We are barely a week out from the ‘climate friendly’ proposal that would see supermarkets add ‘eco labels’ to over 57,000 products so that shoppers can ‘consider the environmental impact’ of their food choices.

This ‘helpful’ information has already been twisted into an opportunity to enact a paternalistic control over what the poor eat and to siphon off untold millions in tax.

Notice how quickly the message went from ‘we are trying to help you make good food choices’ to ‘we are going to tax you if you don’t eat what we say’.

As the painfully screechy Guardian writes:

‘Rearing livestock and growing crops to feed them has destroyed more tropical forest and killed more wildlife than any other industry. Animal agriculture also produces vast quantities of greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. 

‘The environmental consequences are so profound that the world cannot meet climate goals and keep ecosystems intact without rich countries reducing their consumption of beef, pork and chicken.

‘To slash emissions, slow the loss of biodiversity and secure food for a growing world population, there must be a change in the way meat and dairy is made and consumed.’

Pay no mind to the destruction caused by covering agricultural land in solar panels, chopping down forests for wind turbines, or carving up the ground for renewables mines where children are sent into the darkness and muck. Ignore the suffocation of former forests by vegan favourites canola and soy, or that it takes excessively more agricultural land to feed people a vegetarian diet. It’s your ‘intention’ that matters.

Their conclusion is, ‘prices on meat and other animal products will eventually need to reflect all this damage’.

Having lost the ‘meat is murder’ argument against civilisation’s stronger carnivores, the movement has entrenched itself in our political structure and instead adopted the line, ‘meat is murdering the planet’. It doesn’t matter that the claim is false, it looks good as a Twitter hashtag.

Just in case you think the meat tax is a bit of a windup, here is the current plan to tax your Sunday BBQ.

‘Our calculations suggest that the average retail price for meat in high-income countries would need to increase by 35 per cent-56 per cent for beef, 25 per cent for poultry, and 19 per cent for lamb and pork to reflect the environmental costs of their production. In the UK, where the average price for a 200g beef steak is around £2.80, consumers would pay between £3.80 and £4.30 at the checkout instead.’

And no – of course – this won’t impact the poor!

Their solution is to ‘redistribute revenue from a tax on the sale of meat and animal products evenly across the population in the form of lump sum payments at the end of the year.’

Which sounds awfully like the government giving poor people a ‘meat allowance’ to access a food that is currently cheap and unrestricted.

This is far more backwards, cruel, patronising, and repressive than any policy floated since the Enlightenment. It is a disgrace, an affront to basic decency, and an attack on our civil liberty to choose what we want to eat without checking in with government morality police.

Attaching a political agenda to food is not an original idea, but rather an extension of the commercial industry we saw promoted at COP26 where the ‘plant forward’ menus (that contained plenty of duck, chicken, beef, trout, and haggis), also sported a carbon footprint.

Levy, the company who organised the menu and makes its living rating the moral value – sorry – climate value of food, had this to say:

‘We are taking a plant-forward approach, using local and UK sourced in-season produce. Plant-based food products are one of the most effective ways for us to reduce emissions, so we increased the proportion of plant-based dishes, without compromising on variety, quality or taste.

‘Today, an average meal has a carbon footprint of 1.7 kg CO2e in the UK. According to the WWF, we need to get this number down below 0.5 kg CO2e to reach the goals defined in the Paris Agreement. By including climate labels on our menus, we aim to make it easier to achieve this goal – together.

‘The climate emergency is the biggest challenge of our lifetime and food has a key role to play in global emissions. Our target is to reach Net Zero in our Levy UK business by 2027 in the right way. COP26 will be a catalyst for learning and change across our business.’

At the time, I warned that this was a dangerous concept. By equating carbon to a form of calorie counting system, we are inviting government authorities and international bureaucracies to punish food producers, limit the sale of these products, place restrictions on their advertising, and add taxes to their purchase.

Apparently not happy with one-in-nine people starving to death on Earth, the war against carbon – which has rapidly expanded to the fertilisers required to grow food – is ensuring that artificial food shortages spread to the well-fed West.

Not only is our food likely to be rated, but also the people who buy it. This happens in China under the Social Credit System (eerily similar to a carbon credit system) in which shoppers have their government ‘trustworthiness’ rating docked if they do things like indulge in a few too many Mars bars.

Aside from my suggestion that we add a BullS**t rating next to politicians and a Child Slave Labour rating against renewables technologies – what does this carbon scale mean in practical terms for Australian shoppers?

It will surprise no one that the foods punished by this carbon scale are the foods humans require to be healthy – meat, dairy products, nuts, seafood, tea, chocolate, and salads all make the ‘evil’ list. A list that, it must be pointed out, rates fresh beef, lamb, and cheese far higher on the ‘evil’ scale than soft drinks and energy drinks.

While calorie counts help people control their expanding waistlines, the carbon rating is likely to propel well-meaning climate idiots into a critically nutrient deficient diet mostly grown in a lab by chemical companies.

The food being punished is also the food grown by Australian farmers, who will wrongly find their commercial market under siege by the all-powerful advertising nightmare that is political Climate Change. No doubt, when all the small farmers are pushed out of the market, those farms will be sold on the cheep to international corporations. It is reckless for any government to allow their domestic produce industry to be vandalised by such self-destructive ideology.

Academics appear oblivious to the obvious ‘unintended consequences’ of their activism, with Professor Scarborough of Oxford University telling BBC News:

‘It fills a huge gap. Manufacturers, caterers, and retailers have targets for reaching Net Zero and they don’t have the tools they need to get there. Now they have this data and some of them are talking to us about things they can do to help people move towards sustainable food purchasing.’

There is nothing sustainable about punishing fresh food producers for creating the best quality produce in human history. It is as if humanity reached the peak of its agricultural ability only to be cut off at the knees, kicked face down in the dirt, and mulched over by a new era of food made by chemical companies and international billionaires experimenting with genetic modification and animals manipulated by vaccines to ‘reduce their emissions’.

It’s all the worst bits of the dystopian horror writers tried to warn us about.

This is coming out of a climate industry that hand-waves the enormous destruction, toxic waste, and environmental harm caused by the production of renewables. It is an activist cause that ignores the reality that chemical and pharmaceutical companies are the largest carbon emitters in the world. And it is propped up by a coalition of billionaires in the World Economic Forum whose combined business enterprises make a larger ‘carbon footprint’ than the rest of the world’s peasants who are now being ordered to stop farming and eat bugs and chemical sludge.

We keep being told that farming is not sustainable, yet farming has endured for over 10,000 years. Less than 10 years into this climate cult Net Zero policy garbage and we have acute food shortages popping up all over the world, governments being overthrown, and economies crashing into the ground.

Net Zero is unsustainable.

Net Zero is lie told to us by the used car salesmen of the international political speaking tour in an effort to sell us junk food.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.

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