Make meat-eaters pay: Ethicist proposes radical tax, says they're killing
themselves and the planet

By Peter Singer

Sunday, October 25th 2009, 4:00 AM

From:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/10/25/2009-10-25_make_meatea...
y_ethicist_proposes_radical_tax_says_theyre_killing_themselves.html

Taxes can do a lot of good. They pay for schools, parks, police and the
military. But that's not all they can do. High taxes on cigarettes have
saved many lives - not only the lives of people who are discouraged from
smoking as much as they would if cigarettes were cheap, but also the lives
of others who spend less time passively inhaling smoke.

No reasonable person would want to abolish the tax on cigarettes. Unless,
perhaps, they were proposing banning cigarettes altogether - as New York
City is doing with transfats served by restaurants.

A tax on sodas containing sugar has also been under consideration, by
Governor Paterson among others. In view of our obesity epidemic, and the
extra burden it places on our health care system - not to mention the
problems it causes on a crowded New York subway when your neighbor can't fit
into a single seat - it's a reasonable proposal.

But in all these moves against tobacco, transfats and sodas, we've been
ignoring the cow in the room.

That's right, cow. We don't eat elephants. But the reasons for a tax on beef
and other meats are stronger than those for discouraging consumption of
cigarettes, transfats or sugary drinks.

First, eating red meat is likely to kill you. Large studies have shown that
the daily consumption of red meat increases the risk that you will die
prematurely of heart disease or bowel cancer. This is now beyond serious
scientific dispute. When the beef industry tries to deny the evidence, it is
just repeating what the tobacco industry did 30 years ago.

Second, we have laws that ban cruelty to animals. Unfortunately in the
states in which most animals are raised for meat, the agribusiness lobby is
so powerful that it has carved out exemptions to the usual laws against
cruelty.

The exemptions allow producers to crowd chickens, pigs and calves in
stinking sheds, never letting them go outside in fresh air and sunlight,
often confining them so closely that they can't even stretch their limbs or
turn around. Debeaking - cutting through the sensitive beak of a young chick
with a hot blade - is standard in the egg industry.

Undercover investigations repeatedly turn up new scandals - downed cows
being dragged to slaughter, workers hitting pigs with steel pipes or playing
football with live chickens. We may not be able to improve the laws in those
farming states, but taxes on meat would discourage people from supporting
these cruel practices.

Third, industrial meat production wastes food - we feed the animals vast
quantities of grains and soybeans, and they burn up most of the nutritional
value of these crops just living and breathing and developing bones and
other unpalatable body parts. We get back only a fraction of the food value
we put into them.

That puts unnecessary pressure on our croplands and causes food prices to
rise all over the world. Converting corn to biofuel has been criticized
because it raises food prices for the world's poor, but seven times as much
grain gets fed to animals as is made into biofuel.

Fourth, agricultural runoff - much of it from livestock production, or from
the fertilizers used to grow the grain fed to the livestock - is the biggest
single source of pollution of the nation's rivers and streams, according to
the EPA. A meat tax would be an important step towards cleaner rivers. By
reducing the amount of nitrogen that runs off fields in the Midwest into the
Mississippi, it would also stop the vast ?dead zone? that forms in the Gulf
of Mexico each year.

The clincher is that taxing meat would be a highly effective way of reducing
our greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Here's just how bad eating meat is for global warming.

Many people think that buying locally produced food is a good way to reduce
their carbon footprint. But the average American would do more for the
planet by going vegetarian just one day per week than by switching to a
totally local diet.

In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization surprised many
people when it produced a report showing that livestock are responsible for
more emissions than all forms of transportation combined. It's now clear
that that report seriously underestimated the contribution that livestock -
especially ruminant animals like cattle and sheep - are making to global
warming.

As a more recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has
shown, over the critical next 20 years, the methane these animals produce
will be almost three times as potent in warming the planet as the FAO report
assumed.

Meat-eaters impose costs on others, and the more meat they eat, the greater
the costs.

They push up our health insurance premiums, increase Medicare and Medicaid
costs for taxpayers, pollute our rivers, threaten the survival of fishing
communities in the Gulf of Mexico, push up food prices for the world's poor,
and accelerate climate change.

Red meat is the worst for global warming, but a tax on red meat alone would
merely push meat-eaters to chicken, and British animal welfare expert
Professor John Webster has described the intensive chicken industry as "the
single most severe, systematic example of man's inhumanity to another
sentient animal.?

So let's start with a 50% tax on the retail value of all meat, and see what
difference that makes to present consumption habits. If it is not enough to
bring about the change we need, then, like cigarette taxes, it will need to
go higher.

Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University, the author of
"Animal Liberation" and the author, with Jim Masion, of "The Ethics of What
We Eat."

Thanks, very interesting. i wish we'd do that !
In the past, most people couldn't afford meat. in japan it was illegal for
200 years
(except for samurai and royals). the cheapening of meat made animal life
cheap and
pollution and abuse commonplace. Eating meat was not a natural state for
"common"
humans until recently ... we need to get back to "ancient" habits
(internationally).
(and no not iceland or other northern ones! "modern" humans have been for
the most agrarian)
viva legumes !