The week of September 29, 2025: The war on meat (and much, much more) continues, the debt, taxation, and, yes, much, much, more.
There has been some talk of late that we may have reached peak climate policy madness.
I am not convinced. More on why not on another occasion, but for now consider the new (or, rather updated) report by the would-be food police of the pompously named EAT-Lancet Commission. The Lancet is a once distinguished, now somewhat disreputable and highly politicized medical journal. EAT, which was founded by a Norwegian billionaire, describes itself as the “science-based platform for food system transformation.” Science-based! It “connects and translates science to policy, business and society to make food healthy, fair and sustainable for people and planet.” Science. Or should that be #science?
The Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, reports:
Adoption of a plant-rich ‘Planetary health diet’ could save 40,000 deaths a day, landmark report finds.
Pay attention to the use of language here.
The diet is “plant-rich,” not “meat poor.” There is the usual talk of vast numbers of lives saved (followed later by claims of trillions of dollars in savings.)
The report is a “landmark.”
Carrington:
The diet – which allows moderate meat consumption – and related measures would also slash the food-related emissions driving global heating by half by 2050. Today, a third of greenhouse gas emissions come from the global food system and taming the climate crisis is impossible without changing how the world eats, the researchers said…
More words: “moderate” meat consumption. We will see what “moderate” means later. The term “climate change” is replaced by either “global heating” or “climate crisis.” “Climate chaos” has been left for another day.
Of course, the s-word, or a variant of it makes an appearance (my emphasis added):
In many places, today’s diets are unhealthy and unsustainable due to too much meat, milk and cheese, animal fats and sugar.
Unhealthy too? Dear oh dear. Pass the Ozempic.
The report itself includes another cant-word, “just”:
The 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems presents new evidence-based insights on nutrition and human health, within safe and just planetary boundaries.
Planetary boundaries?
I wrote about that notion in the course of a Capital Letter on “degrowth”:
As so often in the history of religious or quasi-religious faith, the apocalyptic script has shifted. The interplay between human ingenuity and market mechanisms [put] paid to the fears of scarcity that ran through the eco-panic of the 1970s. It didn’t take long before the source of the existential threat said to be looming over us switched from scarcity to abundance, a change of emphasis helped on its way by its appeal to asceticism.
We were (and are) supposedly crossing certain “planetary boundaries” (an idea first systematized by a team of scientists in 2009). These are not confined to the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but included, for doomsayers, a satisfying list of constraints that must be respected, essentially for all time. This is an argument that could only convince an audience so blinkered by apocalypticism, guilt or self-righteousness that history’s lessons about our species’ extraordinary ingenuity are ignored.
The Swedish professor who co-chaired the EAT-Lancet Commission, Johan Rockström, helped pioneer the concept of planetary boundaries as it is now too widely interpreted. Among other roles, he is currently director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam. The climate policy ecosystem looks after its own.
Go to the Institute’s website to discover that:
Professor Rockström is a driving force behind myriad international scientific initiatives, including the Earth Commission and the Planetary Boundaries Science Initiative, as well as actively consulting on global sustainability issues for national and multilateral government organisations and business networks.
The reference to the another pompously named commission, the Earth Commission (“a just world on a safe planet”) is a reminder of the connected groupings — all part of that climate policy ecosystem — that constitute a formidable, generously funded, and self-interested bloc pushing back against efforts to rein in the climate follies. Thus the Earth Commission is “a partner of the Planetary Boundaries Science Initiative [amazing!] and serves as the scientific cornerstone of the Global Commons Alliance, a coalition driving collective action to protect the global commons.”
Coalition. Collective. Commons.
And thus the Global Commons Alliance “a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors”is also supported by an “Investor Collaborative,” including ClimateWorks Foundation, Generation Foundation (“unlocking the power of capital markets to drive a more sustainable economic system”), the Oak Foundation (“through our grant-making, we contribute to a safer, fairer, and more sustainable world”), The Porticus Foundation (“Creating a just and sustainable future”), and those regular suspects, the Hewlett Foundation.
Just. Sustainable. Collaborative.
Note too that Rockström is “actively consulting on global sustainability issues for national and multilateral government organisations.”
Our democracies are in the safest of hands. And the money is well spent, I am sure. And so, doubtless, are the shareholder funds of the companies forming part of the business networks for which Rockström is also “actively consulting.”
Read on to be reassured that:
Professor Rockström values diverse perspectives and prioritises speaking at events that feature a balanced representation of genders and geographic regions, while also considering the environmental impact of his travel and the event itself.
The latter considerations are welcome. There has long been a contradiction between dire warnings of a climate “crisis” and the willingness of the people making those warnings — and making rules on the back of those warnings — to fly thousands of miles to discuss that crisis.
