I like a nice steak as much as anyone. Especially with chips (French fries or ‘Freedom fries’ to the Americans, depending on the current French/American diplomatic state) and a nice salad. However, maybe I won’t be able to enjoy it for too much longer - and the reasons why have important implications for cement.
A new report1 from the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR) Initiative suggests that governments around the world are increasingly considering the imposition of ‘meat taxes,’ for two main reasons: public health concerns and for environmental reasons. Of course, governments will always consider new taxes for a third and possibly most important reason: in order to raise revenues for their own use. They never put it like that of course (apart from the rare case of hypothecated or ‘ring-fenced’ taxes for popular measures like public healthcare).
FAIRR suggests that governments should consider taxing meat for the following reasons:
- Greenhouse gas emissions from meat-based agriculture that amount to around 15% of the total;
- An increasing incidence rate of global obesity and associated higher risks of type 2 diabetes and cancer linked with meat-eating;
- Increasing levels of antibiotic resistance in farm animals and in humans;
- Threats to [overall] global food security and [regional] water availability; and
- Soil degradation and deforestation.
At this point, it’s reasonable to ask about the motivation for FAIRR to bring this to our attention. It seems to be a campaigning organisation that seeks to improve animal welfare through making the investment community more aware of actual and potential problems with intensive animal husbandry: ‘The FAIRR initiative aims to build a collaborative network of institutional investors to help bridge this knowledge gap and to help mitigate risks and identify opportunities across the protein production chain.’
Not least of its worries is that of increasing antibiotic resistance (which could cost the world US$100tn in lost output to 2050). As you may know, antibiotics are used widely in intensive meat farming, not only to ward-off infections, but also to improve muscle development. In animals, as in humans, when antibiotics are used and some nominally-susceptible microbes survive, the survivors will be increasingly immune to the effects of the antibiotic (through population selection and through random mutations). Where that antibiotic was once useful, it eventually becomes ineffective - not just in individual animals (or humans) but in larger and larger populations of animals (or humans). Bugs that have evolved antibiotic resistance start to thrive and can be passed from being to being. That can include from animals to humans2. Fairly simple measures can be taken to avoid the transfer (cooking meat properly, washing your hands, and so on). However, if there was a bacteria that was resistant to antibiotics and it was going to do you some serious harm, you would want to wear one of those Ebola-suits, wouldn’t you? I would. That’s one reason why I like my steaks pretty well-done.
Anyway, coming back to FAIRR’s list of reasons to avoid investing in meat production, we should look at their claim as to the ‘Global Warming’ effects of meat production. Meat-based agriculture creates as much as 15% of the world’s greenhouse gases, mostly in the form of methane, from cows belching and producing wind, but also through clearance of forests. Meat is easily the most CO2-intensive form of food3, producing at least 40kg of CO2 per 1kg of lamb, 27kg for beef and 12kg for pork. Alas for enthusiastic meat-eaters, the foods with the lowest CO2-intensity are broccoli, tofu and lentils (all at less than 2kg of CO2 per 1kg of food).
FAIRR suggests that meat will eventually join tobacco, alcohol and sugar on the list of products subject to ‘sin taxes.’ In fact, the 1993 Sylvester Stallone movie ‘Demolition Man,’ set in 2032, foretells the same point, in that meat is banned (as are other pleasant but ‘sinful’ pastimes).
What’s this got to do with cement? Well, activists working their way down the list of industries that have the largest CO2 emissions4, starting with electricity generation and transportation, nodding towards the intransigent sector of commercial and residential buildings, other industries such as chemicals and steel and having ticked off agriculture, then the cement industry will eventually hove into view as a juicy target.
If meat - something that many of us enjoy in its many delicious forms - can be ‘taxed,’ then what hope do we have of defending the unlovely grey dust that is cement?
1 http://www.fairr.org/resource/livestock-levy-regulators-considering-meat-taxes/
2 https://www.cdc.gov/narms/faq.html
3 http://static.ewg.org/reports/2011/meateaters/pdf/methodology_ewg_meat_eaters_guide_to_health_and_climate_2011.pdf
4 https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions