Politician vows to tax producers to make beef more expensive

Amanda Radke

The erroneous cattle and climate change myth is like a bad boyfriend we just can’t seem to get rid of, and activists know it. When they couldn’t get Americans to go meatless to “save the animals,” they tried something else. When they couldn’t get Christians to value a cow over a human being, they tried something else. When they couldn’t get us to go completely meatless by demonizing animal fats and proteins through the Dietary Guidelines, they tried something else. When they couldn’t trick us that plant-based patties taste the same as the real deal, they tried something else. And the “something else” strategy they are tirelessly utilizing is blaming cattle on climate change. Ever since the UN released its 2006 report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which falsely claimed cattle production contributed the lions share of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), our industry has been unable to correct that myth. That’s because a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has even tied its shoes. So what are we to do?...MORE

Farther on in her column, Radke writes the following:

Most recently, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang spoke at a climate change forum hosted by MSNBC where he shared the policy adjustments he would make to combat climate change and get people to cut down on their meat consumption. And this is where it gets scary. His plans to “curb expansion and reduce the environmental impact of the cattle industry” in order to “reduce demand” include addressing the “energy expensive” cattle industry and making producers “internalize the cost of emissions.” He told the crowd, “Because if your cattle end up polluting a lot, which they do just naturally — we don’t hate them for it, they’re just animals. So then what that would naturally do — and some people are going to hate this — but it’d probably make those products more expensive. And that is appropriate because there’s a cost to producing food in that way. “And so if you were to make it more expensive, then you would end up changing consumption patterns over time. So I think it would be healthy on an individual and societal level to move in that direction. But again this is a country where there is a lot of individual autonomy and so you can’t force people’s eating choices on them. All you do now is try to shape our system so that over time we evolve in a productive way.” So to be clear, these policy makers and presidential hopefuls want to control what Americans eat through sin taxes and regulate ranchers out of business by taxing emissions.

They don't hate your cattle, they just want to tax them. They don't hate you, just the business you are in.  The truth is there is a lot of hate coming from the left these days.