[HN Gopher] Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farml...
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Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest
Author : geox
Score : 563 points
Date : 2024-11-24 05:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| dataflow wrote:
| Anyone know if they plan to chop down the trees when they grow
| and use the wood somehow, so they can capture more carbon through
| growing new trees?
| geewee wrote:
| Yes, some of the forests will be untouched nature but a good
| chunk of it will be for timber production.
| dataflow wrote:
| Awesome, thanks!
| sidcool wrote:
| Didn't Bill Gates once say that planting trees has no impact on
| global warming?
| ggm wrote:
| The trees will ride through floods and reduce water flows,
| improve species diversity for insects, birds, small mammals,
| improve temperatures and ameliorate winds, provide shelter for
| farm animals, can enhance grazing. And there's wood to harvest
| in due course.
|
| There's a lot more reasons to plant trees than direct AGW
| offset.
|
| A huge amount of farmland is now surplus to production. Grasses
| and fields of weeds aren't always ideal. Taking land out of
| production can also attract offset funding for farmers (-yes,
| this is a secondary economic outcome and may also incur other
| costs)
|
| People are healthier around trees. People like trees. Even Bill
| Gates may actually like trees.
| notRobot wrote:
| Trees absolutely can help with climate change, although like
| everything in this universe, there are nuances at play, such as
| type of tree, location, etc.
|
| We have done a lot of deforestation, and that absolutely has
| negatively impacted our climate, and we should work to reverse
| it.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| He also once said that 640KB should be enough for anyone, so
| ... let's take his opinion with a grain of salt. Affluence does
| not equal wisdom.
| ndjdjddjsjj wrote:
| He denies it, and even if he said it, it was 1981 and I doubt
| he meant "forever".
|
| > Affluence does not equal wisdom.
|
| True
|
| Just waiting for someone to factcheck about planting trees:
| there must be nuance. In australia we burn em to protect
| people and the environment for example. We have done it for
| millenia.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| And he'd be right.
|
| When those trees die and then rot or burn, that CO2 will be
| released right back into the atmosphere. They'll temporarily
| hold some, yeah, but it's like trying to rapidly fire a squirt
| gun at a fire when someone else is spraying it with a firehose
| of gasoline.
|
| Especially because trees plant themselves. If they want to set
| aside the land for forest and seed it a little to get going -
| great - but those large tree planting operations are a waste of
| time at best or carbon credit loopholes at worst.
| simonask wrote:
| The point of planting trees in Denmark is not to cut CO2
| emissions. The point is to restore biodiversity and the
| health of the environment. I assume the situation is similar
| in countries like the Netherlands.
|
| Climate and environment are two separate things, and are in
| fact sometimes at odds with each other. Denmark is doing
| semi-alright on climate, but is absolutely terrible on
| environment. Aquatic ecosystems in the country are basically
| completely destroyed by agriculture, to the point where
| previously productive shallow waters are completely dead due
| to oxygen depletion.
| notRobot wrote:
| The corollary to this would be that deforestation hasn't make
| climate change worse, and a simple Google search tells me
| that:
|
| > Deforestation plays a significant role in climate change,
| contributing 12-20% of global greenhouse gas emissions
| missedthecue wrote:
| Most global deforestation involves slash and burn. This
| releases the carbon stored in the trees. But I think that's
| OPs point. A growing tree doesn't remove carbon, it
| temporarily stores it until it dies or burns.
| notRobot wrote:
| Trees do pull carbon out of the atmosphere, which can be
| stored in the form of "wood", and it doesn't re-enter the
| atmosphere until burnt.
| missedthecue wrote:
| or dies and decays
| zo1 wrote:
| You could plant a trillion trees tomorrow but it won't help
| anything so long as places like China and India pollute the
| oceans with millions of tones of plastic waste trash every
| year. That's in the thousands of tones _per day_ region. The
| sheer scale of pollution there makes Denmark 's measly little
| contribution just that, peanuts. No wonder the farmers are
| upset. They're destroying their own industry and people's
| livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on
| the altar of enviromentalism.
| kolinko wrote:
| Plastic pollution in the oceans has nothing to do with
| climate change.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| It's funny how I also feel peanuts when I vote for elections
| but also feel very engaged and powerful with that paper
| holding a nano-minuscule fraction of power.
|
| > They're destroying their own industry and people's
| livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on
| the altar of enviromentalism.
|
| The environnemental impact of their AG is peanuts on a global
| scale but cause massive problems on their own lands and
| coast. Food security will still be largely fine : there's
| large surpluses and you are actually safer stocking grains
| than livestock, especially in modern silos. For industry and
| livelihood I'm sure those guys are smart enough to shift to
| others activities. That may be quite easy when you look at
| the current meat industry profitability.
| simonask wrote:
| This is a type of fallacy. Denmark as a country is
| politically relatively powerless compared to China or the US,
| or even Germany, but each citizen has about the same or more
| power compared to each citizen in those larger countries.
|
| The fallacy is to say "I, as an individual in a small
| country, cannot do anything because these other large
| countries are, collectively, much more powerful". Well, no
| kidding. Any Denmark-sized administrative section of a larger
| country (say, a US state, a Chinese province, or a German
| bundesland) has the same or smaller influence on the climate.
| Often a much smaller influence due to how international
| diplomacy works.
|
| It's a category error. Whether progress is made in Denmark-
| sized chunks or in US/EU/China/Germany-sized chunks is
| irrelevant, as long as the average velocity _per human_ is
| the same on a global scale. It 's not high enough at the
| moment, but it's equally significant wherever it happens.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| If you burn the wood, sure. Forests only capture carbon if you
| leave that carbon alone forever.
|
| Denmark isn't just trying to reduce their CO2 footprint,
| though. It's also dealing with terrible soil and water quality,
| both the result of many years of hyper-intensive farming.
| That's a local problem that needs local policy to solve.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| In many parts of Europe, forested areas have actually _grown_
| since the 20th and especially the 19th century.
|
| People no longer use wood as a fuel, or in very small amounts
| compared to the past, and some former pastures have been re-
| colonized by trees.
|
| Czechia is currently 34 per cent forest. Used to be less than 20
| per cent in the Theresian cadastre (mid 18-th century).
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Just open google maps and take a stroll across europe...
| dachris wrote:
| Indeed. A few years ago I ran across a comparison of old
| photographs of rural villages (early 20th century) in central
| Europe vs their present day appearance, taken from similar
| points of view.
|
| Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs -
| less forest - tons of fruit trees
|
| Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a
| historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and
| they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of
| prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they
| could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status
| symbol.
|
| Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant
| tons of trees that also produce food - something like the
| baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g.
| pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Climate getting milder has also meant the tree line, and thus
| forest line, has moved up quite a lot[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.forskning.no/norges-forskningsrad-partner-
| miljoo...
| cpursley wrote:
| It's the same in America, there's actually more trees now than
| at the time of European settlement. A combo of the large
| buffalo herds that used to roam and native land management that
| often involved burning entire forests.
| simonask wrote:
| In comparison, Denmark is currently at only 15% forest.
|
| This is up from about 2% in the early 1800s, back when ships
| were built from wood, and firewood was used for heating.
| Funnily, the slow and steady build-up during those 200 years
| was partially motivated by the fact that when the British
| destroyed the fleet in 1807, there was simply not enough wood
| to build a new one.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| That will be interesting experiment. 1) A growing population
| require food. 2) Their agricultural sector is a major contributor
| to their economy, not only farmers but everything around it
| involves a lot of people and businesses. 3) Many countries rely
| on Danish agricultural exports (it's massive) to ensure people
| have food.
| lokimedes wrote:
| (Dane here) - this is a major reversal on the food-security
| policy that drove not just innovation in intensive farming
| technologies in Denmark in the late nineteenth century, but
| also the formation of what is now the EU, post WWII, on a
| european scale.
|
| Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our
| needs.
