Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang said Thursday that he would encourage Americans to eat less beef by rolling the cost of the cows’ emissions into the the price of the meat.

Yang, who was participating in MSNBC’s climate forum, told host Ali Velshi that it would be necessary “to modify Americans’ diets over time.” (RELATED: Andrew Yang Skirts Question On Mandatory Electric Cars)

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Yang was responding to a question from a Georgetown University student who wondered how he would go about reducing emissions, particularly from the cattle industry.

“Cattle is very energy-consuming and energy-expensive,” Yang began. “And if you project forward what we would need to do to reduce emissions, you would want to modify Americans’ diets over time. Now some of that is happening naturally through education, but I do think it’s difficult to regulate diets. So what you would want to do again is you would want those cattle producers to have to internalize the cost of emissions, because if your cattle ends up polluting a lot, which they do just naturally, we don’t hate them for it, they’re just big animals.”

“Don’t hate the cattle,” Yang added as the audience laughed.

Yang went on to explain how the market might respond if such a measure were implemented. “Then what that would naturally do, and some people are going to hate this, but it would probably make those products more expensive. And that is appropriate, because there is a cost to producing food in that way. And so if you were to make it more expensive, then you would end up changing consumption patterns,” he said.

Breitbart Texas’ Brandon Darby suggested that such a policy would likely lead to a beef black market, tweeting, “Ok. I know a guy with ribeyes and some ground meat, but he gets nervous with new people. So give me the money, I’ll go around the corner and get your beef, and I’ll be right back.”

He took a more serious tone then and added, “Seriously tho, these guys scare the shit out of me. They want to take our way of life as they ‘reorganize’ society and they don’t care how many communities are destroyed by it.”