UN calls for tax on cow farts

[Arwon]

No. Vegetables were easy enough to come by, even in the times I mention - people did not starve to death. But meat was a luxury. And that's what some environmentalists are calling for now, here! Not because real natural scarcity or resources available, but... because they don't like to eat meat. It's not because the planet's resources cannot sustain meat consumption, because clearly it is sustaining that consumption right now. Global warming is only another, more promising, excuse.

I eat meat and I think we should pay the true cost of it instead of subsidising meat consumption for everyone. The price mechanism is an important thing, and should not be lightly messed with.

 

[innonimatu]

I eat meat and I think we should pay the true cost of it instead of subsidising meat consumption for everyone. The price mechanism is an important thing, and should not be lightly messed with.

Have you ever considered in how many ways the price of food is already being messed with? How can you calculate a "true cost"?

Just a few others:
choice of trade agreements;
size of commercial operators;
size of agricultural units;
availability of insurance for crops (which private companies avoid providing, leaving that role to states);
price of fuels/cost of transportation (fuels are taxed, and those taxes are adjusted based on political criteria).

All of these, and more factors, influence the price of food and depend on political choices. Which necessarily must be made (and note that not doing anything is itself a political choice, when alternatives actions are known to be available).

Why are farm subsidies automatically singled out as "evil" by nearly everyone? Anyway, if that was the issue we might as well open another thread to discuss those subsides.

 

[Arwon]

Yes, prices are affected by many factors. Government handouts directly to producers really shouldn't be one of them.

 

[Narz]

How someone can keep insisting that access to food, and better food, is a bad thing boggles the mind!

Hate to inform you but factory farmed meat isn't better food. A 99cent burger isn't better for your health, the planet or even your taste buds.

 

[civ_king]

Hate to inform you but factory farmed meat isn't better food. A 99cent burger isn't better for your health, the planet or even your taste buds.

Real meat is much more expensive because we subsides fake "Meat" which is almost half fat

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Not what I said but nice strawman.

You said the grain going to animals should go to people suffering hunger. I pointed out that Western grain products being delivered to poor countries has proven to be a bad idea on the long run. Maybe you should rather explain than using some standard term of defamation.

So you're for cheap food for 1st worlders but not for poor people?

Yes. Poor people in poor countries need to feed themselves with their own food, if possible. And in most cases it is.

Dunno who told you that but if that were true all locally grown food would be subsidized equally but it's not.

How Farm Subsidies Harm Taxpayers, Consumers, and Farmers, Too (from a right-wing source so you should like it)

So the subsidizing is done poorly. May very well be. I fail to see the significance of it for the point being discussed though. And that you labeled me as some right-wing guy is just hilarious

That's not correct anymore. The current subsidies exist to drive commodity prices down as low as possible, leading to dirt-cheap grain and profit margins so slim that all but the largest farm are driven right out of business. If that counts as "keeping national farming alive", it's at least completely perverted. When agricultural subsidies were originally introduced, the reason was to keep national farming alive, to keep farmers on their farms by paying them off to not flood the market and therefore keep commodity prices reasonable. Look up Earl Butz.

It probably is perverted, yet if you would just cut all subsidies, who do you think would survive? Surely not the smaller farming businesses.

 

[El_Machinae]

A scalpel needs to be brought to the subsidy debate, but it needs to be a very sharp scalpel with a lot of cutting power. I really feel that the lack of action on this topic, despite the fact that most people seem to recognise its needs (and that the subsidies seem to be offensive to both sides of the partisan divide), shows that the American people really aren't being represented & that they don't have a plan to become represented.

 

[Narz]

You said the grain going to animals should go to people suffering hunger. I pointed out that Western grain products being delivered to poor countries has proven to be a bad idea on the long run. Maybe you should rather explain than using some standard term of defamation.

We don't send them grain for free. We sell it to them. Or, even better perhaps, we can let the land formerly used to grow animal feed to allow to go feral.

 

[Narz]

A scalpel needs to be brought to the subsidy debate, but it needs to be a very sharp scalpel with a lot of cutting power. I really feel that the lack of action on this topic, despite the fact that most people seem to recognise its needs (and that the subsidies seem to be offensive to both sides of the partisan divide), shows that the American people really aren't being represented & that they don't have a plan to become represented.

