In his book "Manifesto: The Battle for Green Britain", Dale Vince talks a lot about how to tackle the three interrelated issues of energy, transport, and food by using the big levers of government: taxes, subsidies and regulations, which he calls the tools that create markets. I think the animal rights movement could learn a lot from understanding and implementing a strategy calling for meat tax and much more.
We should, of course, start by stopping meat and animal feed subsidies. We are doing the opposite of taxing meat now, we use taxpayer money to subsidize it. A carbon tax, especially one that took proper accounting of methane emissions, could be the next step, you would not even have to target meat specifically, since it’s such a huge part of GHG emissions, if we were properly accounting for all sources of carbon it would make meat much more expensive than it is now. Of course, I’d be happy if we did target meat specifically, but I think it might be more difficult politically. It would definitely be simpler, though.
In his book "Manifesto: The Battle for Green Britain", Dale Vince talks a lot about how to tackle the three interrelated issues of energy, transport, and food by using the big levers of government: taxes, subsidies and regulations, which he calls the tools that create markets. I think the animal rights movement could learn a lot from understanding and implementing a strategy calling for meat tax and much more.
We should, of course, start by stopping meat and animal feed subsidies. We are doing the opposite of taxing meat now, we use taxpayer money to subsidize it. A carbon tax, especially one that took proper accounting of methane emissions, could be the next step, you would not even have to target meat specifically, since it’s such a huge part of GHG emissions, if we were properly accounting for all sources of carbon it would make meat much more expensive than it is now. Of course, I’d be happy if we did target meat specifically, but I think it might be more difficult politically. It would definitely be simpler, though.