<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>danShumway</author><text>Even if we ignore externalities and pollution costs, just stop outright subsidizing animal meat production so much. The reason meat is so cheap is because our government puts a lot of effort and money into making it cheap.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know why more people aren&amp;#x27;t trying to sell this to the &amp;quot;free market&amp;quot; crowd as government overreach. The reality right now is that plant-based protein is gaining popularity despite the market being artificially biased against it in terms of price. Animal meat &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; cost more than it does, not just in the sense of &amp;quot;you&amp;#x27;re not paying for the true environmental cost&amp;quot;, but also in the sense of, &amp;quot;you&amp;#x27;re not paying the actual monetary cost it takes to produce this product.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The US government throws billions of dollars into subsidizing meat and dairy production every year. Plant-based protein&amp;#x27;s growth is restricted in part because our food prices and production aren&amp;#x27;t determined just by the free market. That&amp;#x27;s not necessarily &lt;i&gt;bad&lt;/i&gt;, but if we&amp;#x27;re going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things.&lt;p&gt;And we could obviously do more than just lowering subsidies, I&amp;#x27;m not saying we should ignore externalities or that we should just completely abandon all subsidies entirely. But I am saying we shouldn&amp;#x27;t pretend that meat actually costs what we see in the store. Meat is cheap because (for various reasons) as a society we&amp;#x27;ve all collectively decided to spend tax money so that we can pretend that it costs very little to produce.</text><parent_chain><item><author>hannob</author><text>Interestingly it doesn&amp;#x27;t even discuss the obvious solution: Let people who buy real meat pay for the externalities. (Interestingly even in places where there&amp;#x27;s some form of carbon pricing - like the EU - this often doesn&amp;#x27;t cover a large share of emissions from meat production, as methane emissions are very relevant here - I&amp;#x27;m not aware of any methane pricing scheme anywhere.)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>How to lower the price of plant-based meat</title><url>https://us14.campaign-archive.com/?u=66df320da8400b581cbc1b539&amp;id=cea38367f1</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>m463</author><text>You know, I wonder if a meat-based production system is a hedge against catastrophic&amp;#x2F;extinction events.&lt;p&gt;For example, let&amp;#x27;s say we have another potato-famine style event.  Even a bio-engineered attack that takes out a crop or crops.&lt;p&gt;We could scale back meat production and use the crop capacity we use to support the &amp;quot;meat pyramid&amp;quot; to feed people directly until the crisis has passed.&lt;p&gt;Subsidizing crop capacity might make strategic sense.  Sort of like how the just-in-time production pipeline ran into a wall with respect to mask shortages at the start of the pandemic.</text><parent_chain><item><author>hannob</author><text>Interestingly it doesn&amp;#x27;t even discuss the obvious solution: Let people who buy real meat pay for the externalities. (Interestingly even in places where there&amp;#x27;s some form of carbon pricing - like the EU - this often doesn&amp;#x27;t cover a large share of emissions from meat production, as methane emissions are very relevant here - I&amp;#x27;m not aware of any methane pricing scheme anywhere.)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>How to lower the price of plant-based meat</title><url>https://us14.campaign-archive.com/?u=66df320da8400b581cbc1b539&amp;id=cea38367f1</url></story>