Gristmill on the Cow Tax and Less Meat vs. Less Coal

categories: Environment and Global Warming, Farm Animals, Politics and Law

Published March 11, 2009 @ 10:35AM PT

Extracted from "The 'cow tax': not now, maybe not ever: A love of delicious farm votes beef crosses ideological boundaries":

A Democratic and Republican Senator have joined together to enshrine in law the sacred principle that American cows shall never be taxed. Smell the bipartisanship.

Including cattle in a cap-and-trade system is, of course, a fine idea. From an environmental perspective, cattle are a major source of a wide range of ills: methane emissions, land use changes, nitrous oxide emissions, ammonia emissions, etc. If you tally up the negative impacts of beef on human health and productivity, the societal cost of cows climbs even higher.

From an economic efficiency perspective, it generally doesn't make sense to exclude sectors from a carbon cap. We want emissions reductions to come from the fastest, lowest-cost sources available, and it's hard to imagine anything cheaper or lower-cost than reduced beef consumption. It takes decades to shut down a coal plant. It takes no time at all to not eat a strip steak [emphasis mine]. Moreover, energy is a primary input to just about every sector of the economy. The same can hardly be said for tender, delicious short ribs.

Finally, pricing is really the only policy implement up to the task of curbing beef consumption. The government might be able to fiddle around at the margins through consumer awareness campaigns and school lunch programs, but anything more heavy-handed would raise a justifiable backlash. (And, sadly, even these modest government interventions are ferociously resisted by industry.) . . .

Anyhow, ranchers need never have worried. A cow tax is a political non-starter, simple as that.

The blogger is right, of course (yes, I'm choosing to ignore that "tender, delicious short ribs" remark). The power that animal agribusiness has in this country--the sway that the animal ag lobby has in politics and the crap (sometimes literally) that animal ag can get away with--never stops amazing and infuriating me beyond words.

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Stephanie is an independent animal rights advocate, a vegan, a tree-hugging environmentalist, and a freelance editor and writer. She lives in St. Louis with an aging corgi-lab and an adolescent rescued pit bull.