Whether or not this will reduce CO2 is yet to be seen. But it will almost certainly raise the price of beef and dairy products. Taxes on producers inevitably get passed on to consumers.
Could you explain which externality this is? I know they produce a lot of methane which is more of a GHG than CO2, but as far as I know, that methane is a part of the carbon cycle so it should be a net neutral contribution.
The problem isn't the cycle, it's the delta of total emissions in the cycle. By your definition, literally everything is part of the carbon cycle, as we are just putting the carbon of old plants in the air, which will slowly be consumed by plants. The problem is if we put all that carbon in the air all at once, we have problems.
The biomass of livestock is 14x larger than all other mammal apart from humans[1], so it makes sense that, even if their carbon cycles is short, it's still a massive amount of effectively permanent GHG that exists in our atmosphere that wouldn't otherwise be there... about 15% of all emissions[2].
Not counting livestock as emissions because they form a decades long closed loop could be fine when we are carbon negative, but we are dealing with the very real problem of total emissions right now, not just unsustainable growth of emissions.
I think a big part of it is that we have so many more cattle than the earth could naturally support, and the number is only increasing as the world gets more developed. As it stands, even without any other sources of carbon emissions cattle would be enough to cause significant climate change on their own. [0]
I don't know if it's by gross weight or calories, but the number I've heard is that feeding plants to animals is 10-20 less effective than just having people eat the plants. Or mostly eat the plants. So, in the case of Denmark, where 50% of the surface area is used to grow food for pigs, we could instead use 3-5% of the surface are to grow food for people and come out at something resembling the same amount of food, at least if we're just talking "food needed to survive". And given some of the other talk we see on this site, (or used to see a few years ago) about how indoor farming is an absolute necessity because we're running out of land due to rising populations, I think that seems quite significant.
BTW, I am not a full-time vegan nor interested in becoming one, but the average meat consumption in Denmark is as far as I know measure in the hundreds of grams per day. Maybe there's room for compromise?
Cows don't eat plants that people can derive appropriate nutrition from. They also don't generally use land that is appropriate for crops. Also, from what I understand, the emissions from the animals isn't significantly different than seasonal die off from natural grasslands they graze on. Beyond this, most of the calculated water consumption "used" is rainwater on said grasslands.
Cows in America derive most of their calories from corn. And while most Montana cows generally live on land unsuitable for crops, Montana only has a small fraction of American cows.
And I believe that your comments are even less true in other prominent cattle producing countries than America.
Grass doesn't grow on hills, or soil with lots of stone/rocks that would be prohibitively expensive to turn into cropland? Not to mention that cropland using regenerative farming, or anything actually sustainable, should include grazing animal rotation.
I'm not a climate scientist, presumably the Danish government has consulted some of those though. My understanding is that livestock farming, in particularly beef and dairy cows, contribute significantly to the Co2e(carbon dioxide equivalent) emissions of the farming sector, which itself is a major overall contributor. The negative externality is this emission, which is not accounted for in the price of beef and dairy products
Given a constant population of cows [1], the cows do not cause an increase in green houses gasses over time.
This is because the methane from the cows has a half life of between six and eight years [2]. Given a fixed population cows, the amount of GHG going into the atmosphere is the same as the amount of GHG coming out of the atmosphere.
The problem with run away climate change is oil. Given a fixed consumption of oil, the amount of GHG in the atmosphere increases over time.
perhaps some kind of financial incentive to curb and eventually reverse the artificially inflated population of cows whose emissions, while part of the closed carbon cycle, increase the greenhouse gas effect of our atmosphere during their half lives, would be a simple and effective step we could take towards increasing the odds we survive the next few centuries that is not at all at odds with also tackling our reliance on fossil fuels?
This is a factual matter. Why be snarky when you can instead lookup the answer? The population of cows in the EU has been relatively constant with a slight downward trend. [1]
Maybe I’m using the wrong term but my understanding is that the carbon comes from the feed, which itself pulls it from the atmosphere. Thus, it came from the air, and goes back into the air.
The fossil fuels did the same but on a grander scale and longer timeline where the carbon becomes sequestered. Carbon taxes on that make sense.
From what I understand carbon comes from the soil as well as from the air, and it's supposed to be "stored" back into the soil by various means but our agriculture and more generally human activities tend to accelerate release of carbon from the soil and refrein the storing process. And that provokes a climate disimbalance.
There was a good video on the relation between carbon cycle and massive extinctions throuhout history (1h long) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxTO2w0fbB4
It has a short half-life (years) in the atmosphere though, while CO2 has a very long half-life (centuries or more). Methane in the atmosphere gets photochemically oxidized into CO2 and H2O, but more slowly than when it's combusted.
> I don't really know what you mean by it being part of carbon cycle
Plants breath in co2 from the atmosphere and bind the carbon in their structure. Cows eat the plants and turn some percentage of the bound carbon into cow meat, the rest they poop or fart or breath out. Eventually all that carbon ends up back in the atmosphere where plants again can bind it. This is the carbon cycle. Thus the point is that cows existing do not increase the carbon in circulation. (As opposed to digging up coal or drilling for oil/gas which liberates carbon which used to be in circulation but become bound in fossils.)
So we should just give up on trying to accurately price externalities until we’ve found a way to include all of them? (Hint: we never will, so that would mean never taking action)
No, but maybe don't start with one of the smaller sources of overall greenhouse gasses (it's like <3% in the U.S. for example, not sure about Denmark), especially when it affects nutrition and well being of your people.
> it's like <3% in the U.S. for example, not sure about Denmark
Sure, but TFA and this discussion is about Denmark, where "...agriculture is the country’s biggest source of emissions".
