This is how you impose an unpopular and ineffective environmentalist policy that will hit the poorest citizens hardest, is bound to create a host of unintended consequences, and is founded on speculative science to begin with.
You are a centrist government in a democratic Western country. You want to be seen to be taking action on the environment, but you believe in consumer capitalism, and therefore wouldn’t dare to dismantle the profit-making machinery that actually contributes most of the CO2 within your economy. You praise the ideals of the Green New Deal, only because you know it will never become reality.
But you can’t just ban meat. Or ration it to 200 grams a week for every citizen. Because that would be considered an authoritarian intrusion that fundamentally violates your people’s freedom.
Yet, even after the publicity campaign, you still can’t ban meat. This is the time for the moment of genius, the clever solution that squares the circle between a free populace and their paternalistic-minded rulers.
The fruits of your labors will be evident within months.
You, the politicians, will complain that you are only using the tools at your disposal – that you can’t charge a poor person less at the meat counter, that you cannot ban a farmer from exporting his carcasses, or a supermarket from opting for cheaper transatlantic chicken over homegrown beef. But then is your clever solution any better than rationing books and Iron Curtain-style central planning?
And indeed you are right – it is the “something” that matters, not the specific results. After all if there is one thing that Greta Thunberg and Nigel Lawson can agree on is that creating a meat tax in Germany, Sweden and Denmark, the three countries that have shown the greatest appetite for this policy, will make almost no difference to global emissions. For example, even if every resident of the United States, the country with the highest consumption of meat per capita, stopped eating meat tomorrow, that would only slice 2.6 percent off its emissions. Meanwhile, a Chinese person now eats five times as much meat as they did in the 1980s, and still only half as much as Americans – so he wants more. And the world population will likely double by the end of the century. Germans eating two fewer sausages a week was never going to be more than a gesture, and everyone knows it.