from Hacker News

Gassy cows and pigs will face a carbon tax in Denmark, a world first

by mypastself on 6/26/24, 5:11 PM with 58 comments

  • by chrisco255 on 6/26/24, 6:20 PM

    Insane to try to blame ruminants for climate change.

  • by wait_a_minute on 6/27/24, 2:30 AM

    > “We have succeeded in landing a compromise on a CO2 tax, which lays the groundwork for a restructured food industry -– also on the other side of 2030,” its head Maria Reumert Gjerding said after the talks in which they took part.

    Yikes. All this is is a successful attempt by the ruling class to convince the subjugated to give up even more rights and freedoms. “It’s for your own good” on steroids. If you want to see clear proof of this, just note that on the strict numbers, this practice won’t meaningfully move the needle on the climate issue. In fact, will it even move the needle overall? Once you feed the animals better, namely with some seaweed incorporated into cow feed in particular, this total emission from these sources drops by some 80% or more. But of course that solution won’t do, because the entire point of these co2 laws is to have more control over people’s lives rather than to solve problems. If climate change ended tomorrow, these same people would try to push the same laws because the intention is to control the masses and to tax people more to feed the bureaucracy machine.

    People should be wary of hall monitors and bureaucrats aiming for “restructuring” of food systems, especially for moral posturing reasons. In history that tends to lead to starvation.

  • by idrathernot on 6/26/24, 8:59 PM

    So now they’ll just import the meat from places with even less environmental concern.

    Not that it matters as the people who support these types of broad punitive measures are mostly just virtue seeking idiots who only care about complex issues to the extent it can be used to advertise their own feelings of moral superiority.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 6/26/24, 5:22 PM

  • by jmclnx on 6/26/24, 6:38 PM

    I understand the "why", but there are like 8 billion people, I lost count, shouldn't gassy people be taxed also ?

    I guess it is a way to reduce meat consumption. But I think there are far better places to look, Oil Industry and use of fossils (ie plastics) then Cows and Pigs. But no Government wants to do the hard thing because the pols will loose their jobs in the next election.

  • by peterbraden on 6/26/24, 9:17 PM

    Are there any reliable numbers on the holistic impact of ruminants? All of the carbon they emit came from the atmosphere via their plant diets, and a huge volume of that carbon is sequestered in the soil via their excrement. Ruminants help the soil, as opposed to modern agriculture which is largely reliant on fossil fuel derived fertilizer.

    I have yet to see a paper that models this. Most of the estimates are purely based on output, which seems disingenuous at best.

  • by bryanlarsen on 6/26/24, 6:47 PM

  • by elzbardico on 6/26/24, 10:40 PM

    In practice non-western countries will keep on using fossil fuels to enable their development and nothing will stop them till they burn the last drop of oil.

    Denmark is a tiny country and their emissions are frankly, negligible.

    So, just another emotional decision from western politicians.