A reader commented on my post In Choosing Among Various Approaches to Energy, Politics Is a Very Big Deal that I support political action involving an ideological/moral campaign to prevent the eating of red meat.
I suppose that would be a decent idea, but I know that most people, Westerners in particular, are very locked in to this aspect of their diet, and thus there is a limit to which such a campaign would be successful.
Having said that, here’s something that I believe is important and eminently fair. In animal husbandry, as in electricity generation and all other forms of commerce, we need to internalize the externalities. Someone needs to cover the costs of dealing with the methane, the manure, the environmental damage and loss of biodiversity associated with clear-cutting the rainforests, the increase in heart disease and myriad other health issues, and rendering millions of children obese and malnourished.
If you ask yourself how McDonald’s became a company with a market cap of $107 billion, your answer needs to include the fact that all these externalities are passed along for other people to bear. That’s not fair, just as it’s not fair that the energy industry uses our atmosphere as its waste dump.
FWIW, at the risk of alienating readers, I believe that our society will also (eventually) come to the conclusion that slaughtering cows and pigs, 97% of which happens in the horrific conditions of factory farming, really isn’t part of a civilized society. Obviously, this will take a great while, but I’m betting that in 100 years, if through some miracle we still have a civilization here, we will have gotten rid of many of the barbarisms that mark our culture today. This is largely because we’re becoming a more secular and reasoning people, and eventually things like factory farming–as well as the death penalty, torture, bull fighting, etc. will simply disappear.
