I don't know why more people aren't trying to sell this to the "free market" crowd as government overreach. The reality right now is that plant-based protein is gaining popularity despite the market being artificially biased against it in terms of price. Animal meat should cost more than it does, not just in the sense of "you're not paying for the true environmental cost", but also in the sense of, "you're not paying the actual monetary cost it takes to produce this product."
The US government throws billions of dollars into subsidizing meat and dairy production every year. Plant-based protein's growth is restricted in part because our food prices and production aren't determined just by the free market. That's not necessarily bad, but if we're going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things.
And we could obviously do more than just lowering subsidies, I'm not saying we should ignore externalities or that we should just completely abandon all subsidies entirely. But I am saying we shouldn't pretend that meat actually costs what we see in the store. Meat is cheap because (for various reasons) as a society we've all collectively decided to spend tax money so that we can pretend that it costs very little to produce.
I think a populist uprising would occur almost immediately and we’d see heads on pikes with their decapitated mouths stuffed with cabbage for all to see. It would be super easy for a party to take advantage of this and they would.
In short, it would be a miserable time.
I'm saying we shouldn't pretend that meat is as cheap as it is on its own. We should acknowledge what the reality is: meat is cheap because as a society, we choose to use tax dollars to make it cheap.
We could do the exact same thing with plant-based meat. We could shift some of those subsidies so that meat and plant protein were equally subsidized. We could balance them out. We can talk about the logistics.
But I think sometimes the conversation gets stuck entirely on "how could we make artificial meat cheaper" when the reality is that animal meat is expensive, and the big difference between animal meat and plant meat is that we pretend that animal meat costs less than a free market would otherwise dictate. Of course I want to artificial meat to be cheaper, but I'm also not going to pretend that it's a fair fight.
The reason why this matters is because I do see arguments from people that say that it's just too expensive to have a social shift towards vegetarianism, and it can't possibly scale, and it's government interference to try and prop up plant-based foods. And yeah, we can have a values conversation about whether society wants us to make meat cheap. But most of the rest of those objections are crap. There are a lot of people that do think that meat is actually priced realistically based on what it costs to produce. They don't realize that it's just that our government chooses to make very specific farming outputs cheaper.
That's a separate issue to whether we should value a free market. Or is it? If we're only going to support a "free market" in spots where it's politically convenient, but be enthusiastic about stripping any regulations that are politically viable, then what we'll see is a systemic stripping of regulations that protect people without power, without touching regulations of people with power.
This ends in disaster.
The poor: Time to eat the rich
Removing some subsidies and making beef slightly more expensive would save money and people would just eat beef one day less/week.
I think the fact everyone has access to the food they want and is part of their culture is a major reason we generally have a peaceful and free society.
I can only imagine the resent from the middle and lower classes when “the elites” eat steaks on airplanes and they, the plebs they are, are forced to subside on processed alternatives while being forced to become a proselyte to a cause that those that can afford to ignore do.
https://smile.amazon.com/Meat-Racket-Takeover-Americas-Busin...
I do think it's kind of under-discussed (it's not the only thing, a lot of niche topics like this, especially around food, don't really get covered much unless they're popular). The thing is that the people who do talk about it are usually in opposition to the meat industry, so most of the articles you find online are going to be written with a pretty obvious bias. As someone just looking for more information, that might bother you or it might not.
The EWG has decent stats online that are presented neutrally and that you can parse through if you're trying to dig into some of the details of how all of this works: https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total
The vast majority of subsidies are towards "feed" products like corn and soy. In a lot of ways, corn's impact in particular has been a lot bigger than just on meat -- we saw a big shift towards corn-based products (including ethanol) that came as a result of this massive increase in resources towards both producing corn and researching uses for it.
