Accounting for externalities would help reduce food waste, too

Adapted from a comment to the NPR 13.7 Cosmos and Culture Blog:
Taking a Bite Out Of Energy Consumption

I would echo what Chad said about raising animals with intent to kill and eat them. Feeding grain to cows, pigs, chickens, etc., is a very IN-efficient way to produce food for human beings.

(From a metaphysical standpoint (or is it an ethical standpoint?), we might consider that the frame of mind that says that cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and all are commodities, that they are things for humans to use as means to our ends, is a fundamental, existential error. Exploitation of animals means denying freedom and imposing discomfort and even misery. Treating a being as a thing is tantamount to slavery. It is wrong, and this is all extremely contrary to how we must learn to recognize and interact with one another.)

There are relatively large populations of plant-eaters in the natural world, where diverse ecology still exists. But there are only small populations of animal-eaters. This difference reflects some fundamental truths about the universe.

Dave says that accounting for externalities would remedy the problem of food waste. Accounting for externalities would, in fact, cause the economy to function with respect to, rather than with lack of regard for, these underlying truths.

Accounting for externalities helps the economy embody principles of biology and the laws of thermodynamics.

If we want to reflect environmental impacts as part of the price structure (so that the economy becomes more intelligent by incorporating information about its environmental impacts into its structure and functioning, in an adaptive, responsive way) then the taxes or fees need to be applied to more than just energy-related externalities. We could easily decide that monoculture itself is an adverse impact on the environment (because it diminishes the extent of biodiversity across the landscape). We could impose a fee on all kinds of monoculture. We might impose a higher fee on monoculture of crops that most people feel are being planted to excess, to the detriment of the human community at large. Sugar cane, corn, opium, cocoa and cannabis may (or may not) be examples of such crops.

The balance or ratios of the different kinds of food produced by our agricultural system would come to reflect what most people believe is a good balance. (This is assuming fees are set at the amounts that will result in the limits that the largest number of people say are about the right limits. Random surveys are an obvious choice as an instrument to discern what those limits should be.)

Cure for what ails the planet:
http://gaiabrain.blogspot.com

Sun Mar 11 2012 18:25:21 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)