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Mary Max <mrsmax

Mary Max <mrsmax

Tue, Nov 3, 2009 8:33 am

Makes Total Cents!

 

 

 

NYDailyNews.Com

Make meat-eaters pay:

Ethicist proposes tax, says they're killing themselves and the planet

By Peter Singer

Sunday,

October 25th 2009, 4:00 AM

 

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Taxes can do a lot

of good. They pay for schools, parks, police and the military. But that’s

not all they can do. High taxes on cigarettes have saved many lives – not

only the lives of people who are discouraged from smoking as much as they would

if cigarettes were cheap, but also the lives of others who spend less time

passively inhaling smoke.

No reasonable

person would want to abolish the tax on cigarettes. Unless, perhaps, they were

proposing banning cigarettes altogether – as New York City is doing with transfats served by

restaurants.

A tax on sodas

containing sugar has also been under consideration, by Governor Paterson among others. In view of our

obesity epidemic, and the extra burden it places on our health care system

– not to mention the problems it causes on a crowded New York subway when

your neighbor can’t fit into a single seat – it’s a

reasonable proposal.

But in all these

moves against tobacco, transfats and sodas, we’ve been ignoring the cow

in the room.

That’s right,

cow. We don’t eat elephants. But the reasons for a tax on beef and other

meats are stronger than those for discouraging consumption of cigarettes,

transfats or sugary drinks.

First, eating red

meat is likely to kill you. Large studies have shown that the daily consumption

of red meat increases the risk that you will die prematurely of heart disease

or bowel cancer. This is now beyond serious scientific dispute. When the beef

industry tries to deny the evidence, it is just repeating what the tobacco

industry did 30 years ago.

Second, we have

laws that ban cruelty to animals. Unfortunately in the states in which most

animals are raised for meat, the agribusiness lobby is so powerful that it has

carved out exemptions to the usual laws against cruelty.

The exemptions

allow producers to crowd chickens, pigs and calves in stinking sheds, never

letting them go outside in fresh air and sunlight, often confining them so

closely that they can’t even stretch their limbs or turn around.

Debeaking – cutting through the sensitive beak of a young chick with a

hot blade – is standard in the egg industry.

Undercover

investigations repeatedly turn up new scandals – downed cows being

dragged to slaughter, workers hitting pigs with steel pipes or playing football

with live chickens. We may not be able to improve the laws in those farming

states, but taxes on meat would discourage people from supporting these cruel

practices.

Third, industrial

meat production wastes food – we feed the animals vast quantities of

grains and soybeans, and they burn up most of the nutritional value of these

crops just living and breathing and developing bones and other unpalatable body

parts. We get back only a fraction of the food value we put into them.

That puts

unnecessary pressure on our croplands and causes food prices to rise all over

the world. Converting corn to biofuel has been criticized because it raises

food prices for the world’s poor, but seven times as much grain gets fed

to animals as is made into biofuel.

Fourth,

agricultural runoff — much of it from livestock production, or from the

fertilizers used to grow the grain fed to the livestock — is the biggest

single source of pollution of the nation’s rivers and streams, according

to the EPA. A

meat tax would be an important step towards cleaner rivers. By reducing the

amount of nitrogen that runs off fields in the Midwest into the Mississippi, it would also stop the vast ?dead

zone? that forms in the Gulf of Mexico each year.

The clincher is that

taxing meat would be a highly effective way of reducing our greenhouse gas

emissions and avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Here’s just

how bad eating meat is for global warming.

Many people think

that buying locally produced food is a good way to reduce their carbon

footprint. But the average American would do more for the planet by going

vegetarian just one day per week than by switching to a totally local diet.

In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

surprised many people when it produced a report showing that livestock are

responsible for more emissions than all forms of transportation combined.

It’s now clear that that report seriously underestimated the contribution

that livestock — especially ruminant animals like cattle and sheep

– are making to global warming.

As a more recent

report by the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change has shown, over the critical next 20 years, the

methane these animals produce will be almost three times as potent in warming

the planet as the FAO report assumed.

Meat-eaters impose

costs on others, and the more meat they eat, the greater the costs.

They push up our

health insurance premiums, increase Medicare and Medicaid costs for taxpayers, pollute our rivers,

threaten the survival of fishing communities in the Gulf

of Mexico, push up food prices for the world’s poor, and

accelerate climate change.

Red meat is the

worst for global warming, but a tax on red meat alone would merely push

meat-eaters to chicken, and British animal welfare expert Professor John Webster has described the intensive

chicken industry as “the single most severe, systematic example of

man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.?

So let’s

start with a 50% tax on the retail value of all meat, and see what difference

that makes to present consumption habits. If it is not enough to bring about

the change we need, then, like cigarette taxes, it will need to go higher.

Singer is professor

of bioethics at Princeton University,

the author of “Animal Liberation†and the author, with Jim Masion, of “The Ethics of What We

Eat.â€

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/10/25/2009-10-25_make_meateaters_pay_ethicist_proposes_radical_tax_says_theyre_killing_themselves.html?page=1