You can also see the impact in products like soy, which, coincidentally with being one of the second-most subsidized foods in the US, is pretty cheap in the US. If you're looking for a meat "substitute" that is actually easy to find at much cheaper prices than meat, tofu can be a very cheap replacement, at least in my experience. I'm being a little bit deceptive there, because most soy is used for animal feed, it's not like we're just throwing funds into tofu. Even there, the primary reason we're subsidizing soy is to make it easier to raise meat. But it does still have some impact outside of the meat/dairy industry.
In comparison, our subsidies towards vegetables and fruits are basically nonexistant (I think ~50 million a year for "specialty crops", but I might have my numbers wrong). It's actually kind of startling how cheap fruits and veggies in the US are given how few resources our government puts into encouraging their production.
If you're curious, you can also look into checkoff programs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_checkoff_program) that basically boil down to a mandatory tax on commodities like beef/dairy that is then redistributed to organizations that promote those commodities wholesale, rather than specific brands.
Checkoff programs are not a direct subsidy, but they raise their own set of concerns about free speech and government involvement in advertising and direct promotion of commodities that might not be in the public's best interest to be so heavily advertised.
Sorry, I know that's not the same thing as just listing an easy-read casual resource, but there aren't many neutral casual resources online, at least not that I'm aware of. Because it's a niche topic, most of the explainers are being written by people who specifically want to draw attention to the problem and are writing from a vegetarian/vegan perspective. Which is what you would expect from a topic that doesn't get brought up very often, but it does mean that if you don't want to rely on those sources, you have to do a bit of digging.
Subsidies help the local farmers to compete with farmers in low cost countries. Transportation costs are usually insignificant. So without subsidies the consumer might pay the same price, but the store just ends up sourcing the product from a different country. However, having a significant amount of food production locally has obvious strategic benefits (and I don't mean just war, even a draught could create sufficient shortages)
Our government isn't spending nearly the same amount of time and money trying to subsidize fruits and vegetables. Shouldn't we be just as worried about those products being sourced from other countries? Why are we treating animal feed so specially over other crops?
If you take the point of view that we're just trying to keep food production domestic, then it's still pretty clear that we care mostly about keeping some foods domestic -- primarily the ones that are necessary for a thriving beef and dairy industry.
Even dairy consistently gets more subsidies than fruits and vegetables. Are we really just optimizing for a worst case scenario where we literally run out of food? Does it really make sense for us to say that during a famine or a drought that milk will be an efficient use of resources? Nobody is baking bread with canola seeds, is it really more important during a famine that we have canola oil than potatoes?
Maybe this is the result of a highly researched government program about how to survive a worldwide famine. But the numbers I'm seeing aren't doing a lot to convince me that famine planning is a more likely cause than lobbying.
Root vegetables don't have much calories. So this would actually make sense.
Very much the government altering the free market. Corn subsidies are not without their consequences. Cattle do not live healthily on corn. People don't do so well on corn syrup either.
I'm not a huge fan of reducing my own meat consumption but think the government should stop subsidizing these industries.
That is as true today as it was back then. Especially when you're feeding the cattle soybeans, which are perfectly good food for humans.
The US consumes a lot of corn, either directly through corn sirup, or indirectly through meat. So it does make sense to have a significant amount of domestic production of what your population actually consumes. That corn might not be healthy is another important topic on it's own.
So subsidizing local farmers isn't the same thing as optimizing for a worst case scenario. In case of a large-scale multi-year war that triggers a famine, you could still order your farmers to switch to growing potatoes, when you have enough actively harvested farmland to begin with. That means subsidizing what is actually consumed during times of peace.
But I'm not saying that's the only reason for the subsidies. Lobbying definitely plays a big (the biggest) role and the largest industries have the strongest lobbying power. But when you have the strategic argument in hand, lobbying for subsidies becomes a lot easier, especially in a country that spends more on the military than any other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_production_in_the_United...
Is it that our corn production is naturally very high, and so we subsidize it more? Or is it the other way around?
My understanding is that a lot of corn uses were developed in part because of corn subsidies and requirements around ethanol. As corn became an extremely cheap material, people started looking for uses for it. And you can quickly enter a spiral there, where as corn becomes more useful, we subsidize it more, which encourages more companies to figure out how to make more stuff out of corn.