The idea that American values are represented via government is a myth. At best the government will make decisions & honestly report them to the American people & try to garner support afterwards.

 

[LucyDuke]

Pubmed searches for "methane" and "cattle" have turned out to be fun. Lucy seems to be correct in that grass-fed cattle produce more methane than grain-fed cattle. Silage looks to be in the middle, though silage-fed cattle are probably being housed where there can be venting & capture.

They fart more methane. Narz's link earlier in the thread shows how grass-fed cows fart more methane, but the decreased farts from grain-fed cows are more than matched by the increased emissions from growing and transporting that grain.

I hate people who want us to do away with eating meat.

I don't think anybody in this thread is a PETA member. Griping about that nonsense is perfectly legit, but that nonsense isn't part of this thread.

Don't you know we are omnivores for a damn reason?

What's that reason?

Taxes designed to internalize a negative externality are in effect removing the subsidy. It is supposed to fix the failure in the pricing system. Even if you stopped all money/resources directly going to the meat industry, you are still giving them free methane quota. That is a subsidy.

This proposal targets methane from cow farts. If you want to argue that not taxing the farts counts as a subsidy, then you must accept that not taxing all the other methane coming out of the machine is also a subsidy.

I'm fine with ending the cow fart subsidy if we also end the much more significant grain train fart subsidy.

No. Vegetables were easy enough to come by, even in the times I mention - people did not starve to death. But meat was a luxury. And that's what some environmentalists are calling for now, here! Not because real natural scarcity or resources available, but... because they don't like to eat meat. It's not because the planet's resources cannot sustain meat consumption, because clearly it is sustaining that consumption right now. Global warming is only another, more promising, excuse.

Can you even try to back that nonsense up? Why do you believe this conspiracy theory? Can you tell me what you think "sustain" means?

FWIW I love eating meat. If steak cost $50/oz, I'd still eat some sometimes.

Have you ever considered in how many ways the price of food is already being messed with? How can you calculate a "true cost"?

Just a few others:
choice of trade agreements;
size of commercial operators;
size of agricultural units;
availability of insurance for crops (which private companies avoid providing, leaving that role to states);
price of fuels/cost of transportation (fuels are taxed, and those taxes are adjusted based on political criteria).

All of these, and more factors, influence the price of food and depend on political choices. Which necessarily must be made (and note that not doing anything is itself a political choice, when alternatives actions are known to be available).

Why are farm subsidies automatically singled out as "evil" by nearly everyone? Anyway, if that was the issue we might as well open another thread to discuss those subsides.

The thread is about taxing cow farts. Obviously a billion things affect food prices, but the thing we're talking about is the government taking money out of the system. It's pretty much impossible to talk about that without also talking about the money that the government puts into the system.

The farm subsidies make some foods very cheap at the expense of quality. It's dramatically less expensive to get 1000 Calories of food from Taco Bell than from any produce department anywhere. Your mother always made sure you finished your broccoli because you needed all the good vitamins and fiber and veggie nutrition. I bet she didn't care if you finished your Supreme Double Fat Blast Burrito. If we're going to have farm subsidies, fine, but subsidize healthy food. It'll bring down the cost of Medicaid.


But you mentioned transportation. That's important too! We're subsidizing really inefficient transportation networks that produce an absolutely enormous amount of pollution. But we dump so many tax dollars into our roads that when I go to the grocery store it's cheaper to buy potatoes shipped in from Idaho than it is to buy potatoes grown 20 miles away. That is just ridiculous.

And yeah, personally I'm more concerned with the transit issues than the farming issues, and that's the undercurrent of most of the rest of what I've said in this thread. We need to at least, if not curtail the massive transportation subsidies, hit it from the other direction and tax vehicular emissions. If we want to be realistic, that comes before cow farts.

The idea that American values are represented via government is a myth. At best the government will make decisions & honestly report them to the American people & try to garner support afterwards.

That's just one more problem on this giant pile of "you're doing it wrong".

 

[Terxpahseyton]

We don't send them grain for free. We sell it to them. Or, even better perhaps, we can let the land formerly used to grow animal feed to allow to go feral.

"We" did send ridiculous cheap food which crushed local markets and increased poverty as well as dependency. Free food would do even more harm.

 

[yellow_peril]

We don't send them grain for free. We sell it to them. Or, even better perhaps, we can let the land formerly used to grow animal feed to allow to go feral.

