"Meat Taxation Is Unavoidable"

Research conducted by Franziska Funke and Professor Dr. Linus Mattauch shows that the cost of meat does not reflect the environmental impact livestock farming has worldwide. Meat is too cheap according to the researchers from TU Berlin's Chair of Sustainable Use of Natural Resources. If the environmental impacts of livestock farming such as nitrate pollution and the destruction of biodiversity as well as the adverse effects on animal welfare and human health were included in the cost of meat, then a kilogram of beef, pork, lamb, and poultry would cost significantly more than at present. With livestock responsible for 13 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, per capita meat consumption in countries of the Global North must be reduced. Without this decrease in meat consumption, it will not be possible to attain greenhouse gas neutrality. To achieve this goal, Franziska Funke and Linus Mattauch, together with their co-authors at the University of Oxford, call for meat taxation and present model calculations for the true cost of meat in their recent paper "Is Meat Too Cheap? Towards Optimal Meat Taxation." 

Read more in our interview with TU researcher Linus Mattauch.

Franziska Funke, Linus Mattauch, Inge van den Bijgaart, Charles Godfray, Cameron Hepburn, David Klenert, Marco Springmann, Nicolas Treich: "Is Meat Too Cheap? Towards Optimal Meat Taxation" (2022), forthcoming in: Review of Environmental Economics and Policy   

Read the paper