Climate friendly meat is a black bean burger
A recent study published in Global Food Security, for instance, shows that humble legumes, with the right government push, could provide a far more sustainable and diverse source of protein than meat
I got your climate friendly meat right here
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 solution is simple: hefty meat tax.
Government has tremendous power to address collective action problems through incentives, regulations, and taxation. In the world of public health, these interventions are ranked on a scale called the Nuffield Ladder, with gentle nudges at the bottom and outright bans at the top. One of the most commonly used tools is taxation. In particular, governments can implement what are known as Pigouvian taxes on things like sugary drinks, tobacco, or polluting factories—the idea is to force producers to cover the cost of the harms their products do. They can also slap so-called “sin taxes” on products to increase direct costs for consumers. These taxes work. Numerous studies show that these are very effective in decreasing consumption, leading groups like the World Health Organization to strongly support them. The academic case for such taxes on meat is robust and convincing. But taxes in general are massively politically unpopular and lead to accusations of a nanny state interfering in consumers’ free choice, as the battles over sugar taxes around the world have shown.
The thing I can never get behind is that this is always used as an argument for new technologies instead of returning to lower tech, pre-industrial solutions that are already well established and known to be safer.