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Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

There is also a less drastic technique: Carbon tax. Natural meat production generates a massive amount of CO2 equivalent, this is currently free.

I would be curious to see how much the ton of CO2 equivalent would have to be taxed for lab-grown meat to become competitive.

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Carbon taxes are a good first step. I would prefer a “qualia tax” where suffering inflicted to animals is quantified using Dennettian heterophenomenology and category theory.

From there we can assign a mathematical value to suffering imposed and calculate an appropriate taxation level.

I once had a friend propose this over dinner when I was still living in LA. He himself was in touch with many of Dennet’s students.

Doesn’t this imply any level of suffering, no matter how extreme, can be tolerated so long as we attach a market price to it?

All the same, I’m sure it would fit in well with the general theme of the financialization of everything.

No you can apply an infinite negative value/infinite cost and use that to bootstrap deontological ethics.

You would do this in a mathematical system where only a single infinity exists since otherwise you might get some weird utilitarian algebra with infinities which would ruin the simplicity of deontology.

But anything less than an infinite tax on animal slaughter would be akin to outright tolerating extreme suffering of a living thing so long as someone is willing to pay for it. I can’t see any difference between an infinite tax and just banning animal slaughter.

Why would you have a carbon tax on meat? Meat is renewable, all meat you eat comes from grass being grown. Tax the oil used for transportation etc, but why tax the grass?

Forest has to be cut down (e.g. in Brazil) to create pasture land for cows to graze. More forest has to then be cut down to grow crops that serve to feed those cows. During their lifetime cows will emit massive amount of GHG in the form of methane. Beef has roughly 3% efficiency [1] (amount of energy consumed by the cow vs what is transferred to you when you eat it), the worst of any type of food, by far.

For every kg of beef produce, about 60kg of CO2 equivalent is released. This is compared to 3kg of CO2 eq. per kg of tofu for example [2].

> Meat is renewable

If by renewable you mean that it's a regenerating resource, sure. But how does that change anything with regard to GHG emission? Renewable process can pollute more than some non-renewable processes. Those are completly different issues.

> but why tax the grass?

The grass isn't taxed. With a carbon tax, you could buy grass and you would only pay an extra fee for the shipping that emitted CO2. But if you buy beef you have to pay for all the emissions of GHG that were necessary to get you that piece of beef.

[1]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1... [2]: https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impa...

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