> That means subsidizing what is actually consumed during times of peace.
It feels like this has looped around and that the current balance of subsidies are no longer about disaster planning. If your starting premise is that we're trying to keep production local (or at least, production capabilities local), and you're also saying that during disaster periods we can pivot to more necessary crops -- then what is the problem with changing how our current subsidies right now are distributed to encourage different crops? What do we lose?
I am skeptical that a dairy farm is going to be able to quickly shift to planting potatoes or grain, it probably doesn't have the equipment or the right land to do that. But taking your argument at face value and assuming they can make that pivot, then we could also collectively decide as a society that we produce too much meat/grain as a nation during times of peace, and we could collectively decide to subsidize local production of more diverse foods. We could subsidize the same number of farmers to produce different things.
Your skepticism is warranted. After all, we had a highly researched government program about how to effectively tackle a worldwide pandemic, and... well.
"That means corn averages roughly 15 million calories per acre" "wheat comes in at about 4 million calories per acre, soy at 6 million" "Other vegetables, while much more nutritious than corn, wheat or potatoes, are far less energy-dense. Broccoli yields about 2.5 million calories per acre, and spinach is under 2 million"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-defense-of-...
“Importing” is an odd way to put it.
I’m honestly suprised the us doesn’t just have a 25%+ import tariff. Would quickly cause more domestic manufacturing.
Like why do we even import garlic from China. We have plenty of domestic ability to produce.
Take the logic of "grow all your food at home" too seriously and you end up like this guy:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/making-sandwich-sc...
Now I'm not saying that subsidising farmers to produce huge crops of the same 3 crops is the best way of continuing to ensure no one goes hungry, it self evidently doesn't work given the current status quo.
However, to talk about making huge changes to these systems without stopping to consider what impact it will have on that part of society is an incredibly rose tinted view of the world.
So there's a lot of avenues that we could take, and yeah, eliminating food subsidies entirely and not giving any other kinds of aid would probably be a mistake. I'm not disagreeing with you. It's just... there's a lot of things we could change or try that wouldn't leave people to starve. Recognizing that meat is subsidized opens up doors for us to talk about whether our current system is efficient, about what behaviors our current system incentivizes. If nothing else it at least acknowledges that we are currently messing with the market, that meat prices aren't naturally low, and that we if we're comfortable with that kind of intervention, then we could at least mess with the market in different ways to promote more diverse foods.
Right now, we are artificially boosting a few segments of the food industry to frankly unhealthy levels of consumption (at least in most of the US) in order to help people afford food. It is worth considering if it is possible to help those people without propping up industries that are at least indirectly responsible for a nontrivial number of health risks and environmental challenges in the US. I don't think most people here are saying we should leave income-strapped Americans to starve (or at least I'm not), but like you said, the current status quo isn't really working, and it has some some pretty big downsides.
Even if you don't want to touch subsidies at all, at the least we could talk about stuff like checkoff programs. I find it much harder to argue that government intervention into how food is advertised is for the benefit of low-income Americans, and I think the advertising that comes from that forced tax on food is responsible for some increase in consumption.
So the consequences would be poorer people would eat less meat, while the rich continue to eat unchanged.
That is the case with anything you want more expensive. The poor people would be the ones having less of it.
The moment I see any mention of price increase to curb spending is probably as naive as it is dangerous.
You always make a proper analysis and do multiple changes money earned on price increases on one category of foods could be spent to reduce another category of food.
You could e.g. tax sugar and junk food and use those earning to subsidize healthier foods , making healthier food more accessible to poor people.
Money saved one place can be spent other places. Instead of spending it on more tax breaks for the rich it could be spent on the poor providing a net gain for them.
So let's funnel that 25% import tarif or money we save from not subsidizing the meat industry into the federal food stamps program.