But if the “crisis” is as bad as Rockström would like us to believe, it is hard to understand why he should put much priority on “balanced” gender representation, unless of course his real agenda is about rather more than heading off a fast-approaching environmental disaster — which, of course, it is.
But back to Carrington:
People in the US and Canada eat more than seven times the PHD’s recommended amount of red meat, while it is five times more in Europe and Latin America, and four times more in China. However, in some regions where people’s diets are heavily reliant on starchy foods, such as sub-Saharan Africa, a small increase in chicken, dairy and eggs would be beneficial to health, the report found.
The people of sub-Saharan Africa will, doubtless, be so, so, so grateful for being permitted a small increase in the chicken, dairy, and eggs they eat.
Carrington:
Moving diets towards the PHD could be achieved by helping consumers make better everyday choices, said Prof Line Gordon, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, for example by shifting taxes to make healthy foods cheaper, and putting warning labels on unhealthy foods.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre is, it explains on its website, “a joint initiative between Stockholm University and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at The Royal Swedish Academy Sciences, located within the Faculty of Science at Stockholm University.”
It develops “science with real world application, communicating with and engaging in collaborationswith communities, organisations, governments, artists and corporations around the world.”
Artists! What could be more #scientific?
There appears to be a whiff of post-democracy about these efforts and inevitably (the reference to corporations) of stakeholder capitalism too.
Professor Gordon wants to help “consumers make better everyday choices.” Naturally, “better” will be defined on her terms — planet (supposedly) before pleasure and so on — and “help,” however much it may be camouflaged, will eventually mean coercion. When she argues for “shifting” taxes to make healthy foods cheaper, that means by increasing the taxes on “unhealthy” foods. And so, as Christopher Snowdon, a redoubtable foe of Britain’s nanny state, recounts, the report’s authors call for “health-directed taxation of meat products,” a perennial demand in climateworld and its neighbors. The higher taxes would also apply to “foods and beverages with high amounts of added sugar, salt, or saturated fats (or a combination thereof).” Foods “healthy” enough to satisfy the commission would not benefit from tax cuts (how much are they taxed anyway?), but by subsidies. Don’t ask from where the money to pay for the subsidies would ultimately come.
As for warning labels — I wonder how accurate they would be in this instance — history tells us they can be a step along on the way to censorship (of advertising, something else advocated in the commission’s report), stigmatization, and in due course quasi or actual prohibition. The authors of the report refer to the way that regulation, among other tools, can be used to “form the conditions under which deeper shifts in values, norms, and governance can emerge.” This dystopia is coming closer than many assume. Thus Carrington relates that England has “banned price promotions on unhealthy foods” and will “ban advertising such foods online.”
Early in his article Carrington refers to the diet allowing “moderate” meat consumption. Later we find his definition of moderate is, well, extreme. Meat-eaters will be expected to make do with two portions of chicken a week, as well as two portions of fish and one of red meat.
And how big are those portions?
Brace yourselves.
Snowdon:
The EAT-Lancet diet is back and it has been only slightly modified since it became a global laughing stock in 2019. It recommends up to 15 grams of red meat per day (half an ounce) if you must. The chicken ration is somewhat more generous at 30 grams, but still only amounts to one and a half nuggets. You can have fish, but only a quarter of a fillet a day, and you should limit yourself to 50 grams of potatoes, the equivalent of a quarter of a baked spud. Egg consumption is capped at two or three per week. Mostly, you should stuff your face with tree nuts, peanuts, legumes and whole grains.
If the EAT-Lancet diet, or if you must, the “Planetary Heath Diet,” was just a weird food fad followed by a few cultists, it would be of no great concern but, as is already clear from what has been mentioned above, these particular cultists want to force feed as much of their dietary restrictions on the rest of the population as they can. Their route to doing so will be through the weird post-democratic para-legislature (NGOs, activists, foundations, and all the rest) from which rules that govern our lives quietly emerge.
As Snowdon puts it, “a lavishly funded lobbying effort has been underway for the last six years to get the diet accepted at the highest levels of non-democratic government.”
He quotes from the report:
Cross-sectoral coalitions—including actors from public institutions, private sector, and civil society—are essential to achieve synergistic governance. These coalitions should align with existing and emerging global frameworks, such as the Paris Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the post-2030 Sustainable Development Goals agenda.
And the enforcement mechanisms of the stakeholder society (a sort of post-fascist corporatism, with “sort of” doing quite a bit of work in this context) are expected to kick in:
The transformation needed to achieve healthy, sustainable, and just food systems is huge, and will require global efforts from individuals, organisations, and governments at all levels of society.
“Global,” incidentally, is another one of those words.
As Snowdon observes, there is no chance that the dietary changes urged upon up us by this particular climatist cult would ever be accepted voluntarily. That’s why it was made clear in the 2019 iteration of the report that politicians would have to do more “choice editing,” a euphemism of such shameless cynicism that, were it not for its appalling implications, I would applaud.
