As you no doubt have read in the papers, or seen on the TV news, food prices have recently shot up, leading the warmists to blame global warming, of course. Sensible people point to the insane practice of turning food into biofuels that no one wants. but everyone is feeling the pinch of higher food prices, with the poor especially hard hit by the rise.
So it should come as no surprise then, to read that the warmist’s answer to this is to call for a hefty “climate tax” on all milk, dairy produce, and meat products.
I know, you’re probably rubbing your eyes in disbelief and thinking “Oh come on, not even they would be that crass” but the call has already gone out in the pages of favoured warmist journal, Climate Change. As MSNBC reports:
Many people think with either their wallets or their stomachs. Taking advantage of that can be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A tax on meat and milk would likely mean we’d buy less of the foods that contribute to climate change. And that’s good for the environment, said a study published in the journal Climate Change.
The problem, according to the authors of the study calling for this latest insanity, is that “we don’t pay the full ‘climate-cost'” of the food that we eat, and must be made to do so as part of a program to move us towards a more “climate-smart” diet of beans and vegetables:
Tacking about $82 onto the cost of beef for every “ton of carbon dioxide equivalent” would reduce Europe’s beef consumption by 15 percent. By taxing all meats and milk, Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by about 7 percent, according to the study.
. . . The benefit of a tax is that it doesn’t require new technologies and could be implemented as soon as legislation was passed. Economically encouraging people to change their eating habits would not only be good for the environment, but would free up land for other uses.
Far more food can be produced on land farmed for beans, corn and other crops, than if it was used for cattle pasture or producing animal feed.
So those with plenty of money, of course, or the land to farm their own organic beef and produce their own organic milk, would be fine, but the vast majority of normal people would end up paying a huge “climate-tax” as part of a move to force them to switch to eating more beans and less steak.
I’m beginning to think that even if their worst predictions of climate catastrophe weren’t total BS, it would still be preferable to living in the sort of world these people envisage for us, living off beans and tofu in unheated houses wearing recycled clothes. I think I would rather burn, thank you very much. Or freeze, or whatever the threat of the week is this week.
hauntingthelibrary 
Guess who’ll be leading this parade.
Yeah that’s right. Animal rights nutters Ingrid Newkirk and Wayne Pacelle.
Like those two needed any more encouragement to consign us all to a life of beans and carrots…
[We can only hope this never catches on.]
My friend David Mason-Jones has written an excellent book exploding the myth of meat as a major climate criminal. He also shows how, properly managed, cattle can assist in the permanent sequestration of huge amounts of carbon.
Check it out at http://www.journalist.com.au
Of course, the people who have come up with this assume that “dirt” can grow anything.
The type of soil you need to grow legumes and grains is entirely different to the type of soil you need to grow pasture for cattle or sheep.
Even the subsoil life – the worms and the insect larvae are different.
This is something put together by people who have two tomato plants in a window box, growing in soil they bought at the supermarket, and think they know about agriculture – they are idiots.
So instead of the cattle producing large quantities of atmospheric warming methane in their flatulence WE will be doing it instead? – That’s surely going to be the outcome of us eating lots of vegetables and beans…
It won’t work very well in Malawi:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351174/African-country-set-make-breaking-wind-crime.html
Perhaps they’ll outlaw other involuntary gaseous ejections – such as breathing.
Perhaps the AGWers who have been praising China’s politics should start to extol those of Malawi.
Am I being ironic? You tell me……..
‘He also shows how, properly managed, cattle can assist in the permanent sequestration of huge amounts of carbon’.
Peter O’Brien, please refer to the ‘pollutant’ by its correct name, Carbon Dioxide, the warmists would like everyone to believe that it is carbon because it has the connotation of being black and dirty whereas carbon dioxide is a plant fertiliser.
As I said, properly managed, cattle can assist to sequester huge amounts of carbon in the soil, thus making it unavailable to form CO2 for release to the atmosphere. Read the book.
Do you recall in our younger days when we joked that the very air we breathe would be taxed? Well, that’s now happening. Some of us also joked that we would all be forced to become vegetarians. I weep for my fellow man, we are indeed quickly going around the bend, we are royally f**ked.
