EPA Cow Tax Will Hurt Farmers and Likely do Nothing to Reduce Green House Gasses
The best way to reduce greenhouse gasses is to build a marketplace for emissions that sets a price for pollution, not attempt to command and control behaviors through regulations. Right now, there is talk of an EPA tax on greenhouse gas that would charge farmers around $150 for each cow and up to $20 per pig based upon their relative carbon footprints (New York Farm Bureau estimates).
This is a bad idea. The tax will have no effect except to raise the price of farming and food products, and drive more family farms out of business. The result will not be a reduction in greenhouse gas, rather a new burden for families trying to buy food and more destruction of the working landscape that connects Americans with the land.
First, where would the money from such a tax go? Please don’t tell me that it will go into a “technology fund.” That is simple political code for being lost in a bureaucracy. The investments that need to occur in order to clean up the methane from these dairies are being made right now by entrepreneurs who see a valuable energy and environmental resource in the manure.
Second, this proposed tax is a misplaced penalty. A good politician knows that taxing things is a good way to reduce them, and incentives are a good way increases a behavior. Taxing cows will harm our single best source of milk…farms! Instead, there should be a framework for creating incentives for measurable reductions in CO2. That will let farmers figure out the best way for their farm to keep producing milk and to reduce CO2. If farmers and investors are allowed to buy and sell their reduced pollution (create a carbon offset), then they will invest private money in the projects, and implement them in an efficient way.
At Standard Carbon, we are 100% in favor of reducing greenhouse gasses, but we are not in favor of destroying the livelihoods of American farmers or singling out and crippling the industries that create jobs and opportunity in our country. We can have economic and environmental prosperity at the same time if we use a market based approach like cap and trade.