Further on in TFA, "The global food system is a huge contributor to the climate crisis, producing around a third of greenhouse gas emissions", of which, "Denmark is a major dairy and pork exporter".
Even per the EPA agriculture is ~10% for the US [0]. And you say "That's all agriculture", I say "Why do you think the US grows so much shite-tasting feed corn? Some for ethanol, lots for pigs, cows, and chicken".
Sure, but you are only looking at one potential impact of this. I can think of at least 3 benefits that are seem pretty clear without doing a deeper analysis.
1. Adding an appropriate carbon tax for gassy cows offsets reduces or eliminates the externalization of the environmental impact of the cows, and provides justification for spending on the increased cost of feeds that drive down the amount of methane produced.
2. Driving a justification for increased spent on those feeds, especially novel feeds, drives investment in new aquaculture techniques that will create additional jobs and ensures that capital that might be otherwise be held as profits actually circulates through the economy (a key component that is actually required for capitalism to work).
3. The increased costs of beef and pork will drive lower consumption of animal based proteins. That lower consumption should be a factor in driving better health outcomes, longer term (note I said lower, not elimination of consumption). This is a net benefit for any nation that provides health care services to it's citizens (heart disease and cardiovascular illness are among leading causes of death in Denmark, like most developed nations).
Cow farts don't cause climate change. Meanwhile ruminants are essential to ecosystems, have existed in the hundreds of millions for tens of millions of years and provide tons of positive externalities that aren't subsidized. Nevermind that they contribute to food security and health. Ruminants are also better for the land than millions of acres of GMO monocrops drenched in Roundup.
Ruminants, yes, corn/grain fed livestock, no. Sadly the days where most of your meat production is coming from cows on a family ranch grazing on acres of grassland is long since gone and most of our beef is coming from cows fed on those "millions of acres of GMO monocrops drenched in Roundup".
I come from a long line of Montana ranchers, I'm in no hurry to see beef production disappear, and it certainly won't be disappearing from my plate anytime soon, but it's important to acknowledge that the ranches of today look nothing like what my parents grew up on.
I also suspect that were you to draw a Venn diagram of people who want less meat consumption, and people who want less monocrops drenched in roundup, you'd discover you've drawn a circle. These viewpoints are not mutually exclusive.
The biomass of livestock is 14x larger than all other mammal, combined[1] (not counting humans). You have to be really intentional with the way you phrase things to point out that, yes, wild ruminants are essential to ecosystems.
Nobody is talking about wild ruminants though, we're talking about the 14x the biomass of all other mammal combined that are creating and obscene amount of emissions. And just FYI, it's the burps that are the main problem, not the farts.
> The biomass of livestock is 14x larger than all other mammal, combined[1] (not counting humans). You have to be really intentional with the way you phrase things to point out that, yes, wild ruminants are essential to ecosystems.
Livestock have supplanted the biomass of wild ruminants and ungulates. As an example, North America had at least 60 million wild bison for millenia before it had 90 million cows. And that's not even accounting for the megafauna that existed prior to the mass extinctions of the Pleistocene (mammoths, giant bison, ground sloths, tapirs, steppe bison, saiga antelopes, giant muskox, wooly rhinos, etc etc) What do you think occupied the Great Plains before they mowed it down for corn fields?
The world has a billion cows, some estimate as many as 1.5 billion, at we expect that to grow significantly as China and India become more developed. I honestly don't think anyone would be worried about cattle if the world cattle population were 90 million. It would be somewhere below 1% if emissions at that point. It's literally a factor of more than 10x.
It's 90 million in USA, that's not disinformation that's a fact, and what I'm underscoring by pointing to the 60 million wild bison population in the mid 1800s in USA is that there hasn't been a significant change in global non-human mammal biomass.
Eurasia alone had 200+ million wooly mammoths during the ice age (note that wooly mammoths have 10x more mass than cows), and there were hundred of millions more megafauna with similar digestive systems for tens of millions of years.
At no point in the last 50 million years did any number of those species trigger large scale climate change. It probably would have been welcome in the midst of the ice age, to be honest.
Nobody is saying that cattle are the sole cause of climate change. Suggesting that is a non sequitur.
They are simply another artificial source of GHGs that are contributing to climate change. That's why you're statements are disinformation. The intention is to somehow equate the natural GHGs from species which arise very slowly and allow a balance to be maintained, generally, yes, in a cycle.
The point isn't that cows are a problem. It's that we've created a whole bunch of cows, very rapidly, without any corresponding plant life to offset the excess emissions they produce. While extremely unlikely, this could absolutely happen in a natural system, and it could still cause climate change if it did.
The problem is total GHGs in the atmosphere right now, of which livestock is a significant contribution.
> Nobody is saying that cattle are the sole cause of climate change.
I'm asserting they have zero effect on climate change, they have merely supplanted wild biomass that existed on a much broader scale for tens of millions of years and there is no evidence that an abundance of mammalian digestion has ever caused climate change in the 50+ million years that mammals have dominated life on earth.
> The point isn't that cows are a problem. It's that we've created a whole bunch of cows, very rapidly, without any corresponding plant life to offset the excess emissions they produce.
The only thing we've done is supplant wild mammals with domesticated mammals. In the absence of agriculture or even humans, mammals already dominated the planet.
As I referenced, wooly mammoths on one continent alone had a higher biomass than all the cows alive on the planet today. That is a completely extinct species, and there's hundreds of more extinct species where that came from:
You'll have to explain to me how it was that the Pleistocene featured such a high biomass of ungulates without a corresponding increase in temperatures.
>I'm asserting they have zero effect on climate change
This argument makes zero sense.
