The Comforting Lie of "Climate-Friendly Meat"
The Comforting Lie of "Climate-Friendly Meat"
The industry insists that meat’s problems can be solved with technical fixes. We’ve seen this before.
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The problem with meat is not that we eat it, but that we eat too much of it. Most people eat a week's worth of meat in a single day, and that results in the over production of meat, which is helping to destroy the environment.
The problem with meat is not that we eat it, but that we eat too much of it.
This isn't how it works. Consuming meat and cheese and butter and other animal products has been made into a conspicuous consumption deal for a long time, it's a status symbol, obviously important to pastoralist cultures and their industrial descendants (like The West).
You can't do "low meat" without first attacking the status power of meat.
People would go crazy and riot over reducing it, as it would most likely manifest as:
- Rationing of meat (I've lived in this, in Romania, a long time ago) - possible, but hard, not really something that works in capitalist market economics.
- Raising the prices (which is something that the animal farmers would love) - which would cause all sorts of ..."so meat is only for rich people? FUCK THAT!" reactions.
If you don't do those, it's just going to be imported.
If you ban imports, you're going to get a meat mafia. Meat bootleggers. The "leather underground" mafia and terrorist organization.
You may actually get to see this, since the prices are destined to shoot up eventually, since it's so unsustainable.
Solution to #2: Implement as a pigovian tax. Return the tax revenue to the population per capita.
The rich: dodges taxes like the Olympic gold medalists of dodging taxes
Yes, the most powerful will always have the most power. It still makes sense to set up some rules.
Pigovian taxes can still be beneficial for society, even if the super rich evade the system. They create incentives for everyone else to move in the desired direction. This includes consumers, producers, investors, researchers. For all those people in their different positions, it will be financial advantageous to consider other options.
But my main point was that you can raise prices without hurting the poor. By returning the tax revenue to the poor.
Better option: keep your fucking hands off our food. All it accomplished is building political opponents for great reasons
What is a weeks worth of Meat?
The actual problem is capitalism.
Most people only eat that much meat because of a combination of lobbying, advertising, education (or lack thereof, about where our food comes from, home ec, etc..) and so on which all influence and create social norms, all engineered and focused on making money for those at the top, not our health, not our well being, and definitely not those of the animals.
The horror that is factory farming only exists because of profit motives. Remove the profit motive and whole thing comes tumbling down (because it's just unsustainable).
The horror that is factory farming only exists because of profit motives. Remove the profit motive and whole thing comes tumbling down (because it’s just unsustainable).
Nope. The horror of factory farming exists because herding/ranching exists. It's the descendant, the result of the transition from extensive herding (which is also horrible) to intensive herding (which is obviously horrible). The CAFOs are the ones making profits by economies of scale. Most of the animal products are from CAFOs. End those and it's going to get really surprising :)
Profits existed way before, with pastoralism. The "livestock" or "living capital" is a form of primitive accumulation, part of the formation of capitalism. The profit incentive and the GROWTH incentive goes deep in pastoralist culture. The notion that it's in any sense non-profit is absolutely incorrect.