A lot of the low food prices in the US also contribute to this poverty. The low prices come at the back of people in the food industry doing long days for shitty pay. If the “solution” to people not getting food on the table was to keep pushing food prices down then one easily end up in a situation arguing against minimum wage and workers rights.
One has to look at the whole system and not just a tiny sliver of it.
America and/or North America is big enough of a domestic market to not need to export food.
Europe already has import tariffs on many American goods. Any broad import tariff actually benefits Americans more than it harms.
Money has to come from taxes or cuts somewhere else. Likewise a tariff gives money which could be spent elsewhere.
Hence a tariff one place could be used to create tax cuts or provide other benefits in another area.
In this case what matters is if you actually have a government which is trying to look out for the poor.
People import and export the weirdest shit with China. Even a small adjustment on tariffs might cause unseen ripple effect on businesses.
We might look at them to see how diet relates to agriculture subsidies.
The same applies to plant based subsides, by the way. I'm in favour of doing away with them entirely in a gradual phase, and offering new farmers low interest loans (lock these current historical rates for first generation farmers) on land and equipment and help much of the dienfranchised and under/unemployed youth into sustainable, organic Agriculture and its ancillary businesses and let them set and the make the market for their products. Not hedge funds and wall street speculators!
This at scale could help make environmentalism profitable like nothing else.
Crop insurance could be offered privately and locally by a series of brokers and established companies and a resurgence of farmers markets as a hub of local communities could do so much good given how destroyed the food Industry is after COVID which would be ideal to ensure we don't repeat the same mitakes.
I'm a 'free market guy,' and also did horticulture Ag and focused on the 'Rolls Royce' of food (Biodynamic) in the EU and then in the US that commanded a significant premium on price and exclusivity. I understand this topic very well and has been focus of most of my adult life. By the way: Free Markets are entirely incompatible when coupled to Central Bank based fiat currencies, and impossible when the very unit of account is manipulated by centralized entities.
I could break down your entire post, but I won't, but suffice it to say your argument is missing that it's not just distorting the market and sweeping the externatlities of livestock (meat) raising but also crop and specific commodities--corn and cotton being the highest culprit on that list that use the most pesticides and poison the soil and water which should be regarded as the crime that it is: Ecocide. Which is done to feed a growing populace, which also includes vegetarians and vegans.
Lowering the subsidies over time and eliminating the power that the animal agriculture industry has over politics would do a lot to increase the number of plant-based eaters.
There are proposals for carbon tax schemes that go like "we'll pay back all the income from the carbon tax to all citizen directly". You can imagine the same for methane. Pretty sure such a proposal would be popular.
So yeah, get rid of subsidies and replace with UBI and we’re probably in nearly the same place. Maybe a good deal of people would forego newly expensive meat and spend their UBI on the lotto?
The EU ETS, which is not a carbon tax, but an emission trading system, but which is the largest carbon pricing scheme in the world, does not include methane at all. The EU has just decided that they want to start monitoring methane emissions, but that's about it. They have no plans right now to regulate or price methane emissions.
Honestly, so many of the ideas for addressing climate just prevent poor people from participating. The upper middle class who are most concerned with these issues (and have the most political power) simply wouldn’t be affected much at all by things that make access more difficult and/or expensive.
Rationing in the name of “equity” won’t happen because these same people will actually be affected so the line is drawn there. We need more housing development but not in my backyard, etc.
I don’t offer a particular solution other than giving people incentives to eat plant based diets and using tax revenues to invest in engineering the problem away as much as possible.
So stop subsidizing meat and spend the same money augmenting the income of the poor, then poor people will be at least as able to eat meat and be at least as well off when doing so as they were with the meat sibaidies, while those who choose not to will be even better off than they were with meat subsidies.
Good luck getting support for that.
Because they actually want to control (or, at least not encourage through subsidization) the externalities of meat consumption?
What economic group so you think that concern comes from?
> Good luck getting support for that.
If it wasn't possible to get something that didn't serve the immediate narrow financial interests of the wealthiest, the developed, democratic world would never have abandoned laissez-faire capitalism for the modern mixed economy.
