Ask HN: Why aren't governments subsidizing meat-substitute products? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why aren't governments subsidizing meat-substitute products?

4 pointsarduinomancer5 comments

The other day I read two statistics that were really surprising.

One is that 15% of greenhouse emissions are from livestock [1].

The other is that apparently Beyond Meat results in 90% less greenhouse emissions compared to regular meat [2].

I'm not a vegetarian but this got me thinking, logically why aren't governments subsidizing stuff like Beyond Meat/Impossible similar to how electric cars are being subsidized via rebates?

Is it just not worth it/too small of a gain compared to other climate change contributing factors?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-livestock-emissions/fighting-global-warming-one-cow-belch-at-a-time-idUSKBN1K91CU

[2] https://www.beyondmeat.com/mission/

I don't want to invalidate your statistic, but it's worth considering another estimate, that meat and dairy consumption account for 0.4 tonnes out of the 2.2 tonnes CO2 equivalent per person emissions from food[0] in the UK.

That's 18% of food related emissions, or 8% out of the estimate 5 tonnes of total emissions per person in the UK.[1] Another estimate says that in 2017, all of agriculture was responsible for 10% of emissions.[2]

My conclusion is that some governments are implementing policies that limit the climate impact of meat and dairy production, but subsidizing alternatives to meat can only reduce demand for it so much, and there are probably more cost-effective things to subsidize. I don't know what the figures are for those other approaches, though.

[0] https://www.carbonindependent.org/18.html

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-kingdom

[2] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0742/production/...

Then agriculture lobby is a way bigger and more powerful part of the apparatus than most people realize.

Anything that can be viewed as stealing jobs or revenue from farmers and giving it to big tech is politically unviable at least in the USA.

Alternatively they could stop subsidizing the meat industry… they won’t do that though because they’ll lose key voters.

There can't be many "single issue meat voters". What you mean to say is "they'll lose key money from lobbyists".

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