Technology bites

I just spent an hour of my life writing a response, for James’s blog, to Ezra Klein’s fine post on why eating too much meat is bad for the environment. The upshot of what I had to say, of which you can get some sense if you track down the partial draft that accidentally ended up in James’s atom feed, was that I agree almost entirely with Ezra about meat but still disagree about gasoline and other such things, primarily because the transportation and home-energy equivalents of what I called the “Macaroni Option” – eating macaroni for dinner because it’s cheaper than beef – aren’t available for lots of poor folks who have little or no access to mass transportation or alternative forms of energy and so would be slammed especially hard by taxes on carbon. It went on from there, and concluded by suggesting that one upshot of helping rural communities be less dependent on fossil fuels, which I think is something that ought to precede taxing (their) consumption of gasoline or emissions of carbon, might very well be a turning away from the sort of factory farming that Ezra began by objecting to.

In any case, I clicked the wrong button and the post disappeared into cyberspace, which is why I’m writing this now. Consider me frustrated, and Ezra’s thoughtful challenge at least sort of addressed. And score this one for writing with a pen and paper.

(Image via Flickrer Zach Klein.)

Filed under: agriculture, energy, environment, food, taxation, transportation