Wednesday's Energy Absurdity: WaPo Says Taxing Cheeseburgers Can Save the World

Wednesday's Energy Absurdity: WaPo Says Taxing Cheeseburgers Can Save the World

[Follow me on Twitter at @EnergyAbsurdity]

Ok, I have to admit my dirty little secret: I am a subscriber to the Washington Post. I have accepted my problem, asked God for help and will begin the process of making amends to those I’ve harmed by committing this act of seeming insanity shortly.

But in my defense, I only subscribe to this vile, disgusting, anti-American, anti-freedom rag to read its absurd takes on politics, climate and energy, and make fun of all of them. As luck would have it, today brings us the fruits of my addiction.

It comes in the form of a story headlined “Taxing Cheeseburgers Could Help Save the Climate.” Which I suppose is all you really need to know about it, so I should end this piece here.

But wait: Many of you are intelligent enough to not waste your money on subscribing to this corrupt propaganda media outlet, so I suppose I should provide excerpts from the story so that you can also marvel at and make fun of it.

Check this out:

Imagine a fantasy future Earth in which kindly aliens or wizards eradicate fossil fuels overnight, replacing every gas tank, power plant and jet engine in the world with green alternatives. Would this mean the end of worrying about climate change? Sadly, no. And the reason, mainly, is those cheeseburgers.

[End]

Mind you, the paragraph above is not written in irony or as a parody. This is not something from the Babylon Bee, although it’s hard to believe the brilliant writers over there have not already written it. No, the author of this article, whose name I will not mention to spare him/her/they/xe/xer/xem the embarrassment, is deadly serious, ‘deadly’ being the operative word there.

The writer goes on and on about how terrible farmers and the beef they produce are for Mother Gaia, and places most of the blame on the United States, because of course he does that - he’s writing at the Washington Post, after all. Blaming America first is one of that vile, disgusting rag’s principal editorial standards.

Hilariously, after admitting that the main driver of rising global beef consumption stems from rising demand in developing nations as their populations gain wealth (the same as rising demand for oil, coal and natural gas) he lands on the miracle solution to all of this, which is to place an onerous global tax on eating beef.

But wait: Won’t such a tax hit the poorest the hardest? Well, yes, of course it will, but the author also has a handy social planner’s solution for that inconvenient truth, and most of you will immediately guess what it is.

Take a look:

The biggest objection to such a tax is that it would hit poor consumers hardest. But a recent study in the journal Nature Food suggests its effects could easily be offset by giving those households tax rebates and by lowering taxes on fruits and vegetables. Of course, that might fly in Denmark, but it will be a tougher lift in the US. Gen Z support for meat tax is strong, but the rest of the country isn’t having it. 

[End]

More debt-funded subsidies! Of course!

And you have to love his support point that U.S. Gen Zers are all in favor of such a tax. Well, of course they are: They’re young, mostly still in school, and have never lived in the real world or paid their own bills and taxes.

Give them 10 years of real life, and most of them will be making as much fun of this idiotic “analysis” as we all are. This is why the legal voting age should never be below 30 or so.

You could never make this stuff up, folks. Don’t even try.

That is all.