Yeah - kind of like leaded gas and DDT, or BPA plastics, no one pays the costs when they are externalised to the environnement/population.
No one paid for the damages caused by DDT - YOU are paying for it by having a crippled biosphere.
If the costs were brought down to you, the meat in a burger would be 20-25$ easy - not thibking about steaks and the like. This would cripple the economy - but it's heavily subsidised
You can't pay the price. If the subsidies are stopped, the farmers have to sell their animals to slaughterhouses order of magnitude more, the slaughterhouses have to do the same with distributors, and those guys do the same to restaurants/grocery stores.
No restaurant/grocery store would buy meat at that price (edit: restaurants and grocery stores make 1-4% profits on their sales) this is a PERISHABLE good. It's way too much risk - and what consumer would buy that?
Not forgetting that everything else remains the same price - McDonalds makes money off of dollar meals - that's not gonna work if a quarter pounder is 20$+.
So no - it's not about budget. This is to explain that the "status quo" is heavily supported and is more akin to a sinking ship that is being propped up by subsidies.
A plant based diet is justified many ways by many individuals. To me, sentient animals are not food and have the right to freedom, so that's why I eat plants. Some are motivated by the environnement, some budget, some health benefits, some other reasons.
> So you agree that if I pay the cost it's not a problem? You just disagree about what that price is?
Not OC, but I don’t think that’s quite right.
When you create any good, like converting a tree into a piece of paper, you convert a natural state into a productive state. No amount of money can reverse this transformation. You can only attempt to offset the conversion. In this example people plant new trees to offset, but the forest remains altered. Then we argue about to what degree it’s been altered and if that’s better or worse.
So I think the debate is more like: Can we offset our consumption of A by doing B? Because B never equals A, some people will naturally always say no and advocate against consuming A in the first place. Others will debate the price/effectiveness of B.
No one paid for the damages caused by DDT - YOU are paying for it by having a crippled biosphere.
If the costs were brought down to you, the meat in a burger would be 20-25$ easy - not thibking about steaks and the like. This would cripple the economy - but it's heavily subsidised