We know that the cattle produce methane via digestion. We know that methane is released into the atmosphere. We know that methane is a greenhouse gas. Thus, we know that these cattle, cattle that would otherwise not exist, are contributing to climate change.
This is a trivially demonstrable argument. The idea that you doubt it means that you are, at best, somehow deeply confused the relationship between GHG emission and climate change in general.
It makes perfect sense: the livestock methane has merely supplanted the wildlife methane that existed for 50 million years. In 50 million years of geological analysis on climate change, we have not documented one case where biological methane has triggered large scale climate change.
> Thus, we know that these cattle, cattle that would otherwise not exist, are contributing to climate change.
In the absence of cattle and especially in the absence of humans, other ruminants will naturally propagate, as they have a number of symbiotic relationships with various plant and animal species.
Ruminants have roamed the earth for 50+ million years, and they have been widely propagated in the hundreds of millions to billions of total global population for that entire time.
The Great Plains were filled with 60+ million American bison, a species which trends larger than cows themselves, but which is still so close genetically to cows that they can still breed together. Deer, antelope, elk, moose, sheep, goats, etc also have similar digestive systems and also existed in larger numbers in the wild prior to modern human expansion.
Who said they cause climate change? Is the impact of domesticated cattle a measurable impact on global methane production? Yes. This has been measured, observed, and accepted science since at least 1995[1]. Does methane have an observable, measurable effect on climate? Yes[2], and agriculture is a major driver for anthropogenic climate change[3]. If you want to argue it doesn't or isn't, bring data, because there are too many articles, research papers, and studies arguing that it does that have for your unbacked opinion to be accepted.
Does this mean that cow farts (or burps) are the cause or driver of climate change? No. Is it something that we can meaningfully reduce the impact of? Well, probably, based on some of the resources linked to in other comments.
Does it mean that solving this for cattle is going to solve climate change? No, but incremental progress helps (insert 1.01% effort per day over a year = 37.8 meme).
You know what doesn't help? Clearly ignorant reductive comments that conflate a contributing factor with the entire problem while ignoring the preponderance of evidence contrary to your claims.
The problem with the assertion that cattle methane has had a meaningful impact is that it's not measured against any historical control. We have a roughly 50-60 million year period to compare against where mammals have been the dominant kingdom of animals on planet earth [1]. Their digestive systems have not meaningfully changed. Livestock have merely supplanted biomass that would otherwise be wild biomass, producing methane just the same (though perhaps distributed over a more diverse spectrum of species).
Domesticated cattle occupy land that was occupied by wild ruminants long before it was fenced in. In the absence of monocrop agriculture and human dwellings, hundreds of millions of more acres would be occupied by ruminant mammals. The Great Plains, where we today grow massive amounts of corn, wheat and soybeans, were occupied by massive quantities of bison, elk, and deer. And before the mass extinctions of the Late Pleistocene, the earth was massively occupied by wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant bison, muskox, shrub ox, stag moose, stout legged llamas, etc etc [2]. The Eurasian biomass of wooly mammoths alone was more than the global biomass of all domesticated cattle alive today [3] (assuming 200 million mammoths 50K YA in Eurasia and 1 billion global cattle population today, with mammoths averaging 10x more mass than cows).
It might be the case that human activity actually reduced the amount of methane produced globally by four-legged ungulates (although surely we've more than made up for the difference from mining and drilling).
EDIT: On further review, I found a study that makes the attempt to estimate what pre-European U.S. settlement methane production attributed to ruminants was and estimates it to be 86% of what modern day livestock and wild ruminant methane production, underscoring my point (livestock ruminants merely supplanted wild ruminants):
That would be an acceptable outcome. Currently red meat is priced lower than it should be. If we want a market based solution to climate change we need to accurately price goods based on the damage they do. We have been discounting externalities for too long, and it's catching up with us.
> Taxes on producers inevitably get passed on to consumers.
And just like any tax on consumption, it would have an outsized effect on lower income consumers. That’s not necessarily wrong or unintended, but it’s the reality of any program like this.
If this were CA, there would be some cockamamie “low income meat consumer tax credit” proposed alongside. And then even if it’s added, it’ll get removed after a few years so just the tax remains.
And those priced out people are voting for right wing parties promising to cancel those taxes. Those right wing parties might not do that, but people on the left should not be surprised why EU is leaning more and more to the right.
Agreed. It's well-established that protein from greens isn't as bioavailable as protein from meat. Hard not to worry about negatively impacting future generations of lower-income families.
It will also undoubtably put many farmers out of business and force more consolidation within the industry to the largest players who can afford to deal with the extra taxes.
They will import those meat and diary products that won't be competitive enough anymore to be produced in Danmark. This kind of taxes work better if implemented uniformly in all the EU, but then they'll import from outside the EU. Ultimately it's a way to tell some industries to pack their things and go away.
> Taxes on producers inevitably get passed on to consumers.
Which raises the cost of living in your country.
Which reduces the quality of life of your citizens
And reduces the competitiveness of your exports on the global markets.
I'm all for protecting the global environment, but capitalism puts concrete boots on the people of any country who spends any money on it whilst other countries do not.
A global binding agreement, backed by sanctions, is the only approach that will work.
I live in Denmark. We have way more pigs than people here. We export most. Only 2% of our nature isn’t farmland. The farming sector only contributes marginally to our economy, while being responsible for an extraordinary amount of the carbon equivalent.
I look forward to this change, and more like these!
> The farming sector only contributes marginally to our economy
Dangerous thinking - economic contribution isn't the only factor - so is ease of regulation and food security. There are plenty first-world nations that felt itself too good for some basic industry, only to become externally dependant later.
60% of Denmark is farmed. 80% of that (ie. 50% of the surface area of the country) is used to grow feed for pigs that get exported. That has absolutely nothing to do with food security.