Elsewhere, the authors of the 2019 report had used more direct language, but this backfired. As Snowdon relates, their openly stated aim — certain food choices “restricted” or “eliminated” — backfired, as did their recommendation of “rationing on a population scale,” so they have gone a (little) more gently this time.
But, if the language is softer, the group’s agenda is, writes Snowdon, “exactly the same: limit, restrict and tax.” Part of what they are doing, as Snowdon suggests may be the case, is trying to move the Overton window. And in Britain, where the nanny state is forever creeping forward, that window is easy enough to move, especially if further greased by vegan or vegetarian support and arguments based on health and cost (two inextricably linked raisons d’état in the land of “our” National Health Service) and, even now, climate.
Americans are not safe from such creep either. The U.S. is after all the land of prohibition, neo-prohibitionism, and of a war against tobacco so extreme that, impervious to irony and the cost in lives, it has been deployed against vaping. Moreover, the U.S. has not proved immune to climatism and the dollars and structures that spread it, even if that spread has been stopped at the federal level for now. And then there’s RFK, Jr., the pseudo-shaman at the helm oh Health and Human Services, no respecter of the division between state and plate, busy setting dangerous precedents for when the political pendulum swings.
The Capital Record: Sound & Vision
We released the latest of our series of podcasts, the Capital Record. Follow the link to see how to subscribe (it’s free!). The Capital Record, which is hosted by financier David L. Bahnsen makes use of another two formats to deliver Capital Matters’ defense of free markets. The original podcast continues, but if you want to watch David talk, please click on the YouTube link.
The 260th episode: (Podcast/YouTube)
As New York City prepares to elect Mamdani as mayor and young people across college campuses tout the miseries of “capitalism,” is the financial crisis of 2008 to blame for a paradigm shift in public sentiment? In this episode, David unpacks the truth of the narrative that everything changed that year.
The Capital Matters week that was . . .
Taxation
According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, the Commerce Department is weighing a plan to charge patent owners a new annual “fee” of 1 to 5 percent of a patent’s value for the purpose of raising revenue. Trump administration officials suggest this patent fee system could generate tens of billions of dollars. But whatever the political appeal, the proposal is not only misguided policy; it is unconstitutional at its core…
Agriculture
In view of RFK Jr’s recently expressed hope that more of America’s farmers adopt woo-woo “biodynamic agriculture,” it’s worth reading Mike Solana’s article in Pirate Wires on yet another gift that “Mother” Nature has bestowed upon us, the Asian citrus psyllid, “an invasive pest” that over the years has inflicted terrible damage on Florida’s orange growers (the orange itself originated in Asia)…
The Debt
Inflation broke out abruptly in early 2021 after Washington spent nearly $5 trillion in pandemic transfer payments, then layered on trillions more in peacetime stimulus spending. The Federal Reserve left interest rates pinned near zero for a year, yet prices did not spiral madly upward. And when inflation finally arrived, it eased relatively quickly, if incompletely, without the kind of deep recession that conventional doctrine predicts. As Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane explains in his new working paper called “Monetary-Fiscal Interactions,” if you think this episode can be explained solely by the timing of rate hikes or by “supply shocks,” you are looking at the wrong lever. The lever is fiscal policy…
Gold
Economist Robin Brooks spots an interesting twist in the recent rise in the gold price, which is up around 9 percent over the past month to $3,900 or so. The usual explanations for the rise of gold in this year (+46 percent) against the dollar rest on the diminishing appeal of the greenback as a safe haven. The reasons for this: longer-term concerns over U.S. debt (the big move in the gold price began in early 2024 well before Trump’s election) as well as unsettling moves by this administration from tariffs to its attempts to bully the Fed…
Argentina
After almost two years in office and now preparing for the midterm elections due on October 26, Javier Milei’s Argentinian government is experiencing its most serious economic and political turbulence yet. Although Milei has achieved outstanding economic results in a short time, he has not yet been able to make much progress on the significant structural reforms required to leave Argentina’s dysfunctional past behind.
Milei insists that such reforms will be carried out if his party and its allies win the midterms. But is it reasonable to expect that Argentina’s future depends only on whether one political coalition remains in power?
Welfare
What are blue states trying to hide?
That’s the question in a little-known yet immensely important federal lawsuit that started arguments recently. The lawsuit was filed by 21 state attorneys general, all of them Democrats, and they’ve sued the Trump administration for asking states to hand over information about their food stamp programs. The federal government — which pays for food stamps — is trying to discover the true extent of waste, fraud, and abuse in welfare…
Immigration
Britain faces a severe housing crunch. A little over 200,000 homes were completed in 2024. At these rates of immigration, it’s hard to see that crunch, which is contributing to the current destabilization of the country’s politics, being eased anytime soon.
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