| danieldk wrote:
| Our issues in The Netherlands are probably similar to
| Denmark's and the biggest issue is not all agriculture. Meat
| and milk production has an outweighed impact on destroying
| the environment. You need far more land to grow crops to feed
| livestock and keeping cows leads to a lot of nitrogen
| deposition.
|
| We can reduce land use and have food security if people were
| not so intend on eating/drinking animal products every day
| (and there are perfectly fine vegetarian alternatives).
| Tade0 wrote:
| I believe the insistence on being a major agricultural
| producer in the EU despite having some of the largest
| population densities in the region has a lot to do with it.
|
| A huge chunk of that output is purely for export.
| nradov wrote:
| That depends on how you define "perfectly fine". All of the
| vegetarian alternatives have a lower protein quality index,
| which matters if you're trying to get enough of the
| essential amino acid s without increasing calorie intake.
|
| https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2024.1406618
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover
| our needs.
|
| Pole here - Poland switched form being a pork exporter to an
| importer over the course of the last few decades.
|
| Top external suppliers are...
|
| Denmark (53kt)
|
| Belgium (50kt)
|
| Germany (44kt)
|
| The Netherlands (24.5kt)
|
| Spain (24.5kt)
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| > Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover
| our needs.
|
| That's really hilarious: Poland imports it's pork from
| Denmark.
|
| (ASF and almost no piglets breeding)
| jopsen wrote:
| If we end up going hungry (or food prices spiking), then this
| policy might be adjusted.
|
| It's not like this will happen overnight anyways.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The Danish agricultural industry accounts for 1% of GDP and
| almost 70% of land use, the highest in the world. The Wikipedia
| page on Denmark doesn't even bother to list it as a major
| industry (unlike Lego) and the only figures I could find put it
| at around 8B DKK. Lego does 66B DKK on its own.
|
| What criteria are you using?
| exe34 wrote:
| Lego is not edible. they'll need food in the coming war.
| simonask wrote:
| By the last metric I saw, Denmark produces food for about
| 12 million people, and that's mainly animal products.
| Denmark has a population of 6 million.
|
| Cutting food production in half would not jeopardize food
| security. Switching focus to plant-based food production
| would more than double it again.
| oezi wrote:
| Jesus, what war are you talking about?
| exe34 wrote:
| https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/11/2
| 5/d...
| oezi wrote:
| Its a special military operation, right?
|
| In all earnesty, what does it change to send troops to
| Ukraine? What did any of these red lines we European were
| afraid of help?
|
| Should not send tanks, it could start a war.
|
| Should not send planes, it could start a war.
|
| Should not allow Ukraine to attack inside Russia, it
| could start a war.
| exe34 wrote:
| I'm all for defending Ukraine, it's just that it would
| have been good to have the USA on side.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > A growing population require food.
|
| Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink
| forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility
| drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment,
| what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good
| policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a
| genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just
| encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila!
| The fantasy of more than a few out there.
| Sabinus wrote:
| Good luck. In the less cohesive Western countries efforts like
| this are met with both protest by farmers who view their
| providing calories as almost a sacred task, and by foreign
| agitprop that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is
| an attempt at subjugating the people.
| KSteffensen wrote:
| Believe me the farmers have been doing their best to buck this.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| > that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an
| attempt at subjugating the people
|
| Well, it is. More expensive food means a worse quality of life
| for normal people. It also means more time spent working to pay
| for groceries, and less time and money to do things that
| threaten the elites like accumulating capital or performing
| activism.
| freetanga wrote:
| The problem is not production cost, but distribution. A litre
| of milk is paid at 20c to the producer (never has been
| cheaper) yet it's 2EUR at the store. The producer makes a few
| cents on it.
|
| The FoodCo is the one driving price up. Them and consumer
| behavior.
| Gigachad wrote:
| There's quite a lot of expensive stuff happening in between
| filling a tank of milk at the farm, and a consumer
| purchasing a single bottle at a store near them.
| blitzar wrote:
| Multiple private jets for the CEO being one of them.
| cpursley wrote:
| Feeding people is a sacred task. Food is literally the base
| pillar of various human needs pyramids.
| 123yawaworht456 wrote:
| shitlibs' contempt for farmers of all people is a real mask off
| moment
| Sabinus wrote:
| Farmers can get extremely attached to one piece of land and
| one farming method and any attempts to shift the incentives
| in the system and make some types of farming or locations
| move on is portrayed as a systemic attack on farming and the
| end of the world.
|
| Everyone appreciates the farmers, some farmers just don't
| seem to appreciate the harms certain types of farming put on
| everyone else and the ecosystem, and they'll hide behind how
| essential calories are to protect their interests.
|
| You're aware the farming lobby is one of the strongest in
| many countries right? They're not under-served politically.
| Farming is one of the most subsidized industries.
| pkulak wrote:
| No they won't. If they started tomorrow planting 100,000 trees a
| day, and never took a single day off, they would finish up in
| 2052. What kind of nursery can even grow 100,000 saplings of
| conifer a day?
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-climate-deniers-pl...
| im3w1l wrote:
| Saplings? Wouldn't it be easier to seed? Or you could plant a
| few more mature trees sparsely and rely on them to seed?
| jltsiren wrote:
| It would take a couple of years at the scale Finnish forest
| industry is operating.
|
| Large parts of Europe are basically forests that have been
| temporarily cut down. If you let the land be, the forest will
| often grow back with minimal effort.
| alberth wrote:
| Using seedballs, you could conceivably plant 1B trees in just a
| couple _months_ by dropping the seedballs from airplanes.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBbU4MQftc8
| ksec wrote:
| Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland?
|
| Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and
| they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it
| on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Where else would you like them to plant trees? Tearing up
| residential areas to convert to forest would be massively
| expensive and likely unpopular.
| cpursley wrote:
| Places that used to be forested and are not productive
| farmland. There's lots of places like this, just maybe not in
| Denmark.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Not really. Trees plant themselves. If it's not being
| actively used for something/mowed it'll turn back into
| forest.
| pintxo wrote:
| (In the absence of grass and small tree devouring
| animals)
| dyauspitr wrote:
| In the US that would be a bunch of only invasive species
| for a long time.
| asdff wrote:
| Eventually it returns to forest within a lifetime. In
| certain parts of the midwest you see fields of farmland
| and occasionally squares of trees in them. Chances are in
| the early 19th century all of what you saw was farmland
| and at one point not as much was actively farmed and
| certain fields no longer plowed. All the trees you find
| in that plot of what looks like the holdover of some
| carved up midwestern forest are actually all less than
| 100 years old and relatively recent growth.
| cpursley wrote:
| Tree planting in eroded/damaged ecosystems requires a
| helping hand - everything from site prep, germination,
| watering, etc.
|
| Source: I've planted thousands of trees.
| simonask wrote:
| This isn't really true. Growing a forest is way more
| complicated than you might think - they don't just sprout
| spontaneously, as trees take a long time to grow and are
| easily kept down by fauna, landscape, nutrient levels,
| erosion, and many other factors.
|
| I don't remember the details, but I believe it goes
| something like farm -> heath -> shrubland -> young forest
| -> mature forest, where each phase has a unique ecosystem
| of both plant species and animal life.
|
| In an extremely heavily cultivated landscape like Denmark
| (seriously, look at a satellite photo), converting
| farmland back into forest is a multi-decade project
| requiring constant maintenance. Converting farmland into
| marshland (which is the "original" stone-age landscape in
| many areas) is a multi-century project.
|
| Just like it was a multi-century project to convert it
| into farmland, by the way. Europe has been cultivated for
| millennia.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Exactly. It only takes a couple of decades for nature to
| reforest, which is an eyeblink, actually. And only a
| couple more decades to return to mature forest. No humans
| or projects needed. There is a lot more forest in New
| England (USA) now, than a century ago.