True, good points. But I would prefer that the land is then used for plant-based food for people instead of (as I recall) 60% for feeding the animals for meat export.
I agree, they should either raise the price of the exported meat, or leave other countries to cultivate their own meat industries. That said, you'd probably need to come up with a good way of employing the extra farmland to justify the move.
It's likely an attempt to kill off beef farming locally I'd say.
> "For example, farmers could change the feed they use."
Finding an alternative to already optimized feeding process will likely cost farmers more and the output be less, that cost is shifted on to the consumers.
But consumers will simply buy cheaper imported beef from Ireland, or even from Brazil where the meat production may be less stringent than inside EU.
Meat consumption has been a sign of affluence throughout human history. It's only fairly recently that beef has become broadly accessible to lower income consumers.
This is a myopic and western centered view, true of a subset of western civilization, largely due to authoritarian rule (e.g. you can't hunt the King's game, even if you're starving).
Meat consumption is how a vast amount of indigenous cultures survived.
It’s not western centered. As countries like China and India have grown more affluent, their consumption of pork and beef have also risen. While hunting (and especially social hunting of large game) was important in pre-agricultural societies, it didn’t nearly approach the amount of meat in modern human diets.
I’d recommend the book “Should we eat meat?” by Vaclav Smil for a very thorough dive into this topic.
the rich already eat the best cuts/breeds and corn-feds, the concept is "life is better if you have more money", which is obvious in a system where better things cost more relatively.
Vegetables are prohibitively expensive for many people. Most people can't just afford the latest veggie dish from The Cosmopolitan that would cost EUR 20,- per person. Even potatoes are super expensive.
Unless you mean turnip style hunger winters, as occurred during WW1 and WW2.
That sounds a bit implausible if you're in the EU. Here in the Netherlands the large supermarkets sell potatoes, carrots and onions for around €2/kg, while chicken is usually around €10 to €15/kg and beef more like €15 to €40/kg depending on the cut.
You can't really make a direct comparison of a kg of meat vs a kg of legumes.
Maybe you just need 100g of meat to get what you'd get with 1kg of legumes.
At least that's what people usually say, but if they do the maths, it's still generally cheaper to have a plant-full diet than a meat centred one (kg vs kg aside).
I’m not very savvy with client science, but does this make any sense? The methane produced by cow farts comes mostly from consumed grass and maybe grain. Grain would have some petrol inputs, but does a grass-fed cow? It sounds like it’s neutral.
Literally everything is neutral in the very long run. The point is that it's a massive input to the current system which is too high right now.
The biomass of livestock is 14x larger than all other mammal, combined, apart from humans[1]. This number is growing. So, yes, it is a massive input to the system even if it's neutral in the long run.
If you are.asking.about econmics, who knows, but the pollution from cows is methane, so unless someone tells me theres some weird physics, what matters is the ability to insulate and the lifetimd of that insulation.
If we could get away.from climaye denial, we would have.more interesting/productive discussions.
The problem with climate denialism is "honest" attempts at evaluating claims tries to "both sides" the logic and the available data, but there isn't another side to climate change. And trying to incorporate denialism makes your rational decisions wrong. Climate change is a singularity that has been passed. We're not going back to the way the climate was 100 years ago.
So, the real question is, how does 100$ per cow remediate the damage of trillions of dollars over the next century. I've got no idea, but it's definitely not nothing.
Using that finishing price and the average value according to the futures market, we're looking at a $234 / head margin. A $100 tax would be 43% of that.
... and that margin is split between the feeder and the packer, and discounts the cost of acquiring said cattle (via purchase of a breeding program).
Full disclosure here: I'm not a rancher, and don't have extensive experience in cattle. I _do_ come from a family where both my father and sister are agriculture teachers. One uncle that I'm close with owned and operated a meat processing facility for about twenty years before specializing in game animals. I raised cattle for show in high school, and my two daughters have been raising and showing swine for the past couple of years as well. Basically I'm a nerd with an ag background.
I can't 100% vouch for the numbers above, as they're based on futures, averages, and estimates. Some years the margin will be twice what it is now, some years it's slightly negative. That's just the nature of agriculture. What I am 100% confident in is that "1/3 of 1%" is not anywhere near an accurate representation of the impact of this tax.
Sorry, I had the decimal place off by one in my head. It's about 3% of the price. I don't think the margin matters though? It's just going to be a flat markup from the husbander to the packer.
Also I have no idea how much being in the EU (and so having a packer ban) but outside the eurozone would impact this (presumably it's levied in kroners?)
Also animals farming is heavily subsidized in EU, in fact many (of not most) of the those farmers operates at loss and get a revenu from this subsidies (comming from tax payers…) so margin is not simply “cost - sales”
We’ve been debating this “green new deal” in Denmark for months. While we have our share of disinformation and bad arguments from political interest groups and confused individuals, it’s pretty eye opening to see how “usaglig”[0] the debate in this thread is. Our political scene is not perfect, but man are we in a much better place here than the US (I assume its the US bias of this site that make even slightly political discussions here so.. difficult)
Here in Denmark, both sides have to make somewhat reasonable somewhat fact-based arguments if they don’t wanna lose face.
[0] we even have a word for whether a debate/argument is ‘high quality’ or not, its either saglig (reasonable) or usaglig (unreasonable)
Why exactly is it "usaglig" to suggest that this new tax is pointless, and indeed hypocritical in light of Denmark's other policies? (No nuclear power, punitive tariffs on EVs and solar panels, etc.)
The most charitable interpretation: It is political theatre. And that, by definition, is unwise and unreasonable.
