Gassy cows and pigs will face a carbon tax in Denmark, a world first

https://apnews.com/article/denmark-cow-tax-greenhouse-gases-9a570518639e0a1990806fd1a05ac11a

by mypastself • 2 years ago

42 58 2 years ago

apnews.com

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40799879

chrisco255• 2 years ago

Insane to try to blame ruminants for climate change.

TeMPOraL• 2 years ago

It's not ruminants that have to pay the tax.

jhbadger2• 2 years ago

Not so insane given that they are far more numerous due to agriculture than they would be as wild animals. This ultimately is a human-caused problem not a natural one. And there is the issue that what we feed livestock affects how much gas they produce. It's a serious research topic

https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/why-do-cattle-produce-m...

atlasy110• 2 years ago

Thank you for raising this valid issue. Ruminant methane output has been reduced by 98.8% with the addition of a compound from seaweed to the animals food. You are a small bit behind the science but thanks to people like you raising awareness we solved the problem!

tengbretson2• 2 years ago

The us cattle inventory is like 80 million or so head, and the peak wild bison population was estimated to be between 30-60 million, so its more, but not a crazy amount more.

hulitu• 2 years ago

And there is the issue that what we feed livestock affects how much gas they produce.

So maybe that is the problem. /s

But, hey, why not fix anorher problem and blame the first one. /s

kasperni• 2 years ago

Farming contributes to a third of Denmark’s CO2 emission.

atlasy110• 2 years ago

We can phrase anything in a negative light. Food which fuels 100% of Denmark’s population causes only 33% of Denmark’s emissions. This is a wonderful achievement.

mitthrowaway2• 2 years ago

This isn't blaming ruminants for climate change. It's just proper accounting.

immibis• 2 years ago

They emit 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. Directly - as farts. You drastically underestimate the scale of the meat problem.

Not insane.

cyanydeez• 2 years ago

Methane.is what the.problem is.

The serious denialism that avoids actual science on HN is astounding.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

I understand the "why", but there are like 8 billion people, I lost count, shouldn't gassy people be taxed also ?

I guess it is a way to reduce meat consumption. But I think there are far better places to look, Oil Industry and use of fossils (ie plastics) then Cows and Pigs. But no Government wants to do the hard thing because the pols will loose their jobs in the next election.

jhbadger2• 2 years ago

People (even "gassy" people) produce very little methane, which is the primary biological cause of global warming.

But I think there are far better places to look, Oil Industry and use of fossils (ie plastics) then Cows and Pigs. But no Government wants to do the hard thing because the pols will loose their jobs in the next election.

This is talking about Denmark. They certainly haven't forgotten about oil and plastic. They have very aggressive taxation on ICE cars and were one of the first countries to ban free plastic bags.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40799879

idrathernot• 2 years ago

So now they’ll just import the meat from places with even less environmental concern.

Not that it matters as the people who support these types of broad punitive measures are mostly just virtue seeking idiots who only care about complex issues to the extent it can be used to advertise their own feelings of moral superiority.

jacobgorm4• 2 years ago

Most meat produced by Danish farmers gets exported to countries like China. Only a small fraction gets consumed by Danes in Denmark. The pigs are transported alive to meat packing plants in Germany and Poland where wages are lower, and most farm hands in Denmark are cheap imported labor who often live under slave live conditions.

yza• 2 years ago

As a Ukrainian growing up and still living in Denmark and who has spoken to other Ukrainians working at those farms, I have never heard of “slave like conditions”. I’ve heard of hard manual labour and occasional disagreements with the owners of the farms though

marcuskane2• 2 years ago

This is an egregious ad-hominem attack, which is both against HN guidelines and a failure of rational discourse.

The people who want to reduce pollution most likely just want to reduce the harms associated with that pollution, not your wacky accusation of their motives. And even if someone's motives were some weird bad thing, if their actions are good (eg, helping us all live better lives in a lower-pollution world) that would still be a good thing.

atlasy110• 2 years ago

I think most here can see the people pushing climate problems keep moving the goal posts and seem hallbent on just making it more difficult to produce food.

When we post solutions to their problems to areas of a well rounded discussion, they enter into a backs against the wall mindset , posting paragraphs and paragraphs back to us with any wacky counter arguments and not picking of the solution they can think of.

In this thread it was “we don’t have enough seaweed” and then they went trawling the internet for opinion pieces to try and back themselves up and reply within minutes.

A person with good intentions and who was genuinely interested in solving the problem would take more time and research papers that support and go against the solution and make a more balanced response to the good news they were given.

There are billions of people starving in this world. The parent comment is correct to question the motives of these people. I get the impression these people are dressing up satanism or communism as green policies. The same smell we all get when people push absurb woke policies.

peterbraden3• 2 years ago

Are there any reliable numbers on the holistic impact of ruminants? All of the carbon they emit came from the atmosphere via their plant diets, and a huge volume of that carbon is sequestered in the soil via their excrement. Ruminants help the soil, as opposed to modern agriculture which is largely reliant on fossil fuel derived fertilizer.

