Well, also including the caveat "at current levels of consumption". As far as I can tell, the incredibly low cost and high consumption that's come from these farming practices is a historical aberration. What was once a luxury became a commodity and then an expectation. The meat from ethically-raised animals is expensive only by comparison, and to my mind it should be regarded as a re-adjustment that reflects the true cost -- and worth -- of the product. If the societal expectation could be reformed to treat meat as a special food, rather than an essential component of every meal, the need for intensive and harmful animal farming would decrease a lot (hopefully by 100%).
I remember wondering just how much the estimated cost of global warming would be, in terms of dollars per gallon of gasoline, so I looked up what the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated the costs per year would be in a few decades, and divided them by the amount of fuel used in a year.
The number I got was on the order of a few dollars a gallon, something like the difference between US gas prices and European gas prices. Or the difference between the peak and valley of recent market fluctuations.
Whether or not you have a problem with doing a cost benefit calculation on preventing global warming, that's not my point.
My point is when you think about the numbers, making meat prohibitively expensive and justifying it by internalizing externalities, would mean you're assuming there are externalities that are orders of magnitude larger than global warming. That seems implausible to me.
If everybody paid $6/gallon for gas, it seems obvious to me it wouldn't be nearly enough to reduce meat consumption to what it used to be. As, of course, people in Europe do continue to eat meat.
We are no where near tapped out on unscaleable food sources that has a positive effect on the environment, and yet we put zero resources on it just because we consider it unscaleable. The result is that we do nothing and put all our hope that in the future some scaleable solution will fix everything. That does not sound rational approach when the problem of environmental catastrophe is already here.
Earth can bear a much larger livestock load than y'all give it credit for.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2009/01/methane-emissions-do...
i think it's inevitable that lab grown meat and/or plant based alternatives get enough economic and environmental momentum to relegate "grass fed"/ethical whatever to a really high price niche forever, so i'd personally just focus efforts at arriving to that point ASAP, be it working for one of these companies, investing, or what have you.