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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

This is internalizing the cost of the externality. If paying the true cost of something is oppressive, hooboy, you're gonna have a bad time, because humanity has been living on credit for 100+ years wrt carbon emissions, the ag revolution, etc. I too am unhappy when a discount I was getting due to mispricing disappears.

If you don't believe in climate change, the argument is not worth having.

https://www.wired.com/story/everythings-about-to-get-a-hell-...

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If my family had to pay the true cost of the food I ate before becoming independent I wouldn't be here.

Now my family has a couple of engineers, and my work has a positive impact in mitigation of climate change.

There are many realities out there. And many ways to fight climate change.

As someone who grew up intermittently food insecure, I am not unsympathetic to this. On the contrary, I am an aggressive supporter of broad food security policy because of this lived experience and empathy. No one should ever go hungry.

With that said, there is a discussion to be had about what effective and efficient ag policy looks like while being mindful of the above, in a world limited by physical constraints.

Denmark was not very eager to investigate the NordStream leak, source of gigantic methane emissions.

All European countries support a stalemate war, oil laundering shipped via massively inefficient routes with high dirty ship diesel emissions, military CO2 emissions, private jets traveling to Davos (there is no fuel tax for private jets in Germany!) and a lot more.

But let us take away the milk from poor people.

Humans don’t need milk. Poor people should still get all the nutrition they need, even if provided for free.

True! We should just legislate that everyone eats the same low carbon footprint diet - nutrition paste fortified with cricket protein and water.

Is that what you’re eating today? Because I don’t know anyone eating this, and it isn’t required for a healthy low impact diet.

That people repeatedly think of bugs when they come up with an alternative to meat/milk in these comments is always a good reminder of how bad nutrition education is at least in the US.

The problem is that this is a regressive tax. It falls disproportionately on the poor, working class, and farmers. This will only lead to a populist revolt that will set the whole project of reducing GHG emissions back by a generation or two, not to mention being grossly unfair.

It's also going after a bit player in global GHG emissions. Replacing coal for electricity generation and oil wherever possible (land transport) are the big ones and where the vast majority of the attention should go.

You don't solve a problem by going after the hardest aspects of it down at the end of the long tail. You solve it by going after the head, which is carbon-rich fossil fuels.

The proceeds from the tax are going to farmers, so it's regressiveness has been mitigated.

Agriculture is not a "bit player" in GHG emissions. It's one of the big 5, the others being electricity generation, transportation, heating and industry, each of which contributes >10%. It's also the sector without a clear path to decarbonization. Generation has renewables, transportation has EV's, heating has heat pumps, some industry has transition plans (and some doesn't)

> It's also the sector without a clear path to decarbonization

It's probably because humans are carbon based life forms and we need to eat carbon based foods to live

I hope we never successfully decarbonize agriculture

It's easy to throw around the word "externalities" and just ignore what it means to real people who have been farming their land for generations.

Everything has externalities, just being born and existing has negative externalities, why don't we just confine everyone to their apartment to limit their externalities? Why don't we force people to pay a tax every time they leave their house to internalize their externalities?

This rule is authoritarian, and it is wrong for the government to use its monopoly on violence to do this to farmers.

Tradition is by no means a valid reason to destroy the one planet we share. Times change, adapt.

> It's easy to throw around the word "externalities" and just ignore what it means to real people who have been farming their land for generations.

I wonder if we could invent some form of farming that doesn't depend on cows? Technology is pretty amazing these days.

> just ignore what it means to real people who have been farming their land for generations...

It's an extra $100 on a cow worth $3k that'll produce 10k+ gallons of milk in its lifetime. A penny per gallon of milk.

It likely means little to them.

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