Good Carbon News for Carnivores

Your carbon footprint may be easier to cut than you think.

Kevin Drum:

Matt Yglesias is startled by the chart below, which shows the greenhouse gas emissions produced by various kinds of food: "The carbon gap between lamb & beef on the one hand and pork & chicken on the other is larger than the gap between between pork & chicken and vegetarianism."



Ezra Klein reposts something from a column he wrote a while back:

Two researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact than trading in your gas guzzler for a Prius. A study out of Carnegie Mellon University found that the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week....A Montanan who drives 40 miles to work might not have the option to take public transportation. But he or she can probably pull off a veggie stew.

This, of course, highlights the genius of the best answer to all of this: a carbon tax. If you tax carbon, nobody makes these decisions for you. You make them for yourself just by deciding what you want to spend your money on. If a carbon tax increases the price of carbon-intensive activities, some people will prefer giving up their hot rod to going without beef. Some will prefer eating more vegetables to giving up their SUV. Some will end up doing neither and giving up something else. But whatever it is, each individual will reduce his or her carbon use in the way that's the least personally onerous. No regulation can do that and no PR campaign can do that, but a price on carbon can. And in addition to all the awesomeness of letting the market work its magic to reduce carbon emissions with minimum pain and maximum consumer surplus, it also produces a pot of money that can be used to motivate research into better energy alternatives for everyone. We are almost literally insane for not doing this.

Liberals promote policies - like a carbon tax - that make fiscal sense, environmental sense and common sense.

My City's Footprint is Bigger Than Your City's Footprint

Take that, Los Angeles! You think your traffic's sooooo special - HA! Lexington, Kentucky's traffic is so bad that it's given the Horse Capitol of the Universe the biggest carbon footprint of any city in the country.

Lexington may be the smallest of the 100 biggest American cities, but it's got the most humongousest carbon footprint of them all. Bigger than LA's, bigger than New York's, bigger even than oil-smothered Houston's.

And of course bigger (though just a little) than that Ohio River upstart, Louisville.

So all you anti-development, Webb-Brothers-hating, bicycle-riding, suburb-condescending, mass-transit-begging snivelers can just shut up with the I-told-you-sos. If Lexington had paid attention to your complaining the last 20 years, today Lexington might have only the 50th biggest carbon footprint, or even be hiding its face among the cities with teeny, tiny carbon footprints. The poor things.

Instead, Lexington is mentioned on the front page of major metropolitan dailies all over the country as the worst - I mean biggest - of them all.

Taylor Shelton at GreenKY discusses why the Bluegrass is so un-green, and you can read the Brookings Report and check out your own city's ranking here.

Cross-posted at Watching Those We Chose.