| StackRanker3000 wrote:
| That last bit is correct, there aren't many places like
| that in Denmark. So the original question remains, where
| would be a better place for them specifically to plant
| these trees?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > just maybe not in Denmark
|
| exactly, and we're talking about Denmark, after all
| mrweasel wrote:
| Quick history lesson: After the war, with Prussia in 1864,
| Denmark lost about 33% of it's area. That part was some of
| the most suited to agriculture. To compensate for those
| loses Denmark started a process of turning previously
| unusable land in to farmland. So lakes where drained, the
| the moors were drained, areas with sandy soil, good for
| nothing but growing common heather, was heavily fertilised
| and forests where cut down. There where even suggestion to
| drain parts of the sea between Denmark and Sweden.
|
| In some sense it was good, and basically help shape modern
| Denmark, but it's just not needed anymore, and has come at
| the cost of wildlife, native plants and sea creatures. It
| didn't start out like that, but when you add modern
| intensive farming on top of killing of most of your nature
| areas, then things starts to go very wrong. Denmark has
| almost nothing of it's original nature left.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Nitrogen emissions from farming are a big topic in the
| Netherlands. We have a right wing populist governments that
| wants to raise maximum speeds back to 130km/h but they can't
| because of nitrogen emissions that caused the previous
| government (also right leaning, pro car, etc.) to lower the
| limits. Intense cattle farming is a big environmental challenge
| in both countries and it comes at a price. Lots of farting cows
| in both countries.
| timc3 wrote:
| Just having farmland be fields is not very good for the land or
| the eco system. Breaking up farmland with hedges, woods,
| wetlands or whatever nature decides it should be is often a
| good idea. Next best thing is to manually plant trees.
|
| Edit: add planting trees
| chickenbig wrote:
| > Breaking up farmland
|
| One thing I have wondered was the relative benefits of a
| concentrated wilderness versus distributed habitat.
|
| The common agricultural policy set-aside distributes payments
| for the wilderness across many farms (for equity, one
| supposes), whereas a concentrated wilderness would benefit
| few (and probably only the landowners).
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| For a short period I looked into carbon stuff and while
| forests were good, wetlands were deemed much bigger sinks.
|
| It feels like wetlands is a huge ignored area. If what I
| read at the time holds (I think it was like 6-12x
| sequestration rate in some regions), a simple thing like
| rising sea levels would have a huge impact.
|
| And anthropogenic destruction of wetlands is also a huge
| issue and one that is relatively easy to reverse in a lot
| cases (dams, rerouted rivers). And in some cases, water can
| just be rerouted occasionally to create temperarly wetlands
| that are good ecosystems as well. Mossy Earth I think is
| doing some of these.
| chickenbig wrote:
| Strangely enough I have been seeing wetland creation
| coming up on my radar recently. Hinkley Point C nuclear
| power station has been proposing these as alternative to
| acoustic fish deterrent, but the locals who might be
| affected are not happy.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgzwrgv71no
| It would transform the biodiverse habitat into barren,
| species-poor salt marsh and tidal mud.
|
| https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2024-10-09/debates/
| 230...
| Aromasin wrote:
| I do a lot of volunteering work with the Woodland Trust in
| the UK, negotiating with people who want to donate their
| land to restoration purposes. Britain is a land of fields
| and hedgerows (distributed). Many people fail to understand
| that most "wilderness" that we want to bring back is
| reliant on density (or concentration). I know many land
| owners who want to rewild parts of theirs, but are
| expecting temperate rainforest on a plot of land a couple
| acres across. It doesn't work like that.
|
| The only way to bring back these lost or dying ecosystems
| is across large stretches of land, hundreds if not
| thousands of acres across. We have tiny pockets left in
| Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, but for the most part the
| country is ecologically baren in comparison to that a
| couple of thousand years ago.
|
| Vast and continuous National Parks are one of the few
| viable ways to maintain or bring back our species rich
| ecosystems. Distributed "wilderness" between city blocks or
| cattle grazing land is duct tape on a leaky bucket.
| awjlogan wrote:
| A lot of "farmland" is unproductive and kept in usage only by
| heavy subsidies. Additionally, I think a more
| important/interesting part of the article is taxation of
| livestock - you reduce the land needed significantly when the
| amount of livestock is reduced. I'm not vegan/vegetarian but it
| is "obvious" we should reduce meat consumption for a wide range
| of reasons and focus on raising livestock in ways that are
| beneficial to the wider environment.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Yes, the least productive 10% of land represents a much
| smaller percentage of food production. This is often land in
| areas that are most environmentally sensitive.
|
| In the UK we pay farmers to raise lamb on marginal land yet
| they still aren't competitive with lamb shipped from the
| other side of the world. I'm not sure why we should be
| subsidising that, especially when there is a lot of
| environmental damaged associated with it.
| Epa095 wrote:
| Could food security in case of another global crisis be a
| good enough reason? I don't know anything about the British
| situation AT ALL, but I think many in Europe think slightly
| different about the market-based solution when it comes to
| both food, medicines, and other essentials after corona.
|
| It turns out that when shit hits the fan, countries need to
| handle the basic needs of their population themselves.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You'd need firewood too.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| People don't need lamb in an emergency.
| throwaway0123_5 wrote:
| Exactly... I find all the arguments in the style of "but
| we need food" extremely disingenuous when it comes to
| meat production. Almost without exception, more food
| could be produced by converting land used for animal
| agriculture into land used to grow food directly for
| human consumption.
| sabbaticaldev wrote:
| governments need it to stay in power
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way
| too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies
| the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of
| their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector
| in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports
| while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around
| 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let
| go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy.
| Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly
| wild nature.
| chipdart wrote:
| > Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's
| way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU
| subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over
| 50% of their profits.
|
| Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially
| unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to
| import the bulk of agricultural products from south America
| and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major
| epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced
| economy and a huge population with high population density.
| The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it
| consumes.
|
| EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the
| strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded.
| Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive
| to preserve current production capacity when it makes no
| finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical
| risk of seeing Europe blockaded
|
| No, its because far lobbies are an important political
| block
| sshine wrote:
| Both can be true.
|
| Protecting your agricultural capacity is what convinces
| the part of the population that does not directly benefit
| from the subsidies.
| panick21_ wrote:
| That's just admitting that it is just justification.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Yes and? If it keeps 20% of the country alive during a
| twice in a century event that it's a good justification.
| chipdart wrote:
| > No, its because far lobbies are an important political
| block
|
| Wrong. If you try to educate yourself, you will notice
| that EU's common agricultural policy even went to the
| extent of paying subsidies to small property owners to
| preserve their properties as agricultural land. This goes
| way beyond subsidizing production, or anything remotely
| related to your conspiracy theory.
|
| Just because someone benefits from subsidy programs that
| does not mean that any conspiracy theory spun around the
| inversion of cause and effect suddenly makes sense. I
| recommend you invest a few minutes to learn about EU's
| common agricultural policy before trying to fill that
| void with conspiracies.
| panick21_ wrote:
| They can write all they want. The fact is, the countries
| wouldn't cant get rid of their farm policies because of
| voting. And the EU, is an outgrowth of those already
| existing countries. EU policy is not handed down from a
| white tower. Of course you can't actually say that.
| darkwater wrote:
| Farmers and people supporting farmers are still a small
| minority and while they can probably swing some election
| in some country if they were to massively support only
| one party or coalition, the money comes for the strategic
| importance. It would be naive to think it's just "for the
| votes".
| panick21_ wrote:
| It was a long time ago that I have looked into this. My
| understanding from the political science is that
| countries where farmers votes aren't as important, also
| have far less subsidizes.
|
| Groups that already have subsidizes are better at
| defending them. Even if in absolute terms their numbers
| aren't as big.
| Retric wrote:
| Resistance to a blockade doesn't require subsidies for
| growing flowers etc.
|
| Subsidizing exports similarly has very different goals.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Sure it does. The goal is keep the farmland available and
| productive along with keeping agricultural
| infrastructure. The USA helped win WW2 because our car
| factory lines were retooled to make war machines.
| Retric wrote:
| Demand for war materials goes up in a war, but the
| population and thus food demand isn't going to
| drastically spike.
