Carbon and Slaughter Taxes for Meat: Modelling trade-offs between climate change and animal welfare
46 Pages Posted: 3 Jan 2025
Date Written: January 03, 2025
Abstract
To reduce food systems emissions, economists and policymakers have called for carbon pricing on food products. This climate policy could lead to substitution away from carbon-intensive products from larger animals (beef, pork) to less carbon-intensive products from smaller animals (chicken, farmed fish). This can result in an increase in the total number of slaughtered animals and the total duration of their suffering. This study models this Small Animal Replacement Problem using a supply and demand model with constant elasticities. It then calibrates the model with data for the United States. The calibrated model predicts that a food carbon tax will cause a small decrease in the number of slaughtered animals and the duration of their suffering. This result is compared to a tax per slaughtered animal, for which the results predict a small decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. When an animal's death is valued at 10% of the Social Cost of Carbon or higher, a slaughter tax would be more tax-efficient at reducing external costs than a carbon tax. A meat and fish tax could be an easier-to-implement alternative to carbon and slaughter taxation when reducing greenhouse gas emissions and animal suffering are considered approximately equally important.
Keywords: animal suffering, animal welfare economics, multiple market failure, product substitution, price elasticity, meat, carbon pricing, elasticity-based modelling JEL codes: C53
JEL Classification: C53, D11, H23, Q18, Q51
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