Germán Forero-Cantor, Javier Ribal, and Neus Sanjuán, "Levying carbon footprint taxes on animal-sourced foods. A case study in Spain." Journal of Cleaner Production 243, 10 January 2020, 118668.
Meat production as practiced today is not friendly to the environment, with animal agriculture responsible for some 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions. Other environmental harms associated with animal agriculture include water pollution and rain forest destruction.
With respect to greenhouse gas emissions alone, Forero-Cantor et al. (2020) calculate (Pigovian?) taxes for pork, beef, chicken, turkey, lamb, eggs, and fish, using quarterly Spanish data from 2004 to 2015. (During this period, the total Spanish consumption of beef, eggs, and lamb decreased. The modal meat meal is fish -- that is, the weight of seafood consumed each year globally exceeds that of pork or poultry, the most common land-animal-sourced meats; fish is undifferentiated in the data, as opposed to the separate types of land-animal-sourced meats.) The researchers need to know not only the carbon footprint throughout the meat supply chain -- lamb and beef are the biggest carbon releasers on a per kilogram basis, while fish have the lowest carbon footprint -- they also have to understand demand elasticities, how changes in prices will alter the quantities of meat and other products that consumers purchase.
The researchers simulate the effect of various taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, and find, counterintuitively, that a tax on fish does best at lowering the overall carbon footprint. A tax on pork, alternatively, given the induced product substitutions, would have a perverse effect, it would raise the overall carbon footprint. A tax on poultry (chicken or turkey) wouldn't help much in curtailing greenhouse gasses, either. Given the huge (1 trillion? -- pdf) number of fish killed each year for human and animal consumption, animal welfare considerations would seem to bolster the (relative?) case for taxing seafood.
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