Well, no, not necessarily. You pay taxes right now to subsidize meat consumption across the board, to everyone, even rich people.
Under a system like UBI, you pay the same taxes, your food costs more, but you also get a check in the mail that balances out the extra food cost.
Or under a targeted system that is designed to specifically benefit the poor, you pay more for food but fewer taxes, because you're only paying taxes to subsidize the poor instead of (currently) also paying additional taxes to subsidize the meat consumption of rich people.
It's a mistake to say that your food costs less right now because you pay taxes. It costs the same, you're just paying part of the price in your taxes. And part of the 'problem' is that the money you're paying to the government is going towards subsidizing everyone, including people who are more well off than you but that get to enjoy cheap meat prices anyway. That's not necessarily a very efficient way to help the poor.
There are lots of different schemes and complications here, it's not as simple as I'm making it out to be. But the very basic idea is that it would cost less money to subsidize just the poor, and then you could keep some of your tax money that's currently subsidizing rich people and you could spend it on meat instead.
Usually people respond to this pointing out some supposed nutrition advantages of meat as if the USA, with the cheapest meat in the world, is somehow the paragon of health and cuisine. Though I'd be down for a government sponsored, optional multivitamin.
Meat consumption is so ingrained that any attempt to curtail it is met with fierce opposition, because people feel as if it's an attack on their identity.
Food is more than a personal identity. It’s a major part of people’s culture globally and meat plays a primary role in many cultures. I think most people would eat more meat if they had the means to.
Only about 3.5% of Americans are vegetarian. Designing policy that favors this group would be ridiculous. Subsidizing meat and democratizing access to it is good policy since nearly everyone benefits from it.
Saying that I hope “plant meat” continues to improve and finds a market outside the novelty it mainly is today. But this can’t be forced on people.
I think it's much more likely that people in countries with rising prosperity are seeing the high meat consumption in affluent parts of the world, and now that they themselves are becoming affluent, they want that diet/lifestyle themselves. It's aspirational, more than anything else.
There is certainly a biological appeal of eating cooked meat, just as there is with fatty (and sugary) foods in general: It signifies high caloric density, which is hugely important for a hunter/gatherer/subsistence community. That base desire is still there, leading to overeating and health issues, since excess calories are often abundant and easily affordable.
Modern Americans (and Europeans) eat a lot more meat than any other culture[1] past or present. The eating of meat every single day at every meal is a huge historical aberration and the clearest possible proof of our destructive overconsumption.
Just as with many other things like candy, sugary drinks, tobacco and alcohol, it would be wise to reduce consumption significantly. Rather than simply indulging base desires, we can choose to cut back and introduce some moderation, a wiser and more enlightened choice, not least because lifestock farming is an ongoing massive environmental disaster.
Currently the US is heavily subsidizing the meat industry, including by massively subsidizing corn. The wise move would be to cut that back and subsidize environmentally sound farming practices and ending the practice of feeding human food to animals. Farm what animals can be sustainably farmed on grass, hay and other plants unfit for human consumption, use the corn and soy and grains for food directly.
We in the western world have to realize that our wildly luxurious eating habits are completely unsustainable, and accept that meat will again be a once a week, maybe twice a week treat.
[1] Save a rare few very specific outliers, such as the Inuit, who in some areas subsist almost entirely on meat.
By the way, deer are not a meaningful contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gas levels.
Suppose you set up a polluting machine that solely emitted carbon, perhaps for art. That goal may be reasonable, but by engaging in it you’re hurting others. A carbon tax makes them whole (by either paying for carbon capture or by direct compensation) and disincentives you from doing it in the first place. If instead it was a naturally occurring polluting machine (a herd of deer, say) then we’d either want to remove it or do something to counteract it, and that cost is paid by everyone. In this case, we’d probably choose to plant trees, rather than killing the deer. (Although the deer population in North America is out of control, so perhaps killing them might be the right choice.)
