Denmark to charge $100 per cow in first carbon tax on farming
cnn.com
cnn.com
If the reduction target is not met, it just means the tax is not high enough.
Or people might start voting for right wing parties promising to cancel these taxes. As just happened during last European elections.
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).
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".
[0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
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.
I’m not seeing the benefit to taxing the cattle.
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.)
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.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
[2] https://sealevel.info/methane.html#:~:text=Various%20sources....
in a frictionless vacuum...
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?
>in a frictionless vacuum...
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]
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
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?
And I believe that your comments are even less true in other prominent cattle producing countries than America.
Denmark doesn't have a significant amount of those. It's pretty flat and rock free.
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.
1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
2: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustain...
The carbon cult has lost the plot.
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.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/jas/article-abstract/73/8/2483/4632... [2] http://repository.geologyscience.ru/bitstream/handle/1234567... [3] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/meth... [4] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/methane-emission... [5] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/methane/?intent=121
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).
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn6842?utm_campa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions [3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-Number-of-Wool...
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):
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.
Stop parroting propaganda.
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?
Stop parroting disinformation.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop...
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.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-Number-of-Wool...
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.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions
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.
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.
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.
I live in Denmark and look forward to this change.
Did you mean to post a different link?
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.
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 look forward to this change, and more like these!
Relevant reading: https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-price
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.
sounds like it has 20% possibly to do with food security, so "absolutely nothing" is hyperbole
> "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 is how a vast amount of indigenous cultures survived.
I’d recommend the book “Should we eat meat?” by Vaclav Smil for a very thorough dive into this topic.
Or, you know, vegetables.
Unless you mean turnip style hunger winters, as occurred during WW1 and WW2.
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).
Still, this is a step in the right direction, even if from a different angle.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...
https://unfccc.int/process/transparency-and-reporting/greenh...
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.
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.
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.
Live cattle futures as of this comment are $1.91 / pound: https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/live-cattle-...
Using those figures, that gives us an average value of $2,483 for a single animal - but value is not margin!
The average cost for finishing out a steer last week was $2,249: https://www.drovers.com/news/beef-production/profit-tracker-...
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.
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”
Almost always whitetail deer in my area. Very occasionally it also includes feral hogs these days.
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)
The most charitable interpretation: It is political theatre. And that, by definition, is unwise and unreasonable.
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.
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.
Maybe the people that advocate the wait and see non-strategy can make the sacrifices?
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.
See desertification, dust-bowl, etc.
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.
Perhaps we need more people to be lab rats so we can have a meaningful sample size for a fact-backed discussion.
Because of not, people could simply shift to imported beef if it becomes cheaper.
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.
Replacing beef with more factory farmed chicken and pork is an ecological disaster.
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.
Pasture pigs are labour intensive, too.
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.
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.
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
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.
- 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.
Well, yeah. Slap a Fukushima or Chernobyl-sized exclusion zone anywhere in the country and half of it has to be evacuated overnight.
Denmark is 42952 square km.
Japan is substantially more densely-populated than Denmark.
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.
[1]: Or is there feed where the carbon is taken from e.g petroleum somehow? Sugar is a hydrocarbon after all...
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustain...
Co2 from atmosphere -> Consumed by grass / grain -> Cow eats -> Methane released in atmosphere -> Broken down to Co2
20 years is a ‘long’ time period from a human perspective and it’s 80x worse over that timeframe.
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)?
(34) https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/gwp-star-better-way-mea....
(27-30) https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
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.
You can find tables with values for a few different gases and periods on Wikipedia[0]
- 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
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.
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!
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"?