It isn’t necessary usagligt to argue that the new policy will be ineffectual, and that its just political posturing. However, its not position that either side here in DK holds. Both sides agrees thats its a major reform. You're making a novel claim here.
Given how politics works, its unsurprising that the legislation isn’t completely consistent with other DK policies. The public opinion on nuclear has changed in recent years - maybe we’ll see some changes here soon.
What would you suggest is simultaneously more charitable and at the same time reasonable and well-considered? I don't think that there is such a position. If climate change is the bureaucrats' true concern, there are many better ways to combat it, and many of those ways aren't taxes on the population.
In fact, it's quite unreasonable to suggest that anything Denmark does, in itself, can affect the world's climate situation. The only thing Denmark can do is provide the world with a positive example. This ain't it -- with rising cost-of-living concerns around the world, it's very much a step in the wrong direction.
The strategy that society chooses is hugely important. And it is decided to a large extent by public opinion and debate. Thus participating in that debate can make a difference.
I am by no means a vegetarian, and I enjoy a good steak or burger very much. I hope the possibility of accessing them never goes away.
But it seems pretty obvious that we need to shift our consumption habits towards more sustainable foods.
We've gotten spoiled in the last 50 years by the insane availability of almost everything, but eating meat three times a day simply isn't sustainable at a global population level. I don't know of taxes like this are the answer, but something's got to shift.
I think we could all live comfortably in a world in which beef was a special dinner once a week, instead of every day.
I think the carbon emissions is a ridiculous excuse and I think this is an attack on meat eating in general and it's based on the assumption a vegetarian diet is good.
Having been mostly vegetarian for 10 years (even vegan at points) and having had a number of health issues, I disagree completely with this assertion and I now eat almost exclusively meat.
People should be rioting - instead we're just a bunch of lab rats with smartphones.
They tax everything they can tax, especially if it's in the name off fighting climate change. The Danes will quietly accept nonsense taxes like these. Try that in France or Spain and next thing you know there are tractors everywhere blocking the roads and spraying manure on Champs Elysees. They'll probably just mess up their agricultural sector as imported meat from Spain or Argentina is going to be cheaper, not to mention Poland and Romania.
There are other foods that are cheaper and more CO2 efficient than beef. Chicken, Pork and Fish for instance.
Making it expensive so that consumption of specific types of food is expensive is the point. The more expensive, the less consumers are likely to consume that type of food.
This carbon tax can also be used to subsidize CO2 efficient foods, making them cheaper for the consumer in the end.
Hog farms and chicken farms have much worse environmental impact than pasture-raised cattle, which are economically feasible and actually improve the quality of the soil.
Replacing beef with more factory farmed chicken and pork is an ecological disaster.
There's some sleight of hand going on here. You can have pasture-raised chickens and pigs (with similar soil benefits; chickens are great at picking out pesky bugs, too), and you can have factory-farmed cows in feed lots.
You _can_, but pasture chicken and pigs aren’t cheap and aren’t really done at a commercial scale. Whereas many conventional beef farmers still raise cows on pasture.
Overall, pasture chicken requires a lot of land and has soil loading issues (too many and the soil gets burned out when the balance of minerals goes off kilter). It’s much harder to overload cows on pasture - it’s obvious when a field is overgrazed.
I'd be very interested in some literature about the points you raised.
The idea is to reduce meat overall, when I said "subsidize CO2 efficient foods", I was mostly talking about fruits, vegetables, grain, ... who reduce emissions and soil pollution by another order of magnitude compared to chicken and hogs. It also reduces antibiotics uses which is a plus.
Growing fruits, vegetables, and grain without raising animals as well means mineral inputs which are derived via mining and fossil fuel sources. This is indeed “emissions” and over the long term eventually results in soil depleted of nutrients, alongside significant ecological harm from runoff from artificially added fertilisers and other inputs.
Industrial scale grain farming also means heavy use of machinery which, again, all runs on fossil fuels. Whereas pasture raised cattle requires far less of these sort of inputs. A balanced approach to agriculture recognises the important of pasture animals such as ruminants and also recognises the damage excessive row crop farming causes.
Milk is literally the only somewhat nutritious product that people who live on EUR 8,- per day for food can afford. Maybe it will still be subsidized, but the whole affair is more complex than to say "let them eat chicken".
Nothing humans do has no impact on the environment
Remove cow pastures and replace them with vegetables, now we're running tractors and harvesters which burn gasoline, amd we're spraying pesticides and other stuff
Not to mention fertilizer, which is made of....?
Everything we choose to do is a tradeoff
All this is doing is making it so all of our options suck equally
Everything has tradeoffs. This is legislation to try and reduce emissions from co2 and methane. It was suggested by a group of expects in the relevant fields, and our politicians went with it.
Growing vegetables obviously has less negative climate impact than beef.
>It was suggested by a group of expects in the relevant fields, and our politicians went with it.
So calculate how much do dairy cows in Denmark contribute to climate change. This was feel good legislation that won't make a lick of difference in climate change, but will make milk more expensive.
How do people not see through this? There's a sucker born every day and some days are better than others.
It's absolutely wild to do this, and simultaneously:
- Place extremely punitive tariffs on cheap Chinese EVs and solar panels.
- Shut down nuclear power generation facilities. Make it effectively impossible to build new ones.
I mean, as a reality test, if those bureaucrats sincerely believed the Earth was about to become an uninhabitable flooded fire ball due to CO2 emissions, they would actually propose serious solutions -- nuclear power expansion, solar power expansion, subsidies on already-low-cost foreign EVs to make them the most attractive default option by far, investment in indigenous cleantech, etc.
They're not really doing that. Hell, nuclear power generation is banned in Denmark.
