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As much as I would love to see subsidies ended on animal products, it couldn’t happen overnight without huge backlash. Lowering the subsidies over time and eli

• nemo44x 6y ago
  You get rid of subsidies and then poor people can’t eat meat. Good luck dealing with the political fallout from that. Subsidized meat is a special kind of a American socialism where the wealthy tax payers fund the subsidies so everyone else can eat meat. Honestly, so many of the ideas for addressing climate just prevent poor people from participating. The upper middle class who are most concerned with these issues (and have the most political power) simply wouldn’t be affected much at all by things that make access more difficult and/or expensive. Rationing in the name of “equity” won’t happen because these same people will actually be affected so the line is drawn there. We need more housing development but not in my backyard, etc. I don’t offer a particular solution other than giving people incentives to eat plant based diets and using tax revenues to invest in engineering the problem away as much as possible.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > You get rid of subsidies and then poor people can’t eat meat So stop subsidizing meat and spend the same money augmenting the income of the poor, then poor people will be at least as able to eat meat and be at least as well off when doing so as they were with the meat sibaidies, while those who choose not to will be even better off than they were with meat subsidies.
    • nemo44x 6y ago
      Why would people that pay taxes prefer that model? So, I pay the same taxes and then I also get to spend a lot more on food for my family? Good luck getting support for that.
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Why would people that pay taxes prefer that model? Because they actually want to control (or, at least not encourage through subsidization) the externalities of meat consumption? What economic group so you think that concern comes from? > Good luck getting support for that. If it wasn't possible to get something that didn't serve the immediate narrow financial interests of the wealthiest, the developed, democratic world would never have abandoned laissez-faire capitalism for the modern mixed economy.
      • danShumway 6y ago
        > So, I pay the same taxes and then I also get to spend a lot more on food for my family? Well, no, not necessarily. You pay taxes right now to subsidize meat consumption across the board, to everyone, even rich people. Under a system like UBI, you pay the same taxes, your food costs more, but you also get a check in the mail that balances out the extra food cost. Or under a targeted system that is designed to specifically benefit the poor, you pay more for food but fewer taxes, because you're only paying taxes to subsidize the poor instead of (currently) also paying additional taxes to subsidize the meat consumption of rich people. It's a mistake to say that your food costs less right now because you pay taxes. It costs the same, you're just paying part of the price in your taxes. And part of the 'problem' is that the money you're paying to the government is going towards subsidizing everyone, including people who are more well off than you but that get to enjoy cheap meat prices anyway. That's not necessarily a very efficient way to help the poor. There are lots of different schemes and complications here, it's not as simple as I'm making it out to be. But the very basic idea is that it would cost less money to subsidize just the poor, and then you could keep some of your tax money that's currently subsidizing rich people and you could spend it on meat instead.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    What's wrong with poor people being unable to afford a luxury item based on animal exploitation and suffering? Usually people respond to this pointing out some supposed nutrition advantages of meat as if the USA, with the cheapest meat in the world, is somehow the paragon of health and cuisine. Though I'd be down for a government sponsored, optional multivitamin.
    • KozmoNau7 6y ago
      The problem is that people in the US (and really most of the western world) have grown up eating meat, been told that they should desire meat, that meat is an essential part of their diet and, to a certain extent, that not eating meat is unmanly and weak. Meat consumption is so ingrained that any attempt to curtail it is met with fierce opposition, because people feel as if it's an attack on their identity.
      • nemo44x 6y ago
        I don’t think that’s the case. Look around the world and you’ll see that as a country has become more prosperous that their meat consumption has increased. I don’t think it’s because people suddenly became more “manly”. It’s because of a simple fact: most humans love meat. Food is more than a personal identity. It’s a major part of people’s culture globally and meat plays a primary role in many cultures. I think most people would eat more meat if they had the means to. Only about 3.5% of Americans are vegetarian. Designing policy that favors this group would be ridiculous. Subsidizing meat and democratizing access to it is good policy since nearly everyone benefits from it. Saying that I hope “plant meat” continues to improve and finds a market outside the novelty it mainly is today. But this can’t be forced on people.