|
| There's a reasonable argument for having a food stockpile
| in case of emergencies, but extra farmland is harder to
| justify.
| ramblenode wrote:
| You are going to stockpile years worth of food for an
| entire country?
| Retric wrote:
| No, if you expect farmland to produce 0 food then having
| extra farmland is pointless. 0 * 2 X = 0 * X = 0.
|
| The point of extra farmland is to make up for some
| expected shortfall, but you're better off stockpiling
| food during productive periods than have reserve capacity
| for use when something else is going wrong.
|
| PS: It is common to have quite large stockpiles of food.
| Many crops come in once a year and then get used up over
| that year. But that assumes a 1:1 match between
| production and consumption, a little extra production =
| quite a large surplus in a year.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| In the case of the US, we turned much of the richest
| farmland into subdivisions. The breadbasket of the nation
| is powered by an aquifer that will be depleted in my kids
| lifetime. Most of our green goods come from the deserts
| of California and Arizona, and won't exist if the
| Colorado River water system breaks down.
| Retric wrote:
| That aquifer is being depleted because of farm subsidies
| not in spite of them.
|
| The US's domestic demand for food is vastly below the
| actual production, exports and biofuels need not be
| maintained in a war.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| The demand won't spike, but the need to switch to local
| production necessitates some way to locally produce.
| Retric wrote:
| That's limited by the country's basic requirements not
| the total amount of farmland available. People may prefer
| wine and beef in surplus resulting in an obesity
| epidemic, but that's not required here. You don't want
| 350 lb soldiers or recruits.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The government has all sorts of policy goals. Resilience,
| employment, etc.
|
| In the US, Nixon era policy and legal thinking drives all
| things. Price is king, except it isn't. Our crazy
| governance model means that corn is better represented
| than humans, so our food is more expensive, less
| nutritious, and our supply chains are incredibly fragile.
| llm_trw wrote:
| You'd think that people would have realized this after
| Europe avoided mass death from Russian gas being cut off
| only because the winter was mild.
| neoromantique wrote:
| Considering that we're doing the barest of the minimum
| about it three years in, yeah, you'd think.
| baq wrote:
| We're off to a not-great start this year:
| https://gas.kyos.com/gas/eu
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Interesting way to frame "Russian gas being cut off"
| instead of "most likely US orchestrated biggest ally to
| ally sabotage in history".
|
| I'm still mad about it, yes. Germany's dependence on
| Russian gas was a terrible thing, but risking my
| livelihood for 4D geopolitics chess is much worse.
| account42 wrote:
| This doesn't change the strategic need to maintain local
| production though.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Germany's dependence on Russian gas was (failed) 4D
| geopolitical chess in itself. I'm mad at that.
| Y-bar wrote:
| > the winter was mild.
|
| Sure about that? I remember a cold winter.
|
| > Blizzards, record winds, red weather warnings and
| biting cold. The long winter of 2023/2024 has featured
| heavy precipitation and a number of extreme weather
| events.
|
| https://www.uu.se/en/news/2024/2024-03-04-a-researcher-
| expla...
|
| And
|
| > Large parts of Europe are starting the 2023-2024 winter
| season with an abundance of snow and cold, a stark
| contrast from last year, which was abnormally warm and
| snowless.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/12/04/europe-
| sno...
| rkagerer wrote:
| I think you meant _financial_
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| Let me get this right. To save the planet Denmark wants to
| stop producing food locally and instead import more? So
| those pig farts gotta go but the bunker fuel used to ship
| grain from a slash and burn rainforest farm in Brazil is
| a-ok.
|
| Utterly brain dead. So much so that you know someone's
| getting paid from these decisions.
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| you got it.. and grain is not the only thing we get
| shipped from Brazil.. to look green, we've replaced most
| our coal burning for energy with bio fuels, essentially
| wood and that gets shipped in from Brazil as well.. very
| green.. because fuck nuclear, because of.. checks notes..
| reasons
| sabbaticaldev wrote:
| and Brazil does that while keeping 60% of its territory
| as native forests.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| 3.6% of bnp seems like little but I think agriculture counts
| for more than, say, management consulting that goes through 5
| intermediaries (does it get counted towards the bnp 5x then?
| I'm not sure). At the end of the day money is only an
| abstraction while food, you can actually eat it.
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| yes, but like 50-70% of the crops grown is animal feed. if
| Denmark really needed efficient food for the population i
| think the whole thing could be done more efficiently and
| those 10% won't be missed.
| pnw wrote:
| What's your source for 4.3% of exports? This source says 22%.
|
| https://agricultureandfood.dk/media/m1qfuuju/lf-facts-and-
| fi...
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| i admit that i haven't read the sources listed here
|
| https://www.dyrenesbeskyttelse.dk/artikler/landbrugets-
| bundl...
|
| and also that this source is probably biased toward
| minimizing the numbers while your source might be pulling
| in the other direction. the true number is probably
| somewhere in between and depends on what you include. like,
| could the raw products be imported instead and the refined
| in Denmark without those 22% taking a hit?
| tokai wrote:
| You are posting literal propaganda from the biggest agro
| lobbyist. That number is about the "Danish food cluster".
| That is all food related business output. Enzyme production
| and such. They have tried for a long time to conflate the
| farming sector with the whole food industry to muddy their
| importance.
| apexalpha wrote:
| the Netherlands exports so much food (and meat...) that it
| becomes a burden on local wildlife and milieu, mostly due to
| nitrogen emissions, pesticides and fertilizer.
|
| I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs
| in stead of cattle.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Haiti cut down all their trees. When a hurricane passes through
| it moves what little top soil they have into the ocean.[1]
| Haiti overfished their costal waters. Now they do not have fish
| to eat and worse can not participate in the single biggest
| economic driver in the Caribbean, scuba diving.
|
| Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining
| and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard
| way in the 1930s. [2]]
|
| [1] https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/08/05/us-funded-
| trees...
|
| [2] https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
| eesmith wrote:
| > The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s.
|
| Grasses, not trees, maintained and protected the soil for
| what became the US Dust Bowl.
|
| The "Great American Desert" was essentially treeless. As your
| [2] links points out, European agricultural methods
| "[exposed] the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-
| rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to
| blow away."
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| > "Like all the others, he had allowed the advertisers to
| multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with
| possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.
| Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of
| subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash
| crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when
| the crop no longer gave him any cash. Then, like all the
| others, he had got into debt with the banks. And finally,
| like all the others, he had learned that what the experts
| had been saying for a generation was perfectly true : in a
| semi-arid country it is grass that holds down the soil;
| tear up the grass, the soil will go. In due course, it had
| gone.
|
| The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the
| experience was making a worse man of him."
|
| -- Aldous Huxley, "After Many a Year Dies the Swan" -- 1939
|
| They were warned what would happen. Yes, it was the grasses
| that keep the soil in place.
|
| However, as the article you referenced says,
|
| > "As part of Roosevelt's New Deal, Congress established
| the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry
| Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work
| planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great
| Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural
| Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and
| promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of
| soil erosion." [2]
|
| A bunch of people didn't understand this in Haiti and now
| they are severely doomed and suffering. Probably not
| something you want to be incorrect about on the global
| scale.
|
| Although, it is the grasses that hold the top soil in
| place, it can be mitigated by planting trees.
| eesmith wrote:
| > They were warned what would happen.
|
| They also believed in "rain follows the plow."
|
| > windbreaks on farms
|
| Sure,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt .
|
| But that was only one of many techniques developed. https
| ://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/11..
| . mentions "if subject to wind erosion, it calls for
| stubble-mulch farming, wind strips and windbreaks."
| (That's a biography about Hugh Hammond Bennett, who led
| the Soil Erosion Service ... but not the Shelterbelt!)
