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Denmark to charge $100 per cow in first carbon tax on farming
- complianceowl 2y agoCows aren't the problem. Large scale industrial mono-agriculture and meat processing are the problem.
- Ancapistani 2y agoI agree with this 100%. 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.
- Euphorbium 2y agoHope this can be EU wide.
- no_time 2y agoIf it ever comes down to affordable beef vs EU membership, I'm really looking forward to setting EU flags on fire.
- Euphorbium 2y agoYou are free to move to any of the countries that are proudly boiling the planet.
- im3w1l 2y agoI have done my part by advocating a climate strategy for carbon neutrality without giving up our quality of life based on nuclear. Maybe the people that advocate the wait and see non-strategy can make the sacrifices?
- bryanlarsen 2y agoArguing on the Internet is not doing your part.
- im3w1l 2y agoThe 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.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoPerhaps a small part. But it's a long ways from "doing your part".
- octocop 2y agoin 10 years it will cost $5 to fart in a public space
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jasonlfunk 2y agoWhether 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.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoThat is the point. As you increase price, fewer cow units are sold because people don’t have unlimited money. If the reduction target is not met, it just means the tax is not high enough.
- pmontra 2y agoThey 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.
- TheLoafOfBread 2y ago> That is the point. As you increase price, fewer cow units are sold because people don’t have unlimited money. Or people might start voting for right wing parties promising to cancel these taxes. As just happened during last European elections.
- K0nserv 2y agoYes of course, it's pricing in a negative externality that was previously not accounted for.
- Clubber 2y agoGovernments 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.
- markusw 2y agoGood thing it’s not all food then, but things that are actively bad for our continued existence on this planet.
- Sayrus 2y agoThere 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.
- trollbridge 2y agoHog 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.
- ceejayoz 2y agoThere'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.
- trollbridge 2y agoYou _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.
- eloisius 2y agoI’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.
- HorizonXP 2y agoAnd the fossil fuel should already be taxed to accounts for its externality so I agree. I’m missing something here.
- cyanydeez 2y agoMeyhane has more global warming potential. https://unfccc.int/process/transparency-and-reporting/greenhouse-gas-data/greenhouse-gas-data-unfccc/global-warming-potentials 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.
- cyanydeez 2y agoIf 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.
- scoofy 2y ago>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. 1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
- filleokus 2y agoFrom 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...
- Retric 2y agoCow digestion produces on average 220lb of methane per year which acts as a potent greenhouse gas. https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustainable https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustain...
- filleokus 2y agoYeah, but how is the "net" greenhouse effect calculated? Over a long time period it should be zero: Co2 from atmosphere -> Consumed by grass / grain -> Cow eats -> Methane released in atmosphere -> Broken down to Co2
- Retric 2y agoOver 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.
- filleokus 2y agoI 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)?
- HyulianGrader 2y ago[dead]
- toomuchtodo 2y agoThis 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. https://www.wired.com/story/everythings-about-to-get-a-hell-of-a-lot-more-expensive-due-to-climate-change/ https://www.wired.com/story/everythings-about-to-get-a-hell-...
- Dig1t 2y agoIt'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.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoTradition is by no means a valid reason to destroy the one planet we share. Times change, adapt.
- digging 2y ago> 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. I wonder if we could invent some form of farming that doesn't depend on cows? Technology is pretty amazing these days.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
- blindriver 2y agoA brave new world where the poor people eat artificial meat and crickets while the rich get to eat cows and chickens.
- wakamoleguy 2y agoMeat 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.
- LMYahooTFY 2y agoThis 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.
- wakamoleguy 2y agoIt’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.
- GrantMoyer 2y ago> A brave new world where the poor people eat artificial meat and crickets Or, you know, vegetables.
- klalxc 2y agoVegetables 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.
- sampa 2y agoeurope's being europe
- zb3 2y agoAnd as always, this will make the poor even poorer, that's why they're protesting these changes, but rich people on HN are cherishing them.
- jokethrowaway 2y agoI 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.
- persnickety 2y agoHaving been vegetarian for 10 years (vegan for 7 of those) and having had no health issues, I disagree completely with your disagreement. Perhaps we need more people to be lab rats so we can have a meaningful sample size for a fact-backed discussion.
- persnickety 2y agoI wish we put a tax on every animal exploited, from the position of suffering caused. But we'd need to recognize animal personhood first. Still, this is a step in the right direction, even if from a different angle.
- markusw 2y agoI 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! Relevant reading: https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-price https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-price
- Chris2048 2y ago> 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.
- markusw 2y agoTrue, 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.
- Chris2048 2y agoI 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.
- rvense 2y ago60% 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.
- Chris2048 2y ago> has absolutely nothing to do with sounds like it has 20% possibly to do with food security, so "absolutely nothing" is hyperbole
- bandrami 2y agoThat's like one third of one percent of the cost of a cow; I'm not sure that's going to move any needles.
- Ancapistani 2y agoAverage carcass weight in the US is about 1,300 pounds: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Livestock_Slaughter/calvwgx5.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Livestock_Slaughte... Live cattle futures as of this comment are $1.91 / pound: https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/live-cattle-price?op=1 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-cattle-margins-near-500-pork-margins-hold-steady 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.
- bandrami 2y agoSorry, 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?)
- 23B1 2y agoYet another example of how environmentalism (good) has been adopted by the political class as another wealth extraction tool (bad).
- lukev 2y agoI 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.
- tracker1 2y agoRegenerative farming requires livestock... growing just produce without animal products/fertilization is not sustainable. See desertification, dust-bowl, etc.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoIt'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.
- ceejayoz 2y ago> Hell, nuclear power generation is banned in Denmark. Well, yeah. Slap a Fukushima or Chernobyl-sized exclusion zone anywhere in the country and half of it has to be evacuated overnight.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoThe Fukushima exclusion zone, at its largest, was 807 square km. Denmark is 42952 square km. Japan is substantially more densely-populated than Denmark.
- ceejayoz 2y agoThe 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.
- Tadpole9181 2y agoAh, of course, only 2% of the entire country. Silly them for being concerned.
- GranularRecipe 2y agoA 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"?
- TheChaplain 2y agoIt'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.
- giardini 2y agoThe 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!
- mikewarot 2y agoDo still have to pay if the livestock is part of regenerative agriculture farm? Such systems capture carbon, somewhere around a ton/hectare/year[1]. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1234108/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...
- throwawa14223 2y agoI'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.
- ranguna 2y agoDoes Denmark import beef? Will they tax those? Because of not, people could simply shift to imported beef if it becomes cheaper.
- petre 2y agoThey 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.
- scoofy 2y agoI'm genuinely shocked be the amount of clever disinformation in these threads. I expected better from this demographic.
- mollerhoj 2y agoSame, did not expect this from HN. Even the farmers interest group here in Denmark don’t spew this much misinformation..
- mollerhoj 2y agoWe’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)
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoWhy 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.
- Tadpole9181 2y agoOh, of course, that's the most charitable interpretation. Usaglig.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoWhat 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.
- mollerhoj 2y ago
- ein0p 2y agoThe Danes, 3 years from now: “How come meat is 3x the price now? We gotta vote those bastards out.”