No, America has been doing that for the past 50 years. It's the reason why the once promising African agricultural industry has never taken off.

I'd say that the subsidies to American farmers should end, but, I see the importance of having a viable food source that isn't imported in from different countries.

 

[amadeus]

It means that subsides have nothing to do with supporting American agriculture & helping Americans eat a balanced diet cheaply & everything to do with lobbyists from certain industries snatching up a lion's share of the subsidies to no one's benefit but their own.

Hope you understand now.

But there's two problems. First, the data isn't all that correct if you believe the numbers coming from the Environmental Working Group, which seem to be in-line with those of the Congressional Budget Office (the latter of which I only have a chart, can't find the actual data on CBO web site).

The EWG page says that dairy and livestock received roughly a combined $6.5 billion between 1995 and 2006. Corn and wheat, however, received over $78 billion during this same time frame. I think your pyramid chart, while pretty, is a bit suspect.

Second, even if livestock and dairy received the most in subsidies, so what? Go down to the local grocery store and tell me what the cheapest options for eating are... or better yet, read check out this chart from the USDA and this story from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

So the average price of a pound of regular ground beef was $1.45 in 1996. In 1999, it was more expensive to buy the cheapest cuts of beef on average than it was to buy pineapples, grapes, plumbs, nectarines, tangerines, peaches, tangelos, kiwis, pears, apples, mangoes, papayas, oranges, honeydew melons, cantaloupe, grapefruit, bananas, watermelon, squash, spinach, carrots, Brussels sprouts, tomatoes, lettuce, bell peppers, cauliflower, green beans, broccoli, eggplant, sweet corn, radishes, celery, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, onions, cabbage, and potatoes. And yet you say the government makes it cheaper for me to eat a Big Mac than it would to make a salad.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

The EWG page says that dairy and livestock received roughly a combined $6.5 billion between 1995 and 2006. Corn and wheat, however, received over $78 billion during this same time frame. I think your pyramid chart, while pretty, is a bit suspect.

That subsidized corn and wheat also goes towards feeding livestock. And also in manufacturing junk food. Cheap junk food.

 

[civ_king]

Mostly Corn actually, also most of the corn grown in Iowa for example is inedible for people because it is grown for corn syrup and as such has a high amount of starch for the production of it

 

[Tigerruss]

Next thing you know they will cut down the rain-forests and make us all suffocate.
Basically I have read a few times that the rain-forests are actually the largest source of methane per year.
But they are also the largest source of oxygen.

So while were at it taxing cow farts lets also kill our enviroment by killing the rain-forests then lets stop burning all fuel that has GHG emissions, and then go and kill off any other big source of methane. =D

But really it might not be a bad idea to tax cow farts, but I am not sure it is a good idea either.

 

[Narz]

Basically I have read a few times that the rain-forests are actually the largest source of methane per year.

Where did you hear that?

 

[Tigerruss]

Where did you hear that?

I couldn't find a link to a place that said what I heard.
So I could have miss heard D=.
But all green plants produce methane.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=methane-plants-and-climate-change

Though with some slight research when looking for it I found that lots of the stored CO2 can be released when rainforests are cutdown/burned.
So really the next step should be the UN taxing deforestation of rain-forests. To help prevent the release of the CO2.
That is if they actually want to slow down global warming and if they think that CO2 is more of a problem then the methane all green plants make.

And want to know what the people in charge of the cow farms could spend money researching bio-domes and help the potential colonization of other planets, and being able to harvest the cows, and methane with out having the pay the tax.

 

[civ_king]

I couldn't find a link to a place that said what I heard.
So I could have miss heard D=.
But all green plants produce methane.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=methane-plants-and-climate-change

Though with some slight research when looking for it I found that lots of the stored CO2 can be released when rainforests are cutdown/burned.
So really the next step should be the UN taxing deforestation of rain-forests. To help prevent the release of the CO2.
That is if they actually want to slow down global warming and if they think that CO2 is more of a problem then the methane all green plants make.

And want to know what the people in charge of the cow farms could spend money researching bio-domes and help the potential colonization of other planets, and being able to harvest the cows, and methane with out having the pay the tax.

Heavily tax non-sustainable deforestation and less heavily sustainable deforestation

 

[LucyDuke]

Deforestation is non-sustainable by definition.