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.
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.
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.
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.