They're fundamentally unserious and this is a punitive new tax that's probably targeted at political opponents.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone started as a 30 kilometer radius around the plant; 60km across. There's nowhere in metropolitan Denmark that wouldn't take a significant chunk out of the country.
I hate buying pork retail. Hog farms are some of the nastiest places I've ever been, eclipsed only by chicken houses.
On the other hand, we currently have nine pigs on our property. They're primarily raised for livestock shows. They're the happiest, friendliest, and healthiest animals you'll find anywhere - my kids are walk them around the property every day (excluding rain), their feed is tailored to each individual animal, and their pens are cleaned twice weekly. They get washed and groomed daily, rain or shine. At the end of the season we'll butcher them and the meat will feed my extended family for all of 2025.
I get that this isn't sustainable at anywhere near the scale of global meat production - but it shows me that quality and humane treatment go hand-in-hand. There is a huge difference between small farm operations and feedlots.
From where does the (extra) greenhouse gas emission come? The cow itself consume renewable feed (of course [1]). Is it the transportation of feed, production of clean water, random diesel tractor stuff? Maybe deforestation due to feed production?
[1]: Or is there feed where the carbon is taken from e.g petroleum somehow? Sugar is a hydrocarbon after all...
The cow transforms the carbon from plants, originating from atmospheric CO2, into methane which has a GWP of 25, meaning its greenhouse warming effect is 25 times higher than that of CO2. So the net result of feeding plants to cows is an increase in global warming.
But the methane will oxidise down into CO2 in 8 years or something (according to Google). So essentially you pay the tax for the "GWP-bump"? It's resonable but maybe a bit hard (or at least non-obvious to me) to calculate fairly?
Methane has a GWP of 25 over 100 years (the standard period used for GWP) even though almost all of its warming effect takes place in the first decade. Unless you want to take a reference period on the order of a millennium, methane is always going to have a significantly higher impact compared to CO2.
You can find tables with values for a few different gases and periods on Wikipedia[0]
If its frontloaded, then it makes sense to keep this ace up our sleeve until temperatures become unbearable. Then at that time, we can cut methane for immediate relief, to flatten the temperature curve if you will. Doing it too early is pointless.
Over a long enough timescale CO2 gets sequestered so the net impact over 10 million years is ~zero. However we don’t really care about geologic timescales.
20 years is a ‘long’ time period from a human perspective and it’s 80x worse over that timeframe.
I saw some numbers about 30x and 10 years, but yeah it's definitely an externality that should be taxed.
But if we have two situations (A) where 1 tonne of fossil Co2 is added to the atmosphere, from e.g fossil fuel and (B) where 1 tonne of renewable methane is added, from e.g cows, it doesn't feel obvious to me how to compare them.
(A) will increase the Co2 PPM / have a GH effect for centuries, if not thousands of years. So on any human timescale it's essentially permanent. This has a pretty clear price in many tax frameworks.
(B) will have a 30x GH effect for 10 years.
What's the cost of externality (B) compared to (A)?
As to how you weigh each it’s worth remembering that climate change often causes harm due existing infrastructure being ill suited to the new situation.
1m higher sea level rise 10,000 years ago would be irrelevant to us today because people would have built buildings based on the way things where. 1m sea rise in the future therefore is problematic because it renders infrastructure useless not because what the final sea level ends up being. Obviously some impacts are inherently harmful, but many things can be adapted to.
In America, it mostly comes from farm subsidies. Subsidies on feed corn and feed soybeans make it cheaper to buy feed than to grow it yourself. So, rather than grow feed on the same farm, fertilized with manure, farmers buy feed trucked in from neighboring states fertilized with chemicals, much of which is petroleum based, and discard the manure.
And, then there are the cow farts full of methane. Methane is apparently a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon. I’ve heard for over a decade that there is some seaweed-based supplement that dramatically cuts methane from cows. But, I guess farmers have had no motivation to buy it yet.
- cows need a lot of land. If you used that land for e.g. efficient crops instead (and if people ate that instead of all that beef) you would free up a lot of land which you could use for other things (say, plant trees for example)
- cows need to eat a lot of feed to produce 1 calorie of beef. It is much more efficient to produce 1 calorie of vegetables and let people eat those vegetables directly instead of having it go through a cow first
- cows emit a lot of methane
- deforestation to produce more feed (like e.g. soy) is indeed also a factor
Cows literally fart methane, a greenhouse gas an order of magnitude worse than carbon. There is no green way to mass produce beef and those externalities should be taxed. However, I know nothing about Danish agriculture so I don't know if this tax is fair and well thought or not, but industrial agricultural production of beef absolutely needs to be taxed.
I can't tell if you're being tongue-in-cheek or not here, but yes. For many reasons, we need to dramatically and quickly reduce industrial beef and dairy production. The effects it has on climate change, the water and land usage, and the effect it has on antibiotic resistance are all reasons we need to stop immediately. Of course, we won't because people are selfish and myopic, but we absolutely should.
This is internalizing the cost of the externality. If paying the true cost of something is oppressive, hooboy, you're gonna have a bad time, because humanity has been living on credit for 100+ years wrt carbon emissions, the ag revolution, etc. I too am unhappy when a discount I was getting due to mispricing disappears.
If you don't believe in climate change, the argument is not worth having.
As someone who grew up intermittently food insecure, I am not unsympathetic to this. On the contrary, I am an aggressive supporter of broad food security policy because of this lived experience and empathy. No one should ever go hungry.
With that said, there is a discussion to be had about what effective and efficient ag policy looks like while being mindful of the above, in a world limited by physical constraints.
Denmark was not very eager to investigate the NordStream leak, source of gigantic methane emissions.
