Thursday at Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service during MSNBC’s Climate Forum, presidential hopeful Andrew Yang said the government needed to tax the cattle industry to “modify Americans’ diets.”

Yang said, “Cattle is very energy-consuming and energy-expensive, and if you project forward on what we would need to do to reduce emissions, you would want to modify Americans’ diets over time.”

He continued, “Now, some of that is happening naturally through education. I do think it’s difficult to regulate diets. So what you would want to do again is you’d 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.”

He added, “So 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’s a cost to producing food in that way. And so if you were to make it more expensive than you would end up changing consumption patterns over time.”

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