A report released this week states that at the COP 21 U.N. Climate Summit in Paris, a discussion on the implementation of a meat tax to curb climate change and improve worldwide health should be a priority.
The report, titled "Changing Climates, Changing Diets," was released from Chatham House and Glasgow University. "The average person is already eating twice as much meat as is deemed healthy by experts," explains the report. "The social and environmental costs of meat overconsumption are significant, in terms of a growing non-communicable diseases burden, obesity, and climate change."
The report claims that the U.S. and the world should "increase the price of meat and other unsustainable products" as an effective and efficient route to slowing climate change.
One of the report's authors, Laura Wellesley, explains that according to surveys, people tend to believe that governments should be able to enact policies that would lead to general global good, and that it is indisputable that cutting worldwide meat consumption would be a beneficial move across the board, according the The Daily Caller.
However, with any revolutionary idea comes a salient counter-argument. Marlo Lewis Jr., a senior fellow at Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues that the poor would be immediately harmed by these taxes, The Daily Caller noted. "It would make energy and food more costly in a world where too many people still languish in energy poverty and go to bed hungry," he said.
Antony Froggat, a fellow at Chatham House, sees the validity in this concern. "Unless alternatives are easily available, something like a meat tax would be "detrimental," said Froggat, according to The Huffington Post.
The report maintains, however, that the greater good of the world is at stake, and that reducing worldwide meat consumption would be one of the simplest ways to secure the world's environmental safety for future generations. For this reason, the report urges the Paris Climate Summit to make the meat tax a main talking point. "We can no longer afford to continue on this path of inaction," the report states. "Past emissions mean we are already locked in to global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels," it further said, adding that cutting meat consumption would help us keep the temperature rise below 2°C.