I have yet to see a paper that models this. Most of the estimates are purely based on output, which seems disingenuous at best.

jacobgorm4• 2 years ago

In Denmark the pigs are fed soy imported from areas of the world where rainforests had to be cut down to make room for production. The short distance between Danish fields and sea, which is no where greater than 50kms, means most fertilizer from the pigs runs off into the sea, causing algae blooms that kill all other marine life.

peterbraden3• 2 years ago

Thats not really what I asked.

But in this situation would you not be better off taxing the soy imports and fining waste outflow?

ch0wn• 2 years ago

This is propaganda from the livestock lobby that has been disproved again and again. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/15/beef-f...

peterbraden3• 2 years ago

What is propaganda? I was asking for a proper carbon model, not a link to an opinion piece.

elzbardico2• 2 years ago

In practice non-western countries will keep on using fossil fuels to enable their development and nothing will stop them till they burn the last drop of oil.

Denmark is a tiny country and their emissions are frankly, negligible.

So, just another emotional decision from western politicians.

gklitz2• 2 years ago

If you are spending 10$ a day on Starbucks and your net after a month is -1000$ sure, cutting the coffee won’t save your budget, but that’s no reason not to cut it, and it’s not “just an emotional decision”.

The idea that no individual small change will ever solve the whole problem so we should just ignore it completely is a childish emotional reaction to the fact that changes have to happen.

elzbardico2• 2 years ago

Well. Like every analogy, this one doesn't capture the issue.

You see, our biggest issue right now is that despite all efforts from the west, we (as in we the world) is not ramping down or fossil fuel usage significantly and on the contrary, we can expect it to keep on growing.

In the past, given the disparity of power between the G-7 and the rest of the world, we could rely more or less on diplomatic pressure to keep the developed countries more or less inline on this global effort, but, right now, our capacity has been diminished on this front.

And the problem with decisions like that, and other stupid ones like the insistence on renewables as the panacea, to the detriment of real solutions like Nuclear energy, we are increasing our costs, because no matter how much PR you do about LCOE, the real hard fact is that renewables are fucking expensive in a system-wide based opposed to the fairy-tale world of LCOE, and this is ensuring the west is less competitive and thus less powerful. The reason for that, I am afraid, is beyond the current midwit zeitgeist, so I won't elaborate more, but it is fact easily proven by analyzing energy costs for consumers viz. penetration of renewables in a given market.

So, you see, individual small changes are not always positive, because sometimes small changes have unexpected side effects that their proponents rarely take into account.

Right or wrong, the developing world thinks that they are not responsible for most of the excess carbon on our atmosphere and think that if we became rich by spewing gigatons of carbon, it is only fair they have the same choice. And as we use less and less fossil fuels, at the same time our energy costs increase, we are even helping them by making fossil fuels less expensive.

So, yes, probably we (North America and Western Europe) will get closer and closer to net zero, at the cost of destroying our economies and our ability to lead the world in a more sensible way.

Yeah, I agree with you that changes have to happen. But they need to be rational changes, they have to be taken based on the context of objective reality. Voluntarism, taking action just for the sake of action usually sucks. There are almost unlimited ways of doing anything wrong, and usually just a few ways of doing it right.

wait_a_minute2• 2 years ago

“We have succeeded in landing a compromise on a CO2 tax, which lays the groundwork for a restructured food industry -– also on the other side of 2030,” its head Maria Reumert Gjerding said after the talks in which they took part.

Yikes. All this is is a successful attempt by the ruling class to convince the subjugated to give up even more rights and freedoms. “It’s for your own good” on steroids. If you want to see clear proof of this, just note that on the strict numbers, this practice won’t meaningfully move the needle on the climate issue. In fact, will it even move the needle overall? Once you feed the animals better, namely with some seaweed incorporated into cow feed in particular, this total emission from these sources drops by some 80% or more. But of course that solution won’t do, because the entire point of these co2 laws is to have more control over people’s lives rather than to solve problems. If climate change ended tomorrow, these same people would try to push the same laws because the intention is to control the masses and to tax people more to feed the bureaucracy machine.

People should be wary of hall monitors and bureaucrats aiming for “restructuring” of food systems, especially for moral posturing reasons. In history that tends to lead to starvation.

gklitz2• 2 years ago

the entire point of these co2 laws is to have more control over people’s lives rather than to solve problems.

Interesting take, so the absolutely massive subsidies on meat that completely change the overall affordability of meat vs vegetables isn’t a problem. But trying to renormalize costs so the environmental impact of meat isn’t hidden away in subsidies is “control the people”.

If we removed all subsidies tomorrow the problem would go away as everyone just naturally cut 90% of their meat consumption because of the cost.

wait_a_minute2• 2 years ago

Subsidize produce too. The point of the subsidies is to normalize reliable access to food. Otherwise during low seasons, farmers would get wiped out and it would compromise food security.

Gassy cows and pigs will face a carbon tax in Denmark, a world first

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