|
| In general (a few paragraphs earlier):
|
| 'Modern soil conservation is based on sound land use and
| the treatment of land with those adaptable, practical
| measures that keep it permanently productive while in
| use," he explains. "It means terracing land that needs
| terracing; and it means contouring, strip cropping, and
| stubble-mulching the land as needed, along with
| supporting practices of crop rotations, cover crops,
| etc., wherever needed. It means gully control,
| stabilizing water outlets, building farm ponds, locating
| farm roads and fences on the contour, and planting steep,
| erodible lands to grass or trees."'
|
| Earlier at https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs00
| 00well/page/96... you can read about the then-novel idea
| of contouring;
|
| "Tillage is proceeding across the slopes, rather than up
| and down hill. It is being done on the contour on 15,362
| acres. Farmers are finding that it not only serves as a
| brake on running water but also reduces the cost of mule-
| power and tractor-power."
|
| Oh, interesting. In 'Predicting and Controlling Wind
| Erosion', Lyles (1985) writes "Despite the credit the
| Prairie States Forestry Project has received in ending
| the Dust Bowl, windbreak plantings under the Project did
| not begin on a large scale until 1936", and says "the
| cardinal principle of wind erosion control is maintaining
| vegetative materials on the soil. ... this practice of
| conserving or maintaining vegetation on the surface has
| evolved into various forms of tillage management, which
| currently go under the generic name of conservation
| tillage and have become a major technique for erosion
| control." (See
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3742385.pdf )
|
| This suggests again that trees and windbreaks in general
| are not the primary solution to the regions affected by
| the Dust Bowl, but rather grasses, including crops.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| I don't see how Haiti situation applies to Denmark.
| r3d0c wrote:
| are you being obtuse?
| JoshGG wrote:
| You left out the part where Haiti was destabilized and
| crushed by colonial debt. And I don't think that lack of fish
| is what's keeping the tourists away. But hey, weren't we
| talking about Denmark ?
| tbrownaw wrote:
| So is that relevant because it means that cutting down all
| the trees want their fault, or because it provides an
| alternate explanation for what mechanism is causing the
| soil to else?
|
| And obviously the connection to Denmark is meant to be that
| a lack of trees causes problems so replacing things with
| trees must be good. Even if there hasn't been news about
| those problems happening there.
| vidarh wrote:
| Denmark has had massive erosion problems for decades to
| the point there used to be signs about it when I used to
| go there as a kid in the 1980's.
| asdff wrote:
| Scuba diving really? You'd think cruise ships and a large
| airport would be a lot more significant.
| gklitz wrote:
| Because it's becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying
| farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land. What
| I mean is that if we removed the subsidies the farmers wouldn't
| farm their land, the market just doesn't work to support their
| production. So we are essentially saying "if you pretend to
| farm your land we'll make sure you profit" but even at that
| they of cause need to try to keep the pretend farming
| profitable enough that the entire charade pays off, but that
| means dumping a ton of fertilizer on the land, which tends to
| run off and ruin streams and seeps into the ground water. Most
| recently this has led to the agricultural industry competeley
| and likely semi permanently destroying the fishing industry
| around one of the major pars of Denmark. So at this point the
| farmers have to stop.
|
| There's a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies
| and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political
| power because they have a lot of money because of the policies
| they've set up back when they had political power because they
| had a lot of money... Anyways, so what is actually happening is
| that the farmers have decided that if their land is
| unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to
| them for it.
|
| The government could just cut the subsidies which means we
| would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely
| just with the money we spend less. Instead we'll see a lot of
| additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line
| subsidies will increase to "make up" for all the land they
| "lost".
| panick21_ wrote:
| In New Zealand the believe that if they removed farm
| subsidizes, their farmers would quite. Now they are a massive
| farm product exporter.
| mmooss wrote:
| So the public gives them their hard-earned money via taxes,
| and the farmers reap more money from exporting?
| panick21_ wrote:
| No, the public gives them no money and they make money
| for the country by exporting.
| geoffmunn wrote:
| To be more accurate - by removing subsidies, NZ farmers
| became more efficient and sell their products at the world
| price, which is quite often overseas.
|
| Subsidies and/or tarrifs always distort the market and have
| unintended consequences.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Not sure why you say 'more accurate'. What you state is
| what I implied. I hope this was clear.
|
| What removing subsidies do is unleash the potential. Lots
| of farming communities that live with subsidies are
| convinced that removing them is a dooms day scenario.
|
| However evidence often doesn't support this. Japan used
| to protect its market for beef. Then this was forced to
| be opened by the US. Japan farmer then realized that
| their specialization was high quality beef. And now Japan
| is globally famous and exports lots of high quality beef.
|
| Removing subsidies can lead to structural changes and
| consolidation, but it can also have lots of positive
| effects.
| asdff wrote:
| Does it pencil out though? You go from more farmers
| making less profit and getting subsidy to smooth things
| over and then they go ahead and spend most of that back
| in the economy running the business presumably.
|
| And the other situation is no subsidy, fewer players as
| they have to take what little profit there is and spend
| it more on overhead, and presumably less money reinvested
| in the local economy overall because of less economic
| activity from fewer players as well as that subsidy no
| longer being available to spend back on overhead and
| recirculate into the economy. And profit is presumably
| held by fewer and wealthier people who spend even less
| proportionally in the local economy than someone with
| less means.
| 0xy wrote:
| Do you think food production has national security
| implications or do you think "the market" will be happy to
| sell you food during another global conflict while their own
| citizens are starving?
|
| Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a
| handout.
|
| Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature
| otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
|
| Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in
| 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as
| farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument.
| It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
| awjlogan wrote:
| There's a big difference between supporting food security
| and subsidising otherwise unviable land usage and farming
| practices. In the UK, there are subsidies for upland
| farming for sheep with produces a negligible amount of food
| at high cost (monetary and environmental) for next to no
| return for the farmers even after the subsidy.
|
| Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as
| investment in technology of the future. You might also like
| to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.
| andreasmetsala wrote:
| How does having such a large surplus that you're an
| exporter of food jive with national security? It sounds
| like they already produce more than enough. Exposing food
| production entirely to market forces is, as you point out,
| a bad idea.
| mollerhoj wrote:
| Sounds like you've fallen for some farmer rhetoric.. How
| is growning crops to feed 28 million pigs to 6 million
| people? We'd have to eat 5 pigs each.. If it was really
| about food security, we'd surely plant crops to eat
| ourselves, which is much more efficient in terms of
| calorie per m^2.
|
| Meat has many more negative externalities than plants.
| Thats the argument for substituting green farming.
|
| Of course it's political.. anything is to some degree.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Because of animals we grow far more grain than we need,
| giving us a substantial amount of necessary slack. If
| there is a wide spread crop failure, the price of grain
| rises, causing ranchers to sell breeding stock they can
| no longer afford to feed. Then humans then eat the grain
| instead of the animals.
| chipdart wrote:
| > How does having such a large surplus (...)
|
| You should educate yourself. Europe imports around 40% of
| the agricultural production it consumes.
|
| The "surplus" is referenced in economical value and
| reflects luxury exports such as wine, which is hardly
| what keeps Europe alive in case of all-out war.
|
| The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is
| food security including an event of all-out war.
|
| Your comments sound like advocating against having a
| first-aid kit just because you sell silk scarves.
| thworp wrote:
| Please provide some sources, because I think your 40% is
| also based on monetary and not nutritional value.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Destroying fisheries goes directly against food security.
| Fishes are more efficient as source of food by energetic
| reasons.
| gklitz wrote:
| I don't understand why this is being downvoted but this
| is very true, and it's the literal case that the
| fisheries around the entirety of the Bornholm region of
| Denmark have been completely shut down because the
| farming industry runoff destroyed it. Had it not been for
| subsidies the farming industry wouldn't have done this.
| We literally paid people to deliberately destroy our
| environment. Is insane and everyone's just looking to the
| sky like "what are we supposed to do? We've tried nothing
| at all even though there has been consistent warnings for
| two decades and it still happened!?"
| gklitz wrote:
| > Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in
| nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green
| subsidies.
