Hacker News Reader

Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

Governments taxing food usually isn't a good idea. They should attack the problem in a way that doesn't make it so food is more expensive for people.

View on HN

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.

Pasture pigs are labour intensive, too.

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".

I find this a strange claim. 1: Are people living on milk? Never heard of that diet except for infants. 2: Many things are both cheaper and more nutritious, see https://efficiencyiseverything.com/calorie-per-dollar-list/

This doesn't make "food" more expensive. It makes specific food options more expensive. The options that tax the environment deserve to be taxed.

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.

Good thing it’s not all food then, but things that are actively bad for our continued existence on this planet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com