More to the point, this seems like a misreading of GP's comment. Wyre specifically says that they don't want to impose taxes, that they want to very slowly cut or redirect subsidies instead. So I guess a followup question is, is the government currently giving you money to let deer fart in your pasture? Because if not, you'll also probably be OK.
The number of cows in the world is immaterial to the stated concerns though, since it's not the number of cows that determines the amount of methane produced — it's the amount of biomass they are digesting. So if the number of cows is reduced but the amount of biomass consumed stays the same (being digested by deer, rotting in the field, etc.) there's no net impact to the methane produced.
A) different animals produce different amounts of methane. Even among cattle animals, there are efforts to decrease the amount of methane they produce[0]. And nobody is laughing at those scientists and saying, "this is silly, they're still going to eat the same amount of feed so this can't possibly work." It's not just what's digested, it's how it gets digested.
B) if we have fewer cows, we don't need to replace them with the same number of another animal -- the point is we could have fewer grazing animals entirely, because our agricultural industry does not exist in order to feed wolves. We don't need to increase the number of deer by however many thousand times to sustain that ecosystem.
That was kind of my point. If you are planning on keeping the total number of grazing animals constant by massively scaling up the amount of deer, then maybe we have a problem. But why are you doing that?
If you're proposing that the current volume of cows/biomass consumption we have is a natural constant, and that other animals would just move in and take their place -- that's just not the case, we are artificially boosting the number of edible animals in the world, and by extension, we are also artificially boosting the amount of feed produced and consumed. Before the agriculture industry scaled up, we didn't have the volume of corn we currently produce lying around and being mass-consumed by deer. We started producing a lot more corn/grain and then breeding a lot more herding animals that we then fed it to.
[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/livestock-ghg-emissions-s...
For example, let's say we have another potato-famine style event. Even a bio-engineered attack that takes out a crop or crops.
We could scale back meat production and use the crop capacity we use to support the "meat pyramid" to feed people directly until the crisis has passed.
Subsidizing crop capacity might make strategic sense. Sort of like how the just-in-time production pipeline ran into a wall with respect to mask shortages at the start of the pandemic.
IIRC a lot of countries were forced to abolish these price controls by the WTO, and then were screwed over when they got a bad harvest and poor people had no food.
If there was an ecological disaster that killed crop production, we wouldn't waste it by feeding it to animals for a grossly inefficient luxury item.
It's like when people try to make a "pro-meat" claim by pointing out how much water it takes to grow a pound of almonds, only possible because they never looked up how much water it took to grow a pound of beef.
This is what I interpreted the parent comment as saying.
Also:
https://www.covercropstrategies.com/articles/1368-adding-hay...
There's also strong logic in having hay as part of crop rotation, which as we know, is vital to reduce the need for fertilizer.
On top of this, there's loads of land useless for anything other than grazing. Too dry, with no irrigation (only usable for grazing in the spring). Too rocky, too much of a slope, soil quality not right (too much clay, etc, etc), yet still able to support grasses.
There's a lot of grazing done, in and outside of the US.
Lastly, and this was mentioned GP, it's vital to produce more than we eat each year. Extremely vital. Part of all the subsidies we have, is to ensure farmers DO grow more than required.
To ensure that the free market, doesn't bottom out pricing too much, because we have farmers over producing. If you want to start removing subsidies, then you should first ensure people have a year's worth of canned emergency food on hand.
If people get hungry, that's where the knives come out. If your kid is hungry, you're going to feed it.
But ONLY if externalities are also fully priced & included for all other products - cars, plastic crap shipped from China, aircon, ... otherwise that kind of legislation is simply discrimination against meat-lovers.
Meat has a victim [1]. Respectably, how would you price in the cost of death?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-n...
Personally, I don’t consider the death of (most) animals any different to the death of plants. Only killing conscious entities (be they meat-based or potentially digital in the future) is immoral.
