[HN Gopher] Gassy cows and pigs will face a carbon tax in Denmar...
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Gassy cows and pigs will face a carbon tax in Denmark, a world
first
Author : mypastself
Score : 31 points
Date : 2024-06-26 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40799879
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Insane to try to blame ruminants for climate change.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not ruminants that have to pay the tax.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Not so insane given that they are far more numerous due to
| agriculture than they would be as wild animals. This ultimately
| is a human-caused problem not a natural one. And there is the
| issue that what we feed livestock affects how much gas they
| produce. It's a serious research topic
|
| https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/why-do-cattle-produce-m...
| atlasy1 wrote:
| Thank you for raising this valid issue. Ruminant methane
| output has been reduced by 98.8% with the addition of a
| compound from seaweed to the animals food. You are a small
| bit behind the science but thanks to people like you raising
| awareness we solved the problem!
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| A citation for those who (as I) didn't know about this:
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26388081.2022.
| 2...
|
| Don't know how widely adopted this is.
| wyre wrote:
| It's not a solved problem. This is a hyperbole less
| accurate than saying vehicle emissions are a solved problem
| because EV's exist. Seaweed is not a widespread additive in
| cattle feed and global production of seaweed would need to
| drastically increase to handle demand. There is also a
| plethora of other factors to consider with the increased
| farming of seaweed and the dietary changes that make adding
| seaweed to a cows diet anything but a "solved problem"
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-
| science/arti...
| atlasy1 wrote:
| You can think of it as similar to a human taking a cheap
| charcoal tablet with their food to reduce flatulance.
| They will not take such a tablet until they are aware
| they have gastritis. When enough pressure is applied the
| solution will be implemented.
|
| Only a small part of the animals feed needs to be seaweed
| and thankfully it is one of the easiest and fastest
| growing organisms on the planet. So it's extremely cheap
| for the industry to adopt the solution when compared to
| facing losses related to carbon taxes and loss of market
| share.
| wyre wrote:
| Sorry, edited my post while you were replying.
|
| Your underestimating the amount of food cows need to eat
| a day and likely overestimating global seaweed production
| in relation to even supply only 1% of cattle feed.
|
| 89 millions cows in the US alone eating eating 20+ pounds
| of food a day is 890,000 tons or nearly 325 million tons
| per year. That's per day. Global production of seaweed
| was 358,200 tons in 2019. Only about 11% of what would be
| needed to be included in 1% of feed of every cow in
| America. And that wouldn't leave any seaweed to be used
| for any of its other uses or the millions of other cows
| around the world.
|
| https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-cows-
| in-...
|
| https://beef.unl.edu/cattleproduction/forageconsumed-day
|
| https://fppn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s43014-02
| 2-0...
|
| https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/0990814231045
| 205...
| slavik81 wrote:
| Seaweed grows very quickly. The historical production was
| much higher a hundred years ago, but there's been
| relatively little need for seaweed in recent decades. It
| would not be hard to farm more of it, if there were
| demand.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Seaweed grows very quickly
|
| This is like saying that trees grow quickly.
|
| "Seaweed" means thousands of different species. When we
| see a cluster of seaweeds in a rock some of them are not
| even in the same kingdom than their neighbors. Its life
| cycles and chemical properties are totally different.
|
| The truth is that some species are really picky and some
| take decades to regrow after harvested. Just because
| brown seaweeds are fast growers does not mean that red
| seaweeds are.
|
| > there's been relatively little need for seaweed in
| recent decades
|
| You may not be aware of how much of our everyday stuff
| includes algae. The demand of toothpaste has not fell. I
| would dare to speculate that the demand of laboratory
| stuff is probably higher than ever since Covid.
| ygjb wrote:
| This is a potential solution, but the problem isn't solved
| until the market actually adopts it.
|
| Without a financial incentive to follow through (for
| example, a carbon tax on gassy animals) to offset the added
| cost of feed supplements, then most farms won't see the
| business justification (carbon footprint is largely
| externalized).
| atlasy1 wrote:
| Sorry to double post this but you can think of it as
| being similar to a human taking a cheap charcoal tablet
| with their food to reduce flatulance.
|
| Only a small part of the animals feed needs to be seaweed
| and thankfully it is one of the easiest and fastest
| growing organisms on the planet. So it's extremely cheap
| for the industry to adopt compared to losses related to
| carbon taxes and loss of market share.
| ygjb wrote:
| That means absolutely nothing until the majority of
| cattle farms incorporate the supplement into their
| operations.
|
| Knowing a potential solution is not the same as solving a
| problem, unless you are performing an academic exercise.
| atlasy1 wrote:
| A little difficult to parse your argument. It is the lack
| of implementation of the cheap solution that you are
| worried about and raising as a problem.
|
| Do not worry.
|
| When enough pressure is applied on the farmers thanks to
| people like you , the solution (seaweed) we have found
| will be implemented. We have already done the difficult
| part and found a solution to the problem.