|
| The green subsidies are also paid out to farmers... it is
| outrageous. Imagine if we were still paying subsidies to
| weavers because of their "strategic importance in case of
| war" and also paying them green subsidies to avoid using
| the toxic chemicals they would otherwise use doing the
| thing they are only doing in the first place because it
| justifies the theater that has the state maintaining their
| consistent income.
| standardUser wrote:
| > Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a
| handout.
|
| It's absurd to not acknowledge they are both.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| This is often the justification but in many countries
| agriculture systems are not oriented towards food security:
| they produce a large share of export crops/products and
| thus also rely on imports. If they were an actual national
| security tool, they would be more focus on not relying on
| imports and not helping exports, right?
| asdff wrote:
| Well they aren't really subsidizing based on having
| everything you need on shore. They still specilize into a
| few monocrops and have to trade to fill the rest of a
| balanced diet for the population. No one is calculating how
| much butter would be needed to last a multi year siege and
| dolling out subsidize to the dairy farmers on that I don't
| think.
| chipdart wrote:
| > Because it's becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be
| paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their
| land.
|
| This is a particularly ignorant and clueless opinion to have.
|
| The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to
| preserve the potential of agricultural production as a
| strategic asset. Europe's strong economy and huge population
| density, coupled with cheap access to agricultural production
| from south America and Africa, renders most agricultural
| activity economically unfeasible. The problem is that this
| means Europe is particularly vulnerable to a blockade, and in
| case of all out war the whole continent risks being starved
| in a few months.
|
| The whole point of EU's common agricultural policy is to
| minimize this risk.
|
| Owners of farmland are provided a incentive to keep their
| farms on standby even if they don't produce anything exactly
| to mitigate this risk. It would be more profitable to invest
| in some domains such as, say, real estate. Look at the
| Netherlands: they are experiencing a huge housing crisis and
| the whole land in Holland consists of dense urban housing
| bordered by farm land. It would be tempting for farmers to
| just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic
| upside.
|
| You would do better if you educated yourself on a topic
| before commenting on it.
| credit_guy wrote:
| With this type of argument you can demonstrate that lots of
| things have strategic importance. Steel? Check. Textiles?
| Check. Asphalt? Check. We should subsidize everything. Yet,
| when the military threat actually materializes and you need
| to manufacture 155mm shells, all the strategic planning
| seems quite useless.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| In the US, we have sextupled 155mm shell production.
|
| If war breaks out, you need to feed people, maintain
| roads, build vehicles, etc.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Europe has a huge coastline, it's impossible to blockade.
| If war breaks out, it's better to shift workers from
| agriculture to war-related production, and import food
| from places that are not at war, such as South America.
| Food produced in Europe is basically a luxury. For every
| kilogram of beef produced in Denmark, you can buy 2.5 kg
| of Argentinian beef.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| While Europe has a long coastline, there are only a given
| number of ports capable of the high thoroughput needed to
| feed Europe's population. Blockade those and the entrance
| to the Baltic and Mediterranean, and most of your work is
| done. Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from
| other global regions attempting to supply Europe would be
| targeted.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Who is this hypothetical battle to be fought against?
| Surely anyone with sufficient power to mount a blockade
| has nuclear missiles and at that point it's kind of
| moot...
|
| Note that I actually agree with your position but this is
| an interesting discussion on a topic I hadn't thought
| about deeply enough!
| credit_guy wrote:
| > Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from other
| global regions attempting to supply Europe would be
| targeted.
|
| This happened before, twice. The solution was convoys, it
| worked both times.
| nradov wrote:
| The convoys barely worked. Parts of Europe were
| desperately short of food for several years. And the non-
| Axis countries couldn't manage to defeat the blockade on
| their own: they needed help from the USA to accomplish
| anything.
| hollerith wrote:
| It didn't work for Japan though. The US could've kept
| Japan impotent and hungry indefinitely without invading
| or nuking it. The main reason for nuking it was to get it
| to surrender before Stalin could enter the fight and take
| part of Japan.
| speeder wrote:
| Let me see... Well, there was this thing in the past,
| called WW2, it was a WW, because well, Germany for
| example didn't want France buying Brazillian agricultural
| products, and sunk Brazillian ships using submarines.
| Thus making Brazil join the war.
|
| Right now Lula wants to form a coalition with Russia, so
| what makes you think, in case of war, Brazil would keep
| selling to the EU? Maybe because USA would threathen
| Brazil? In that case they would focus on feeding
| themselves, and not the EU still.
|
| In the entirety of human history, a base war tactic is
| Siege. What makes you think nobody will try it again?
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| Everything you are listing is indeed very much strategic
| and Europe was indeed extremely stupid to let that go.
| The end of your paragraph is a demonstration of that. It
| doesn't go against the core idea.
| gklitz wrote:
| > It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real
| estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
|
| That's tempting even with subsidies. I have friend who own
| farming land at the outskirts of the city, they rent it to
| a farmer at almost net zero to themselves after taxes, but
| would make a small fortune if they could develop the land.
| The reason farmers don't sell their land to real estate and
| 100x the value instantly isn't that they don't want to
| because of subsidies, it's that they aren't allowed to due
| to zoning laws, and zoning laws are what they are to
| protect property values, because everyone involved in
| designing them own at minimum one property. The only
| political party we have representing renters in any
| capacity never get any power in the governmental bodies
| that govern zoning laws.
|
| > The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is
| to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a
| strategic asset.
|
| Nothing about that required the current setup. Imagine if
| we were talking about government subsidies for private
| militias because we needed to maintain the much more
| directly important military capacity. Wouldn't that be
| crazy? Why is the farming subsidies seen differently. Why
| must the government pay to private institutions who's worth
| had disappeared. If we want governments to maintain
| farmable land so be it. We don't have to finically support
| an artificial elite based them having owned a one
| profitable asset. Just let it degrade in value and buy it
| when it hits bottom.
| cco wrote:
| > Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies
| for private militias because we needed to maintain the
| much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn't
| that be crazy?
|
| Not really? It is very protective to maintain an
| agricultural, energy, and industrial base; not doing so
| is immensely risky.
|
| Take Germany the first winter after the Ukraine invasion
| as an example, a mad scramble to fill a huge hole in
| their energy sector. Imagine the same scenario but with
| food, or munitions.
|
| You simply cannot rely solely on global supply chains for
| industries that are critical to survival of a nation. The
| ability to power, feed, and defend yourself is a primary
| concern of a nation state and is worth economic
| inefficiency.
|
| With all that said, I have _no_ idea how Europe and
| Denmark specifically does subsidies for agriculture. It
| could be asinine. But philosophically, imo, it is
| uncontroversially necessary in some form or another. It
| is far too risky to save a penny on importing wheat from
| Brazil and risk famines.
| regnull wrote:
| > Why is the farming subsidies seen differently
|
| Because you can live without private militias but you
| can't live without food?
| phil21 wrote:
| I'm of the opinion food security - even at great expense - is
| the primary thing a nation should be concerned with as a
| society. At the level where producing enough calories to feed
| your total population if things truly hit the fan as a hard
| requirement for every nation on the planet. This is not
| something you leave to "free trade" or whatnot. Obviously that
| doesn't mean every calorie need be provided in the most
| luxurious form - but in the end, there should be enough food
| produced to feed your people in the worst of times. Even at
| great expense and waste during the good times.
|
| That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both
| per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we
| simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to
| agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.
|
| So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do
| mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with
| - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes
| over time, and it should be expected.
|
| Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a
| different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be
| more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's
| a wild guess.
| smilingsun wrote:
| Read the post by gklitz: Agricultural practices are ruining
| the water supply. It's nice to have food security, but you
| also need drinkable water.
|
| Groundwater in Denmark is drinkable and most people wanna
| keep it that way. But unfortunately, fertilizer has killed of
| huge areas of sealife.
| usrnm wrote:
| > That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive
| both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years
|
| We also have way more people to feed and house than 100 years
| ago, you cannot look at productivity increase in isolation,
| demand for both food and land has also risen significantly.