        • KozmoNau7 6y ago
          >"Look around the world and you’ll see that as a country has become more prosperous that their meat consumption has increased. I don’t think it’s because people suddenly became more “manly”. It’s because of a simple fact: most humans love meat." I think it's much more likely that people in countries with rising prosperity are seeing the high meat consumption in affluent parts of the world, and now that they themselves are becoming affluent, they want that diet/lifestyle themselves. It's aspirational, more than anything else. There is certainly a biological appeal of eating cooked meat, just as there is with fatty (and sugary) foods in general: It signifies high caloric density, which is hugely important for a hunter/gatherer/subsistence community. That base desire is still there, leading to overeating and health issues, since excess calories are often abundant and easily affordable. Modern Americans (and Europeans) eat a lot more meat than any other culture[1] past or present. The eating of meat every single day at every meal is a huge historical aberration and the clearest possible proof of our destructive overconsumption. Just as with many other things like candy, sugary drinks, tobacco and alcohol, it would be wise to reduce consumption significantly. Rather than simply indulging base desires, we can choose to cut back and introduce some moderation, a wiser and more enlightened choice, not least because lifestock farming is an ongoing massive environmental disaster. Currently the US is heavily subsidizing the meat industry, including by massively subsidizing corn. The wise move would be to cut that back and subsidize environmentally sound farming practices and ending the practice of feeding human food to animals. Farm what animals can be sustainably farmed on grass, hay and other plants unfit for human consumption, use the corn and soy and grains for food directly. We in the western world have to realize that our wildly luxurious eating habits are completely unsustainable, and accept that meat will again be a once a week, maybe twice a week treat. [1] Save a rare few very specific outliers, such as the Inuit, who in some areas subsist almost entirely on meat.
• hannob 6y ago
  Depends on how you do it. There are proposals for carbon tax schemes that go like "we'll pay back all the income from the carbon tax to all citizen directly". You can imagine the same for methane. Pretty sure such a proposal would be popular.
  • wyre 6y ago
    A carbon-tax funded UBI would be popular, but ideally wouldn’t funding from a carbon tax go towards sequestering the carbon and other green initiatives instead of giving it back to consumers to spend on high-carbon goods and services?
    • nemo44x 6y ago
      It’s essentially what we do today. High tax payers consume more and their tax revenues subsidize things like Ag which make things like meat affordable to poor people. So yeah, get rid of subsidies and replace with UBI and we’re probably in nearly the same place. Maybe a good deal of people would forego newly expensive meat and spend their UBI on the lotto?
      • bigfudge 6y ago
        Why the snipe at the end? Perhaps they would buy plant based food instead. What you’re describing sounds like a wi for everyone.
        • nemo44x 6y ago
          The bottom fifth of incomes spend the most on the lotto. It would stand to reason they would spend more if given the means to.
  • radicalbyte 6y ago
    Carbon taxes apply to all GHG, including methane. We just use "carbon" as the unit.
    • 6y ago
• tengbretson 6y ago
  So with your plan, if I get rid of the cows in my pasture and a bunch of deer move in to graze it instead do I still get taxed for their farts too?
  • gbear605 6y ago
    Of course not. Unless you’re raising a deer herd, and claiming ownership over them, in which case sure.
    • tengbretson 6y ago
      When you put it that way it kind of sounds like managing the animal conversion of biomass into methane isn't the actual goal then.
      • gbear605 6y ago
        If you’re raising the deer, then you’re responsible for the externalities produced by your economic pursuit. If you’re not raising the deer, then they’re the responsibility of humankind as a whole, who is already paying for those externalities (by having to suffer from climate change). The point of a carbon (or methane) tax is to ensure that you pay for your externalities, both to disincentivize you from having them and to repay everyone else for the cost that they’ve been dealt by you. Suppose you set up a polluting machine that solely emitted carbon, perhaps for art. That goal may be reasonable, but by engaging in it you’re hurting others. A carbon tax makes them whole (by either paying for carbon capture or by direct compensation) and disincentives you from doing it in the first place. If instead it was a naturally occurring polluting machine (a herd of deer, say) then we’d either want to remove it or do something to counteract it, and that cost is paid by everyone. In this case, we’d probably choose to plant trees, rather than killing the deer. (Although the deer population in North America is out of control, so perhaps killing them might be the right choice.)
      • dwaltrip 6y ago
        The goal is to fix the current phenomenon where human activity dumps enough co2 (and other greenhouse gases like methane) into the atmosphere to significantly alter the global climate and cause massive problems. By the way, deer are not a meaningful contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gas levels.