| ygjb wrote:
| And I am sure that all of the fat people (myself
| included) are thrilled that a thermodynamic approach to
| weight loss is a proven solution, despite the fact that I
| have not had much success applying it.
|
| I am also strongly reassured that XSS is a solved problem
| when using content security, and climate change has been
| solved by mass reforestation efforts.
|
| The difficult part of a technical solution is not
| inventing it (although those are rightfully hard
| problems); the real challenge is in driving adoption of
| the solution.
|
| The industry will push back on this solution for a broad
| range of reasons:
|
| 1. Cost - what is the cost of both the supplement and the
| labour required to administer it, or the differential on
| unfortified vs. fortified feeds.
|
| 2. Marketing - how will you communicate to folks that
| they should do this?
|
| 3. Customer Satisfication - does the supplement
| meaningfully affect any of the metrics for customer
| satisfaction (flavour, texture, etc of the meat).
|
| 4. Availability - retooling and spinning up the
| aquaculture required to produce the supplements
|
| 5. Viability - what is the ecological impact of the
| proposed seaweed solution, and is it a net positive.
|
| I spent a chunk of my career as a researcher, developing
| protoypes and proof of concept stuff. One of the greatest
| things of that time in my career was developing something
| to 80% and throwing it over the fence, which let me
| ignore all of that hard work and call my project a win.
| One of the worst things is that out of that multi-year
| period of experimentation almost none of the work I did
| actually yielded unique products or improvements
| (although the tools I built did drive improvements to
| address issues and flaws found).
|
| Assuming that you did the research, your work was
| definitely successful in finding a solution. You have not
| solved the problem, and the hard work is very much ahead.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Ruminant methane output has been reduced by 98.8% with
| the addition of a compound from seaweed to the animals food
|
| I had debunked this yet a lot of times. This is a dead road
| and will fail. With the current data available is obvious
| that is a false solution.
|
| I would strongly suggest to read the article with a
| critical mind
| tengbretson wrote:
| The us cattle inventory is like 80 million or so head, and
| the peak wild bison population was estimated to be between
| 30-60 million, so its more, but not a crazy amount more.
| jacobgorm wrote:
| Denmark produces around 29mio pigs per annum on a tiny k
| look and area inhabited by less than 6mio humans.
| kasperni wrote:
| Farming contributes to a third of Denmark's CO2 emission.
| atlasy1 wrote:
| We can phrase anything in a negative light. Food which fuels
| 100% of Denmark's population causes only 33% of Denmark's
| emissions. This is a wonderful achievement.
| tengbretson wrote:
| But consider that if they eliminate all food it would
| reduce their carbon to 0.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Food which fuels 100% of Denmark's population causes only
| 33% of Denmark's emissions.
|
| Are you saying that Danish eat a 0% of fish, seafood and
| vegetables?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| What makes that wonderful? What do you think the #s would
| look like if Denmark wasn't one of the top pork exporting
| countries?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| This isn't blaming ruminants for climate change. It's just
| proper accounting.
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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.
| jhbadger wrote:
| People (even "gassy" people) produce very little methane, which
| is the primary biological cause of global warming.
|
| >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.
|
| This is talking about Denmark. They certainly haven't forgotten
| about oil and plastic. They have very aggressive taxation on
| ICE cars and were one of the first countries to ban free
| plastic bags.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40799879
| idrathernot wrote:
| 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.
| jacobgorm wrote:
| Most meat produced by Danish farmers gets exported to countries
| like China. Only a small fraction gets consumed by Danes in
| Denmark. The pigs are transported alive to meat packing plants
| in Germany and Poland where wages are lower, and most farm
| hands in Denmark are cheap imported labor who often live under
| slave live conditions.
| yza wrote:
| As a Ukrainian growing up and still living in Denmark and who
| has spoken to other Ukrainians working at those farms, I have
| never heard of "slave like conditions". I've heard of hard
| manual labour and occasional disagreements with the owners of
| the farms though
| marcuskane2 wrote:
| This is an egregious ad-hominem attack, which is both against
| HN guidelines and a failure of rational discourse.
|
| The people who want to reduce pollution most likely just want
| to reduce the harms associated with that pollution, not your
| wacky accusation of their motives. And even if someone's
| motives were some weird bad thing, if their actions are good
| (eg, helping us all live better lives in a lower-pollution
| world) that would still be a good thing.
| peterbraden wrote:
| 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.
| jacobgorm wrote:
| In Denmark the pigs are fed soy imported from areas of the
| world where rainforests had to be cut down to make room for
| production. The short distance between Danish fields and sea,
| which is no where greater than 50kms, means most fertilizer
| from the pigs runs off into the sea, causing algae blooms that
| kill all other marine life.
| peterbraden wrote:
| Thats not really what I asked.
|
| But in this situation would you not be better off taxing the
| soy imports and fining waste outflow?
| elzbardico wrote:
| 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.
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