Is a Climate Tax on Meat Politically Feasible?

Most policy-oriented research targeting climate change and especially the study of public support for pro-climate policies, has primarily been occupied with carbon dioxide emissions origin from the transport sector, for example the public’s acceptability of and support for taxes on fossil fuels. This research is constantly growing and today the scientific community has a rather elaborated picture of both the levels of public acceptability in many (OECD) countries and furthermore what factors are typically affecting people’s propensity to accept and support such policy instruments (Drews & van den Bergh, 2016). Having said that, the transport sector is only one major source to the increasing problem of climate change. Food production and consumption is another key driver of climate change, with the agricultural sector constituting close to a quarter of annual global greenhouse gas emissions (Smith & Bustamante 2014). A large share of these emissions stem from the production of animal products, primarily beef and dairy. Several recent analyses have therefore concluded that diet shifts from animal to plant products constitute a key climate mitigation strategy, especially given limited options for technical mitigation of methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture (Bajzelj et al. 2014; Springmann et al. 2018). Several studies have shown that a tax—levied on all food products or restricted to items with the highest carbon footprint (e.g., animal products)—could substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food consumption, while simultaneously typically promoting more healthy eating (Springmann et al. 2016, Gren et al. 2019). Yet, we know little about the degree to which - and due to what factors - people are (or rather would be) willing to accept policies aimed at regulating meat consumption on the household level. Since such policies would probably be seen as much more encroaching on people’s personal liberties, compared to e.g., more neutral fuel taxes, a fundamental hypothesis is that people’s resistance against meat regulations is stronger than for, e.g., fuel policies. However, is the resistance caused by the same factors? In this paper we use unique survey data from a randomized sample of the Swedish population (N=3000) to first compare the level of acceptability for several different pro-climate policy instruments, including a meat tax. Thereafter, we focus on the meat tax and we conduct regression analyses to determine which factors are most strongly correlated with resistance against such a meat tax, including personal norms, ideology, level of political and inter-personal trust. We conclude by discussing the policy implications of our findings.