WASHINGTON POST – The debate over climate change has reached a rarefied level of policy abstraction in recent months. Carbon tax or cap-and-trade? Upstream or downstream? Should we auction permits? Head-scratching is, at this point, permitted. But at base, these policies aim to do a simple thing, in a simple way: persuade us to undertake fewer activities that are bad for the atmosphere by making those activities more expensive. Driving an SUV would become pricier. So would heating a giant house with coal and buying electricity from an inefficient power plant. But there’s one activity that’s not on the list and should be: eating a hamburger.
If it’s any consolation, I didn’t like writing that sentence any more than you liked reading it. But the evidence is strong. It’s not simply that meat is a contributor to global warming; it’s that it is a huge contributor. Larger, by a significant margin, than the global transportation sector.
According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Some of meat’s contribution to climate change is intuitive. It’s more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people. Some of the contribution is gross. “Manure lagoons,” for instance, is the oddly evocative name for the acres of animal excrement that sit in the sun steaming nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. And some of it would make Bart Simpson chuckle. Cow gas — interestingly, it’s mainly burps, not farts — is a real player.
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Article by Ezra Klein, he can be reached at [email protected] or through his blog at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ezraklein.
© Copyright Washington Post, 2009
The cap and scam doesn’t cap anything! The cap goes up the more they pay! Only the biggest corporations can afford the permits because they are auctioned off. This goes to the highest bidder, ie, the polluter who takes the most shortcuts to lower their costs! This is about environmental Eugenics. Cap and Trade increases pollution, the offsets do not reduce dependency on fossil fuels! Clean Coal gets cap and trade funding! Every part of the carbon they put in the ground is a write off! All the real toxins persist! David Blood of Goldman Sachs and Al Gore run the racket for global taxes! It doesn’t even reduce pollution, the real solutions are local!