All European countries support a stalemate war, oil laundering shipped via massively inefficient routes with high dirty ship diesel emissions, military CO2 emissions, private jets traveling to Davos (there is no fuel tax for private jets in Germany!) and a lot more.
That people repeatedly think of bugs when they come up with an alternative to meat/milk in these comments is always a good reminder of how bad nutrition education is at least in the US.
The problem is that this is a regressive tax. It falls disproportionately on the poor, working class, and farmers. This will only lead to a populist revolt that will set the whole project of reducing GHG emissions back by a generation or two, not to mention being grossly unfair.
It's also going after a bit player in global GHG emissions. Replacing coal for electricity generation and oil wherever possible (land transport) are the big ones and where the vast majority of the attention should go.
You don't solve a problem by going after the hardest aspects of it down at the end of the long tail. You solve it by going after the head, which is carbon-rich fossil fuels.
The proceeds from the tax are going to farmers, so it's regressiveness has been mitigated.
Agriculture is not a "bit player" in GHG emissions. It's one of the big 5, the others being electricity generation, transportation, heating and industry, each of which contributes >10%. It's also the sector without a clear path to decarbonization. Generation has renewables, transportation has EV's, heating has heat pumps, some industry has transition plans (and some doesn't)
Maybe this tax is not good, it feels a bit too specific to me. However, if every country and leader took your position, actually tackling climate change would be hopeless, maybe it is.
It's easy to throw around the word "externalities" and just ignore what it means to real people who have been farming their land for generations.
Everything has externalities, just being born and existing has negative externalities, why don't we just confine everyone to their apartment to limit their externalities? Why don't we force people to pay a tax every time they leave their house to internalize their externalities?
This rule is authoritarian, and it is wrong for the government to use its monopoly on violence to do this to farmers.
Or, in this case, a tax pushed for by multiple large and small parties, negotiated in agreement with the agricultural sector. Long time since it was polled, but it was like 50/50. No elites needed.
What discussion would you like to see? I feel like this article doesn't really belong here to begin with.
I don't think this is a topic where people can be swayed by well articulated arguments unlike say, under post about the merits of Clojure.
I can see myself giving Clojure a shot after reading a nice comment about it. But no amount of arguing is going to convince me to approve of a tax on a food item I like. The difference in beliefs just goes too deep.
> But no amount of arguing is going to convince me to approve of a tax on a food item I like. The difference in beliefs just goes too deep.
Try to listen to this from an outside perspective. That's an absolutely bonkers thing to say.
So let's say that we're in the midst of a diabetes and obesity epidemic in the west and out comes solid, real-world proof that a tax on sugary beverages can significantly improve the outcome of children's health. This would lead to a healthier populace, lower costs on healthcare infrastructure, and consequently improve well-being of the nation.
Damn to all of that, you want your sodie pop?
Let me frame this another way to show how rediculous it sounds: replace "food item I like" with "tobacco" or "alcohol".
> I can see myself giving Clojure a shot after reading a nice comment about it. But no amount of arguing is going to convince me to approve of a tax on the booze I like. The difference in beliefs just goes too deep.
It's from an account that literally has a post complaining about "The Jews" ending with "Heil Hitler". I quote: "I cannot wait for the 30s again. I'm so glad I'm here and still young enough to be actively involved in what's to come. H[eil] H[itler]"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40768048
So I think it's pretty clear who they mean with (((spiteful hegemonic elite)))...
They haven't been working this much land this intensively for millennia. So-called "conventional agriculture" is an experiment that's younger than my dad. Although this tax is only about carbon, the negative effects of the Danish agricultural sector on the rest of us who have also been living here for millennia are too many to mention. They provide next to no jobs and result in a few percent of GDP. In return, they are killing our seas with algae, poisoning the rivers and groundwater, and taking up sixty percent of the surface area.
Fully half of my country is used to grow pig feed, and most of that meat is exported.
The rest of the world can grow its own fucking bacon if it wants it so badly. This country needs less agriculture. There's no "but".
The runoff argument is a good one. That’s an externality that’s easily forgotten.
However, if Denmark stops exporting pork and tells everyone to grow it itself, what happens when those countries stop exporting products that Denmark doesn’t make? Is Denmark going to produce its own computers?
I understand the frustration and the argument. Maybe there’s something else Denmark can and should export.
> I understand the frustration and the argument. Maybe there’s something else Denmark can and should export.
Like pharmaceuticals? Or aerospace, robotics, high end machinery (Grundfos for example), or sea freight?
Before COVID the Danes also produced massive amounts of fur from mink, they've been culled due to the pandemic and nothing much has happened.
> However, if Denmark stops exporting pork and tells everyone to grow it itself, what happens when those countries stop exporting products that Denmark doesn’t make? Is Denmark going to produce its own computers?
Trade wars due to a country's economical decisions about what they prefer to produce or not is not a reality. Or if it is I'd like to see some examples.
I'm not against exports in principle. I'm against the destruction of my local environment for the profit of a group factory farm owners which as far as I know number in the hundreds. 0.5% of this country is wild nature - again 50% is pig feed! - and we need more wilderness and more forests both to maintain our biodiversity and capture carbon to reach our 2030 goals. This cow tax is actually part of a larger deal that also sets aside money to buy land back from farmers to achieve that.
And if you're asking me whether I think it's fair that we can buy computers from Asia for around the price of the raw materials and labour, and not have to worry about the environmental devastation of both the production of them and the handling of them when they're discarded, the answer is a firm no. I want environmentalism both here, in China, and in Africa. Production should be sustainable, and if I then have to eat less meat or make my computers last longer, then that's just how it is. Just because I want something doesn't mean I have a right to it when what I want has such a profound impact on others.
Other countries would import their pork from somewhere else, or produce their own pork, while still selling their computers to Denmark because that’s good business?
