(naturally, they are the ones who decide what The Common Good is)
"moralizing zealots"
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
A big problem is that the moral busybodies who propose laws banning random things are the same moral busybodies who censor internet discussion.
They are price insensitive for the most part. Their yachts and personal airplanes don't make a dent in their billions of assets.
I still support carbon taxes as a source of investment for sustainable transition.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...
That group is still pretty price sensitive. Maybe not enough to drop beef completely, but enough to at least partially move to pork or chicken.
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/
Oxfam press release:
> In 2015, around half the emissions of the richest 10 percent - people with net income over $38,000 - are linked to citizens in the US and the EU and around a fifth with citizens of China and India. Over a third of the emissions of the richest one percent – people with net income over $109,000 - are linked to citizens in the US, with the next biggest contributions from citizens of the Middle East and China. Net incomes are based on income thresholds for 2015 and represented in $ 2011 PPP (purchasing power parity).
From the paper they are linking to:
> The richest 10% of the world’s population (c.630 million people) were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions – depleting the global carbon budget by nearly a third (31%) in those 25 years alone (see Figure 1); > The richest 1% (c.63 million people) alone were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget – twice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population (see Figure 1);
https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
Additional data point: I don't have a yacht.
It might be a bear to administer, though...
The problem is that the externality is set arbitrarily by people who think beef in particular is bad --- it's a sin tax. If you're being honest about pricing emissions, you internalize externalities universally, uniformly, and transparently. An across-the-board carbon tax is defensible; such a tax would likely affect beef. A fee on beef by itself --- that's just disingenuous and moralistic nonsense.