| simonask wrote:
| Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food supply,
| even less its food security. It produces way more food than
| is needed to feed its own population.
| chipdart wrote:
| > Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food
| supply, even less its food security. It produces way more
| food than is needed to feed its own population.
|
| Denmark is a part of the EU. Their agricultural policy
| follows EU's common agricultural policy. Food security is
| evaluated accounting for all members, not individual
| member-states in isolation. In case of a scenario that puts
| food security at risk, such as an all-out war, it's in her
| best interests of all member states if the whole Europe can
| preserve it's food security.
| simonask wrote:
| If we are ever in a situation where food security becomes
| a real issue in the EU - and that's an almost
| unfathomably big if - then the first step would be to
| actually grow food for humans, instead of food for
| animals that are then exported to China as meat products.
|
| Food security is simply not a relevant concern here.
| 7952 wrote:
| The argument about security comes up a lot and makes
| intuitive sense. Although it seems far more complex than just
| protecting farmland and a simple yearly statistic. Developed
| countries can be ridiculously dependent on centralised supply
| chains to process and deliver food. And many of the inputs
| and equipment require a complex industrial base to support.
| We don't just need the space to grow food. We need to feed
| it, protect it from pests, harvest it, process it, deliver it
| to people. In most countries Iit is very dependent on
| electricity, heavy industry and global trade for equipment.
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Simple: Germany has a huge export surplus that China and the
| USA is unwilling to accept anymore.
|
| Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas
| and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South
| America for exports while balancing it with import of South
| American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not
| be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process,
| but by the Commission).
|
| The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural
| Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU. They are using the
| Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of
| course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way
| that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their
| forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that
| developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and
| Finland.
|
| Expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of
| right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for
| stricter integration.
|
| https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/11/19/eu-mercosur-tra...
|
| https://forest.fi/article/whos-to-pay-the-cost-of-eus-nature...
|
| https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leadi...
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| Germany has been leaching off the EU for so long through the
| weak Euro, they now think it will always work. They are
| clearly putting France on a fast track to an exit via a far
| right government with the whole Mercosur agreement debacle.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Denmark did get rid of its forests a long time ago, after
| World War I. Germany has vast forests, a magnitude larger
| than those in Denmark, a country which is almost entirely
| farmland outside the cities. You have no idea what you're
| talking about.
| pvaldes wrote:
| I think that there is an official and an unofficial reason. The
| official is that something must be returned to nature before
| climate change destroys everything. The unofficial is, in my
| opinion, that EU politicians are terrified by US elections.
|
| In all western countries, far right groups are crawling to grab
| more and more power gradually. Those groups feed basically on
| farmer followers, ruthlessly brainwashed with fake news,
| antiscience and outrage, and the system has proven to work well
| (See US).
|
| Until now traditional parties believed that could control the
| situation and appease the farmers with more money, and maybe
| even benefit of some votes of grateful people on return. The
| wake up has being brutal. Each euro given to farmers is just a
| victory reclaimed by this groups, that nurture a higher
| discontent.
|
| So now that they are coming for they political heads and the
| time is running out, traditional politicians feel the pressure
| to take some delayed unpleasant decisions before is too late,
| and getting rid of the fake farmers to build a market from
| there is a first step. If fake farmers can sell subsidized meat
| for a lower price, the real farmers suffer for it.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > The official is that something must be returned to nature
| before climate change destroys everything.
|
| Nature is an abstraction, not a weird angry god. We need to
| capture GHG and stop emitting more but that's pretty much it.
| That will most likely involve reforestation as it's a good
| carbon sink but using the expression "returning thing to
| nature" is not a correct way to frame it.
| fire_lake wrote:
| Because Denmark is almost entirely cities and farmland?
|
| There's already a housing crisis...
| sunflowerfly wrote:
| We pay farmers not to plant fields in the US. Here in the
| Eastern half, much of this farm land setting idle receives
| adequate rain and sunshine. Farmers have to mow (brush hog) the
| fields every year or two to prevent trees and brush from
| naturally taking over. Economically it makes little sense.
|
| Where this might actually make sense is around waterways to
| prevent erosion. And farmers have taken down a large percentage
| of the tree rows between fields that were planted in the dust
| bowl days in an effort to use every inch of their field.
|
| Although, I am personally in favor of simple regulations
| instead cash handouts.
| tim333 wrote:
| I presume the EU has an excess. A lot of land is 'set aside'
| where you get an EU subsidy for not farming it so we don't end
| up with too much food.
| rvense wrote:
| Because there's nothing else? 60% of Denmark is farmed land,
| most of the rest is cities, industry, or suburbs.
| casey2 wrote:
| There is no way it's cost effective to produce food in Denmark.
| If people were rational about this Denmark would be 0-5%
| farmland. But racism/nationalism and irrational fears and
| entrenched political power exists so these sane changes only
| happen slowly. This is a country whose largest imports are
| (fish, animal feed, wine and cheese) and mostly from other
| European countries. If they were really worried about min-
| maxing they would be trading with other countries. They seem to
| be more preoccupied with keeping cash inside Europe and
| confusing old world status symbols with wealth.
|
| It's as if your economic planning is based own how good it
| appears to a potential time traveler from 100 years ago
|
| "The people work 30 hours a week and eat wine and cheese
| whenever they want! Everybody is rich!"
| CPLX wrote:
| This is a very strange statement. Being able to produce the
| food needed for your own survival is about the most core
| national security issue there is.
|
| And having people living healthy, well-fed, lives of leisure
| seems like a pretty good definition of rich to me. What's the
| better one?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Not all farm land is productive, so converting it back to
| forests and uncultivated land is better overall for the
| country.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Rage mode over more forest? Are you a psycho?
|
| > Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and
| they are very good at it.
|
| And both are tiny and being swarmed by sustainability issues.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Denmark drained the only source of natural diversity it had,
| its marshlands, after World War I and turned the entire country
| into farmland. Outside the cities, it is endless fields of
| farmland. And now its chickens have come home to roost, having
| poisoned the soil and rivers. This is entirely Denmark's fault,
| and now they're trying to reverse some of the damage they did.
| jopsen wrote:
| > why Farmland?
|
| Because trees don't grow well in the ocean? :)
|
| There is developed areas (cities/towns/industry) and farm land.
|
| Most of the land not suitable for farming was turned into farm
| land. Through extremely hard work over the past 150 years. Like
| straightening rivers, draining marshes, and planting up the
| heath.
| blitzar wrote:
| Farmland is not some natural balanced healthy state for the
| land to exist in.
| jillyboel wrote:
| Because the EU wants its member countries to care about the
| climate, even though it's completely overshadowed by the US and
| China not giving a shit
| smackay wrote:
| What kinds of forests? For nature, or for lumber? If the latter,
| what is quality of the timber produced, or will it spark a new
| wave of power stations burning wood pellets. Lots of questions,
| with very little detail available in the article.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| Southern Europe seems to be converting farmland into solar farms.
| And new forests seem to be all monoculture Eucalyptus, fast
| growing for commercial reasons, but sadly empty of wildlife.
|
| As much as I'd love for Europe to be reforested, the reduced food
| security might come back to bite us.
| skrause wrote:
| Food security is not an issue at all. For example in Germany
| around 20% of all farmland is used for "energy plants" (biogas
| etc.). Even in Germany solar planels have around a 28 times
| higher efficiency per area than biogas plants, so there is a
| lot of potential to repurpose farm land without changing food
| production at all.
| logicchains wrote:
| >there is a lot of potential to repurpose farm land without
| changing food production at all
|
| This takes years, which isn't enough in the case of a major
| food security event, i.e. war.
| standardUser wrote:
| Is there a reason you and some many commenters here are
| concerned about food security? Has this became a nativist
| rallying cry of some sort? Because by all fact-based accounts
| there is no problem with food production in Europe.
| jopsen wrote:
| And if food security became an issue we could reverse
| policies.
