalities. Whether that's releasing carbon into the atmosphere, or whatever it costs to fix the land or water you're polluting. If you're polluting as much as your neighbor but producing fewer calories you'll make less money, so market forces will take care of that and you'll be more likely to go out of business. There's no need to tax anything based on caloric production for the purposes of taxing pollution. That of course assumes that you're producing the same product as your neighbor, but maybe he's making dogfood and you're making Kobe beef. Then it's OK for your business if you're producing fewer calories per unit of pollution.
  - sparrc 8y ago
    Right, my point is that producing any type of meat consumes excessive amounts of land vs other forms of producing food, I guess what I'm asking is: how do you classify 'land' as an externality?
    - avar 8y ago
      With per-acre property taxes. If you need 10x the land to produce a kg of beef v.s. a kg of lentils you'll pay 10x the property taxes, which'll be worked into the price of your product. The question of e.g. water consumption or pollution is a separate question. It's possible to pollute a lot in a very small area, and that should be priced accordingly.
      - sparrc 8y ago
        Fair enough, I see the logic behind what you're saying, but taxing that as an externality would require a massive change in the way farmland is managed and taxed in most of the western world. I'm not saying this is right, but farming is such a difficult and low-margin occupation that most countries have policies of helping farmers and having low to no taxes (even to the point of giving cashback in the EU) on land classified as "farmland" So "sin taxes" would be a way of targeting some of the biggest problems (meat) without completely restructuring the food and taxation system around the world.
        avar 8y ago
        The "sin taxes" would just be another and less efficient form of restructuring. You'd reduce meat consumption, thus screwing over some polluting farmers, but also equally screwing over other farmers who pollute less to produce the same product. But on the topic of say EU farming subsidies: You'd still raise the taxes dramatically to price the externality of pollution, but could just on top of that decide to give tax rebates that would amount to the same net subsidy. The reason it's important to do it that way is two-fold.: First you want to as a matter of public policy see how much you're actually paying for this subsidy. E.g. corporations in the EU usually pay a reduced VAT rate via rebates, we don't pretend that the concept of VAT doesn't apply to them. We could see that we like farming so much that we're spending however many billions of EUR/yr on offloading pollution on future generations. Secondly because such a tax subsidy could be structured to give more money to farmers if they pollute less, instead of them coming out even if they continue doing what they're doing now. Right now a farmer who releases way more CO^2 than his neighbor doesn't pay any more taxes, maybe you'd like to keep it that way for political reasons, but we could at least structure it so that his neighbor makes money by polluting less.

aplummer 8y ago

This was ops point, if you tax the emissions only people can innovate and reduce emissions in all these areas to the same effect.

sparrc 8y ago
But how do you tax the potential land usage? Are you saying we should tax farmers based on how many acres it takes them to produce a calorie? This could also have a knock-on affect of encouraging _more_ cruelty (if that's even possible at this point).
- aplummer 8y ago
  I think we should tax them based on emissions which includes deforestation / clearing yes. Separately I would definitely like to see animals regulated with X land per animal like free range chickens are regulated. Given the current state of pig farming I don’t think we can physically go worse than status quo. I understand “tax emission” has many edge cases and will be tough to nut out without a general rule being possible, but it’s really important the cost of polluting is actually paid for with dollars and this is what we pay politicians to do every day (despite what it looks like).