Comment by jandrewrogers
11 days ago
Why don’t they do the same with food then? There is a similar issue where truly vast amounts of food is destroyed every year. Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint. Countless tons of e.g. wheat straight to the landfill, not even used as animal feed. The demand for the product is unpredictable and they need to produce and sell enough to cover the investment in producing it at all on average. There is also a fuzzy limit on how much the market can absorb.
The underlying dynamic is simple: the value of the product in every market exceeds the logistics cost of moving the product to that market. In other words, the market clearing price is globally negative. Because most of the cost of production is in the logistics, and destruction can be done close to the point of production, the resource and environmental footprint of destruction is smaller than every alternative.
People don’t produce excess inventory for fun, that is a pure loss. The production is highly optimized to eke out a thin average margin in an unpredictable business. If the product is not destroyed, it necessarily increases the average cost of those products because either logistics costs go up or supply goes down.
Are you arguing against yourself to provide an example of why this law is bad…or do you actually want to force people to eat rotten/spoiled food?
You seem to provide a great example of why Eurocrats regulating a highly efficient market will not cause the desired outcome…due to reality.
> Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint.
Yes, keeping 8 billion humans alive does have non-negligible energy costs. Again I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or if you’re an anti-human environmental terrorist.
If you actually care about agriculture emissions though, population decline will cause this to go down faster than any Eurocrat will with silly laws based on some clickbait news article they read about an industry they understand nothing about.