The key is on which farms is this applied. If it's on big companies I find it ok: they have the power to emit a lot of gas, I guess. But on the small/family farm?
A grand-uncle(?) of mine had to kill one or two of his 5 cows when the country entered the European Union. Just about retiring age. I totally relate to your comment.
It applies to all farms, but the proceeds are distributed as adjustment subsidies. Small farms will receive a disproportionate share of the subsidies, so they will likely be net beneficiaries.
> I wasn't going to click until fascism was brought up and now he sounds like an interesting guy.
> I'm the most racist person you can imagine and I don't get it.
On a submission titled Data-fueled neurotargeting could kill democracy:
> Cool. How can we help?
Look, this is a place for discussion, not edgy behaviour. It'd be best if you tried to participate in the same way, you are not spitting facts and your opinion is, at best, quarrelsome. It'd be best for all of us if you approached this space with less of this stupid rhetoric.
To me, this seems like the way to reduce the carbon emissions the least, while pissing off the largest possible voter base. Also making the least fortunate suffer the most. Brilliant move, slowly clapping here.
Make a few decisions like this in a few years and voila, you get pissed off masses who won't suffer any more taxes or cancelled bbq dinners for your "libtard agenda" and another Trump-like fellow will rise. Meanwhile no one taxes private jets or yachts for carbon emissions. I guess their costs are not "externalized".
> Can you spot the constituencies that have outsized voting impact?
I suppose people who has to eat and stay warm. I get what you mean, but it still is a good blow-softener in my opinion. Even if farmers get some benefits for no reason.
> Broad based carbon taxes are the correct solution, but they're also the reason Trudeau is going to lose the next election.
Well we are not living in a perfect world. I am not familiar with Canada and Trudeau's political opponents, but still. If a "solution" triggers a kneejerk reaction, cutting its own life short; and causing nutjob demagogues to rise, which leads to much greater harm than it prevented in the first place, how is it the correct solution?
No, it's pretty much a giveaway to Eastern Canada, which is the only part of Canada that uses heating fuel widely. Quebec uses electricity for heating, and the rest of Canada uses natural gas.
The fertilizer exemption is a protectionist measure. Fertilizer production produces massive amounts of carbon. If Canada taxed carbon on domestically produced fertilizer but not on foreign produced fertilizer it'd kill local fertilizer production for little benefit. The right solution is a carbon tariff at the border, but that's really hard to do unilaterally so we have the fertilizer exemption instead.
Nobody's barbecue is going to be cancelled because of this. Meat and animal products are some of the cheapest and most easily available calories you can get here.
It isnt really fair to mock this viewpoint. Everything genuinely is 1984 now, but worse because we have AI on our cameras, and 1984 didnt have the internet. Or robots, which may soon be relevant.
The studies showing red meat is actually good for you, kinda make me believe this.
My health has also dramatically improved after eating more red meat and less low fat vegetarian options, but I'm a sample size of 1.
My personal lived experience about what actually worked for me, really makes me question more things.
Lived experience is one thing and if it works for you go for it, but as for the studies: there are studies that will justify basically any diet decision you want to make.
If you want to rely on answers from authoritative sources your only logical option is to go with the mainstream consensus which is still that red meat is terrible for you. As soon as you branch off into less mainstream studies you're now in the territory where you could logically justify nearly any health decision based on which studies you decide to cherry pick. At that point you have to ask yourself if you're really basing your decisions on the studies or if you're picking your studies based on your decision.
Again, the science is so sketchy that just doing what works for you makes sense, but it's not a good idea to pretend that you're doing it because of the science.
I was mostly eating vegetables for years, but eventually chronically underweight. At 25 I went to the doctor for severe knee pain, and the doctor told me I just need to eat some god damn food. I went out and gorged myself on korean barbeque. After that I started adding beef, lard, and meat in general to my previously mostly lentils and fried vegetables cooking. I am now no longer underweight and dont experience strange symptoms of deficiency such as the papillae on my tongue dissapearing, and loud painful joints.
FWIW that's not a healthy diet. A vegan diet (assuming you were vegan) needs a lot of variety--carbs/grains, healthy fats, nuts, legumes, etc. You won't meet your daily caloric needs on lentils and vegetables.
I ate yogurt and nuts in the mornings. Breads, lots of potatos. Lots of lentils which are legumes and have about the same protien per dollar and weight as chicken. I also put walnuts, peanuts, lots of other nuts and seeds, oils etc in my cooking. I cooked in bulk in a large pot.
I also ate 5+ bowls a day a day.
I just could not reach my calorie requirements.
I did exercise everyday by going up the nearby mountain. Adding protien powder to my meals helped, but adding meat made it very easy to substantially increase my calorie intake.
The levy is on livestock, not merely cows. Apparently all mammals fart.
Where does it end (no pun intended)? Gerbil farts? At this rate they should levy a tax against Jarls and Emma for their sickly farting. Rise of a personal tax? Invest in Beano futures now!
I'm so torn on this. On the one hand reducing pollution is obviously good, but on the other hand it is less clear cut when the reduction in pollution comes from increasing the cost of a moral good like meat eating.
A few comments mention that the policy is about internalising the cost of externalities.
In this concrete case, I wonder how do you price it correctly absent a market?
Generally, I wonder how far you can extend the concept of internalising externalities without severely limiting individual liberties.
E.g. health care (in countries with a public health care system). We already try to price in the social costs (burden on public health insurance) of smoking and drinking with taxes and other limitations.
How about other activities, like biking without helmets (legal in some countries), extreme sports or consumption of coffee, meat etc?
Should we tax and limit activities that are "negative externalities" and provide tax benefits for "positive externalities"?
