Animal agriculture accounts for a significant share of global greenhouse gas emissions—somewhere between 12% and 20%, according to recent estimates. And yet, the meat industry has, for the most part, escaped the reach of carbon tax and cap-and-trade regimes. Emissions trading systems in California, Canada, China, the European Union, and the United Kingdom all exclude livestock. The world’s largest greenhouse gas pricing programs overwhelmingly stop at the farm gate.
That could soon change. In June 2024, Denmark announced plans for a livestock emissions levy, set to start in 2030. And last month, a European Union panel called for the introduction of a greenhouse gas pricing system for agricultural sectors across the union’s 27 member states. While its recommendations are non-binding, the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change has sparked a continent-wide debate over “meat taxes” with its proposal to put a price on farm animal emissions.
Given the large contribution of livestock emissions to global warming, any comprehensive climate action strategy must include animal agriculture within its ambit. And climate change aside, there are plenty of reasons to tax—or otherwise put a price on—meat. As the EU panel observed, “livestock production is the main cause of environmental degradation” across the continent—driving biodiversity loss, depleting water resources, and exacerbating air pollution. And according to one estimate cited in the panel’s final report, excessive consumption of red and processed meat causes nearly 275,000 premature deaths in Europe each year.
But while meat taxes and similar policies could benefit the planet and improve human health, not everyone stands to win from plans to put a price on farm emissions. Industrial-scale meat producers are, unsurprisingly, the most outspoken opponents of these proposals. But another, much larger group of beings could suffer from livestock emissions levies—a group that lacks a voice in policy debates.
I am referring, not at all facetiously, to chickens, the most numerous—and most maltreated—land vertebrates on Earth. Chickens stand to lose from livestock emissions levies not because they would be subject to heavy taxes, but because—under many iterations—they would be exempt. For example, New Zealand’s agricultural emissions pricing scheme (which was scrapped by a new center-right government before it took effect) would have excluded poultry as a “minor-emitting sector.” The 2024 agreement laying out Denmark’s livestock emissions levy states that policymakers will explore the possibility of a “de minimis threshold . . . designed in such a way that in practice only cows and pigs are covered.”
On first glance, the chicken exemption might seem to make sense from a climate perspective. According to one estimate, producing a kilogram of beef generates approximately nine times the greenhouse gas emissions—measured in carbon dioxide equivalents—as producing the same quantity of poultry meat. In climate terms, beef is to chicken what a classic Hummer is to a brand-new Prius.
But if livestock emissions levies raise the price of beef, then consumers will predictably shift toward poultry products, as beef and chicken are well understood to be substitutes. And even a small increase in the price of beef can lead to large effects on the chicken population. According to one estimate based on U.S. data, a 1% increase in the price of beef would lead to at least 12 million more chickens being raised and slaughtered each year to meet rising demand. (The estimate for Europe would likely be similar in magnitude.) One reason why the effect is so large is that chickens are so small: it takes approximately 214 chickens to produce as much meat as one beef cow.
From an animal welfare perspective, any shift from beef consumption to chicken consumption is, indeed, a problem, at least given current conditions on the factory farms that dominate the poultry industry on both sides of the Atlantic. Broilers (i.e., chickens bred and raised for their meat) live objectively terrible lives. Most broilers in Europe and North America—95% in the EU, and an even higher percentage in the United States—are bred to gain weight at such an unnaturally fast rate that by the time they are ready for slaughter, they frequently struggle to walk. The vast majority will spend their entire lives indoors—often in chronic contact with ammonia-laden feces that leaves necrotic lesions on their skin.
Given these conditions, most people, ranging from animal ethics experts to frequent meat eaters, agree that broiler chickens on American and European factory farms experience lives “not worth living”—their fate is worse than death. But the deaths of broilers are grisly too. When they reach slaughter weight—around six or seven weeks—these chickens are typically shackled upside down by their legs and zipped through an electric water bath. If they raise their heads or flap their wings along the way, they may escape the electric shock and still be conscious when their throats are slit. Some European poultry processors are moving away from live-shackle slaughter, but the method remains prevalent across the continent and dominant in the United States.
Perhaps, these indignities would be tolerable if chickens could not feel pain—or if they experienced pain only dully. But as neuroscientist Lori Marino observes in her peer-reviewed synopsis of scientific research on the subject, chickens exhibit “complex cognitive, emotional, communicative, and social behavior” that “is similar to what we see in other animals regarded as highly intelligent,” such as dogs and pigs. When given the option, chickens with visible gait abnormalities choose food containing painkillers, indicating that chickens are not indifferent to their own suffering. Nor do they appear to be indifferent to the suffering of their offspring: mother hens show physiological and behavioral signs of distress when forced to watch their chicks endure even mild pain.
To be sure, cattle are also complex animals who are almost certainly capable of suffering. And some common practices in the beef cattle industry—such as the routine castration of bulls without anesthesia—are admittedly abhorrent. But on the whole, conditions for beef cattle in Europe and North America are better than conditions for chickens—by a wide margin. Beef calves spend their first six to eight months on open range, often alongside their mothers. The captive bolt method commonly used to stun cattle before slaughter is much more humane than the routine shackling of chickens. And because cattle are so much larger than chickens, the number of sentient beings who must suffer to produce a given quantity of beef is a tiny fraction of the number who must suffer for the same quantity of poultry.
How can livestock emissions pricing systems be crafted so that broiler chickens do not bear the brunt? Policymakers who care both about the planet and the animals inhabiting it would be wise to keep three design principles in mind.
First, livestock emissions levies should not exclude the poultry sector. Chicken may be more greenhouse gas-efficient than beef, but chicken production still accounts for nearly one-tenth of livestock emissions and more than 1% of global greenhouse gas output, according to estimates from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The climate footprint of chicken is smaller than of beef, but it’s still roughly 20 times the climate footprint of tofu on a per-serving basis. The greatest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector could be generated not by a shift from beef to chicken, but by a shift from meat to plant-based products.
Second, livestock emissions levies on chicken could be scaled up to reflect the other external costs of poultry production, including animal welfare costs, as economists Romain Espinosa and Nicolas Treich have proposed. For example, the price per kilogram of carbon dioxide equivalent could be set higher for chicken than for beef to reduce the risk of beef-to-chicken substitution. Putting a price on animal suffering is not easy, but most people would agree that the cost of subjecting a highly intelligent broiler chicken to a life of misery on a factory farm is more than zero.
Third, as the EU panel suggested in last month’s report, some of the revenue from a livestock emissions levy could be used to subsidize plant-based foods, thus alleviating the effect of higher meat prices on consumers’ total grocery expenditures. Revenues also could be used to support the development of alternative proteins—such as cultivated meat—that have the potential to replace farm animals in the protein supply chain, thereby reducing animal suffering and greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.
Ultimately, meat taxes and other livestock emissions pricing systems need not entail a climate-cruelty trade off: we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture without inflicting extra pain on chickens. But win-win solutions require careful thought and planning. Far too many of us ignore the interests of chickens when we roast them in our ovens or toss them in our salads. We should not ignore them when we design our climate policies too.
Daniel Hemel is the John S.R. Shad Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, where his wide-ranging research explores topics in taxation, nonprofit organizations, intellectual property, administrative and constitutional law, and animal welfare. He can be reached at [email protected]
Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed in the Environmental Forum are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of ELI.