The Big Picture Policy Blog

I have struggled for some time to explain an increasingly alien concept to friends, family, and to my colleagues and superiors at work: the concept of enough . We are each trained, from the moment we are born, to want more . More of everything - more money, more possessions, more property, a faster car, more expensive clothes, and so on, forever. I have had incredulous and occasionally heated responses from managers who, when asking what my goals are in terms of work progression, cannot compute the idea that "I have none; I have enough", or are almost offended that I would countenance doing more work without material or financial reward if it meant being able to help more people. These people are not uncaring, or evil - they are merely following their programming: despite having good jobs, (more-than-)comfortable incomes, and a level of material luxury that was almost inconceivable within the lifetime of their grandparents, we are conditioned to want not j...

Before we start, cards on the table: meat is delicious, and I love it. I am not about to try to make people feel bad for eating meat when a rare steak in a country pub is one of my greatest pleasures. Smashing burgers for friends at the weekend and imagining myself quitting my office job to sling hot beef from a hip food truck are both things that get me through the demoralising days sat staring at a screen. However, the Western diet – which, as rapidly developing countries in the far East and elsewhere attain greater levels of disposable income and consume more and more meat , is becoming ever more popular – is leading us quicker and further down the path to climate crisis, with the environmental impacts of the production methods of our industrialised meat and dairy industries becoming ever more noticeable. Global livestock accounts for 14.5% of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions (more than transport, by comparison), of which 65% comes from beef. I propose taxing be...