The problem is that most of the cows in the world live in India, Africa and South America, regions which have relatively low carbon intensity per capita. In the developed world, agriculture accounts for on average ~10% of carbon emissions, half of which is from cows. Targeting methane makes a small difference in rich countries and on a global scale places an unfair burden on the poorest countries, and politically, severely hurts the perception of climate protection advocacy among farmers, who are no doubt smart enough to know that fossil fuels are responsible for eight times as much greenhouse emissions as they are, and who are generally an extremely sympathetic constituency, cf. recent Indian protests.
In rich countries, transportation and thermal processes based on fuel burning account for the lion's share of greenhouse gas pollution and rightly deserve the spotlight. The outlier is China, which is rapidly expanding meat production along with its transition to a more industrialized economy. Purveyors of meat substitutes might consider taking the Chinese market more seriously, since they have an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
The OP does touch on the subsidies by suggesting the producers rely more on soy and corn, which are heavily subsidized, and as are used as animal feed and thereby constitute a pretty major source of the meat subsidy. While not about externalities, I think they could have pointed out the reasons corn and soy are so cheap compared to other plant sources are in large part a result of government policy.
In agricultural, we have added carbon which starts out as natural gas. It then get used to create synthetic fertilizer. The fertilizer is used to grow feed crops, which then the animals eat. The manure is then either dumped or kept for creating new bio gas or sold to organic farms that uses it as an alternative to synthetic fertilizer. The organic farms can then sell feed to more farms, but at lower and lower yields given the same input carbon from the first synthetic fertilizer, or crops that people eat.
One alternative is that each instance pay for carbon it handles, in which case we don't care if carbon is added or not. We could also tax the first instance where the carbon is introduced to the system. A different system could attempt to tax what we find to be the incentive for the system.
Personally I would tax the externalities of synthetic fertilizer because that is instance where extra carbon get added, and it solves part of the controversial issue of biomass production being labeled as carbon neutral when using fertilizer. It will also make animal feed more expensive for factory farms, while grazing animals farms in low population areas can benefit from being more ecological to the environment.
Are we going to have people paying for the "externalities" of all the products they consume?
For example, the people who buy a new phone every year or half (this habit causes a significant amount of pollution, so-called "e-waste"). The people who drive their car everywhere. The people who fly a few times a year. The people who use computers (more e-waste). The people who wear clothes made of synthetic fibers and use plastic-based implements. The people who burn wood, coal or oil for central heating. The people who use electricity (the major producer of greenhouse gas emissions is power production). The people who read books printed in paper produced by felled trees. The people who consume plant-based products whose production is responsible for deforestation, soil depletion, acidification of soil, etc etc. The people who eat fish. The people who eat soy (major contributor to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest). etc etc.
Are we only going to make meat eaters pay for their "externalities"?
Well, yes, we should. Considering that notion is baked into every part of the economic models we're using to determine how we're structuring the rest of the economy, absolutely, the bare minimum we could do is make people actually pay for the damage they're causing. I'd go so far as to say a substantial part of the reason we seem unable to reasonably address things like pollution, climate change, and biodiversity is because people aren't paying the full cost of their actions.
One way or another, it's the only way we get a society that can live on the planet indefinitely without making it less and less fit for human habitation.
How you do that is not necessarily trivial, but we should start doing what we can figure out how to do now, yes. You don't have to do it for everything for it to be valuable to do it for what we can figure out how to do it for.
For meat, simply ending subsidies would be a good start.
Cell phones and other electronics as you point out are another obvious target, yes. Some have proposed that the cost of disposal/recycling should be built into the purchase price -- one practical way to do that, is require manufacturers to take back the products at end of life for recycling or disposal at no charge (and ban them from municipal waste stream).
Practical: how easy is it to have a rough calculation of the externality's cost, and include that in the price?
Desirable: how does pricing in the externality help achieve some socially desirable objective?
I would think it’s more efficient to get protein from bugs than to go through all the complicated manufacturing process to get “fake” meat, which is very far from being a raw/natural product.