Such a tax would hit the poor hardest; but these days i’m pretty sure they (the leftist warmist environmentalists) didn’t intend that, as i think they are completely incapable of foreseeing any consequence of their schemes. Which is ironic, as ecology understands itself as a science of biological systems. Not much (well, nil) systemic thinking in this proposal. At the same time, they boast to be able to predict the climate’s future in a 100 years – but only because a computer told them so. So, they show that they are incapable to think one tiny step ahead, but believe blindly in a software’s prediction. Intellectual capacity can’t get any worse.
I’ve watched the way enforced vegetarianism has emerged as a part of the alarmist manifesto very closely.
The weakness of the argument is about equal to the fervour with which some ‘environmentalists’ promote it. This suggests prior commitment, which will surprise no one.
All part of the illiberal, controlling (anti-democratic) mindset we all know and love.
“but would free up land for other uses.” So we’re supposed to plow up grasslands that are currently devoted to grazing livestock and plant crops instead. What these fools don’t realize is that the great majority of soils in the US and elsewhere are either: too rocky, too shallow, too arid, too sandy, too steep, too cold….you get the idea. The best use for these prairies is just that – grazing land. You can’t plant potatoes in rock. (What we have a lot of around where i live) Or anything else for that matter. Cows are able to convert grass – something that is inedible to humans – into something we can eat – meat, milk. And it’s the most sustainable form of agriculture there is – no erosion, no fertilizer, no expenditure of fossil fuel to cultivate. As always with these people, it has nothing to do with the environment. It has everything to do with making us all vegetarians.
Oh for the good old days when they just told us to eat cake.
Given that price hikes in food is considered a contributing factor in the current unrest in Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Armenia, etc. a ‘strategy’ like this could only work to trigger populist revolutions. People who can’t afford food are certainly not going to be concerned about their ‘carbon footprints.’
OH JUST Bring it already. I dare them.
Enough ticked off people in this country are already not able to afford decent food, and they want to tax it? Yeah.. watch whats going on in Egypt and imagine it here when the food riots start.
Has anyone met a right wing vegan?
Trying to convert to more meaningful numbers… €60 per ton (tonne?) of CO2 equivalent doesn’t signify much to me.
For meat, according to this, each kilo of beef is associated with about 10 kg of CO2 equivalent. At €60 per tonne, that’s €0.60 per kilo of beef. [Or about €0.66 per kilo if they really meant ton as it says in the press release; but as the study originated in Sweden, you’d think that tonne would be the logical unit to use. Plus it makes the math easier. 🙂 ]
For milk, Google led me to this, which claims that one litre of milk is associated with 400g CO2 equivalent. At €60 per tonne of CO2 equivalent, that works out to be less than €0.02 per litre of milk. I rather doubt that demand for milk is going to be greatly affected by such a tax.
To expand this discussion somewhat, would like to refer readers to the work of Allan Savory – someone who has studied what happens when livestock are put into desertified areas in Africa. The desertification is reversed, even water returns to springs… He won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award in 2010. I heard him speak in London in fall 2009 – and maybe he really is onto something here. Check it out! http://www.savoryinstitute.com/
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@old44
*puts hand up*
Not quite there, but I’m a right-wing vegetarian FWIW
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/aug97/livestock.hrs.html
worth a read, as it outlines the social problems with meat production, that is that a huge energy input is required compared to the output, for instance beef requires 54 times the amount of food input to the food output it produces, making steak really quite a selfish choice! The effect of bio-fuel production on the world hunger problem pales in comparison.
Furthermore the CO2 emissions caused by meat production comes mainly from the production process, eg transportation, heating etc. The bigger environmental problem linked to this is actually the methane and nitrous oxide emissions – it is estimated that 35% of world methane emissions and 65% of world NOx emissions are caused by livestock, perhaps something to consider before getting on your high horse about lefty veggies imposing on your civil liberties?
Hi Jo –
Thanks for posting. I hope my horse wasn’t too high 🙂 I’m not actually looking to bash “lefty” veggies specifically. My political views are not right-wing, funnily enough, more anti-statist, so i suppose a bit anarchist-libertarian along Ed Abbey / Dave Foreman lines more than anything else.