Given that the EU sets strict ESG criteria for granting subsidies to companies in need of funding and considering the criteria for green development in their design, emphasis should also be placed on a new pricing of products that make a greater contribution to the climate crisis.
The rate of livestock farming in climate pollution is more than 20%. Livestock farming together with the fossil fuel industry make a major contribution to the worsening climate crisis. Automatically this makes our eating habits an important factor and a key issue at the heart of environmental policy.
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To make the EU’s ‘climate-neutral economy’ a reality, this will be achieved through a smooth plant-based population transition. This is achieved through a new pricing policy on the products and services of livestock products, which will consider the so far avoidable costs of greenhouse pollution caused by their production.
If an attempt is made to price the production pollutants from the products produced in the greenhouse, it would become apparent today that citizens pay only a quarter of the actual price of livestock meat. In other words, these costs do not appear, they pay indirectly, all those who do not eat livestock meat (the poorest citizens) in the form of climate impacts.
If the fair price is attributed in practice to livestock products and services, the industry will shrink dramatically, with dominoes of bankruptcies, making such pricing unsustainable politically (high political cost).
The alternative is to put this hidden cost of producing greenhouse gases as a climate criterion in the distribution of subsidies and taxation.
It is unfair to tax and subsidies two products where one is polluting and sold at 50% of its actual price while the other fully displays its actual price.
Taxes and subsidies should be increased based on the climate criterion, so that at some point the spread between the fair and real price respectively in a polluting product is zeroed.
In this case, the transition to a neutral climate economy will be smooth.