|
| This won't be implemented overnight.
|
| We could also just make less bio fuel, or eat more plants
| less animals, etc.
|
| Lots of options, sure we need some food security, but there
| are limits to how much overproduction we need.
| nradov wrote:
| There have been many famines in Europe throughout the past
| few centuries. Perhaps we're now at the end of history and
| nothing like that will ever happen again but since countries
| aren't willing to take that bet.
| ggernov wrote:
| This is ghoulish - farmland should directly be benefit the
| endemic population as much as possible! That's what it's there
| for!
|
| I love green tech like solar etc, made my home even more
| efficient etc but we need fresh food to LIVE!
| kawsper wrote:
| Denmark exports a lot of the produced food, and we are one of
| the most intensely farmed countries in the world, 60.4% of
| Denmark consists of fields, and 48% of Denmark's land area is
| used to grow food for animals, animals which are primarily
| pigs.
|
| We also yearly import 1.8 million tons of soy from South
| America to feed said pigs, because we can't grow enough food
| for them ourselves.
|
| It would be nice to have some nature to walk in, it's something
| I miss here and something there's a lot of in England, and it's
| great combined with their public footpath system!
| doommius wrote:
| Yup, and to add to this, the large majority of this meat is
| produced for export, and it's sold super cheap, I personally
| believe a good way of solving this is only giving EU support
| to non export farming, eg if you receive EU subsidy the good
| shouldn't be allowed to be exported, or those taxes would
| have to be repaid.
|
| As currently we're destroying the nature, and waters due to
| this extremely intensive farming and as others have mentioned
| Denmark is producing 200-300 % of our domestic need + it
| requires significant import from south America where it
| wouldn't surprise me if this import lead to significant
| deforestation.
|
| I know China is also working on increasing their domestic
| production[1] which is one of the primary markets that
| Denmark is exporting a lot to , It was 85000 tons last
| year[2]
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/business/china-pork-
| farms... [2]https://effektivtlandbrug.landbrugnet.dk/artikler
| /marked/103...
| fifticon wrote:
| this is about farmland that should never have ben cultivated
| to begin with, it was a temporary emergency practice from WW2
| that lobbyists kept alive after the war.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| Planting orchards would seem an interesting compromise
| JacobJeppesen wrote:
| I've seen a bit of confusion regarding this. First, it's 10% of
| Denmark's total land area, which is roughly equivalent to 15% of
| farmland area. Second, the conversion of farmland area into
| nature and forests is mainly for improving water quality, as
| excess nitrogen from agriculture has essentially killed the
| rivers and coastal waters through oxygen depletion from algae.
|
| Regarding global warming and CO2, the area conversion of
| peatlands will help, but the major change here is the
| introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural
| industry. And to end confusion regarding other emissions than
| CO2, it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a
| range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e.
|
| If you'd like to read more, see the two PDF documents below,
| which are the main official documents. They're in Danish, but
| upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll have a much better
| source of information if you'd like to know more about the
| specifics and how the actual implementation is planned.
|
| [1] https://www.regeringen.dk/media/13261/aftale-om-et-groent-
| da...
|
| [2]
| https://mgtp.dk/media/iinpdy3w/aftale_om_implementering_af_e...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a
| range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e
|
| Your pig farmers must be thrilled.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I had to look it up, Denmark is allegedly a world leader in
| pig farming exports. You make a really interesting point that
| I feel like garners more discourse.
|
| https://agricultureandfood.dk/danish-
| agriculture/agriculture....
| busterarm wrote:
| Denmark is also THE world leader in pork consumption.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| This doesn't seem to be true. In 2002 it appeared to be
| true, but the way it was calculated was by calculating
| the full mass of pigs produced and subtracting the amount
| exported. This didn't take into account that exports
| tended not to include heavy bones. https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...
|
| More recent data shows thir pork consumption as nothing
| noteworthy, though I have no idea how good the data is
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pork-
| cons...
| AdamN wrote:
| There's a great few episodes on this in Borgen where the
| PMs paramour goes to the hospital because there are so many
| hormones pumped into Danish pigs and how powerful the
| industry is in the country.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Thought cows are methane intensive
| ostacke wrote:
| They are, but Denmark is pig-intensive
| JacobJeppesen wrote:
| It comes with quite a lot of compensation and subsidies, so
| they're less angry than you might expect. Also, an important
| note here is that they were part of the negotiations, and as
| such were part of the agreement which was proposed to the
| parliament.
|
| All that being said, you're right, they're not exactly
| thrilled with the government adding taxes and monitoring them
| more.
| account42 wrote:
| > It comes with quite a lot of compensation and subsidies,
| so they're less angry than you might expect.
|
| Do people really still buy this trick?
| guappa wrote:
| Subsidies will be cut by a future government so it's all
| fine :D
| JacobJeppesen wrote:
| They've tried to avoid this by doing the negotiations
| between the government and interest organizations from
| all sides. The most surprising part of all this is really
| that these organizations, which included the main
| agricultural lobby organizations and the main nature
| preservation organizations, managed to sit down together
| and come to an agreement. This agreement was then
| proposed to the parliament, which voted it through with a
| broad coalition from both sides. So, that should ideally
| make it somewhat resilient to changing governments. Of
| course, that's not a guarantee, but at least it should be
| more solid than most of these political agreements :)
| AdamN wrote:
| Agriculture has been subsidized for security and
| stability reasons for a very long time - this isn't a
| trick it's the status quo ex ante.
| fifilura wrote:
| So you tax them for CO2 and then subsidize them for the
| same reason?
|
| How does help anyone else than salaries for tax and subsidy
| administrators?
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| It gets legislation that people in general want (better
| rivers and streams, healthier sea ecosystem) passed, by
| subsidizing the changes required for the people those
| changes negatively affect.
|
| Is it ideal? maybe not, but it is the real world.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Without having read the legislation, the two aren't
| necessarily contradictory. They only are if the subsidy
| mechanically increases with the tax.
|
| A "climate income" is a good example of that. Everyone
| gets taxed by usage/pollution, but the collected tax gets
| redistributed evenly.
|
| That way, on average there is no extra taxation, in fact
| it's typically a redistribution from top to bottom. And
| yet every individual will end up with more money the less
| they pollute. It's that individual incentive that makes
| the measure effective, but it's the redistribution that
| makes it socially acceptable (if implemented correctly)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Ideally, you gradually ramp down the subsidies, to give
| folks a gentle offramp.
| JacobJeppesen wrote:
| Not exactly. I'll just copy a reply I made further down:
| in 2030, a tax will be introduced of 120 DKK (~16EUR) /
| ton CO2e, which linearly increases each year until it
| reaches 300 DKK (~40EUR) / ton CO2e in 2035. However, the
| farmers can get subsidies for changing their practices
| and adopting new technologies, in order to reduce their
| emissions. I.e., the government will give you money to
| change your production, so you can minimize the carbon
| taxes you have to pay. There are more technicalities to
| how it works, but that's the gist of it. The important
| part is that the goal is to transition to new
| technologies and production methods, which reduces
| emissions per unit food produced.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Give them seaweeds to lower their gas output.
| manvillej wrote:
| I am very conflicted on a carbon tax for the agriculture
| industry. It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor
| thin margins. The transition from regenerative agriculture is
| expensive & rising food costs has a destabilizing effect.
|
| There need to be changes, but I am not convinced that this will
| have the desired effects. Its quite possible this leads to a
| net conversion of farmland to residential or commercial
| property rather than nature.
| lovemenot wrote:
| It should be fine, I believe. Just in terms of land-use,
| livestock is several times less efficient than other kinds of
| agriculture for the same food output. So a shift from meat to
| other food crops would be a net win, even as it frees up land
| for other purposes.
|
| Many farmers will receive a one-time payment on land sales
| and some will use this windfall to subsidise their transition
| from growing livestock to more environmentally-friendly food.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >Just in terms of land-use, livestock is several times less
| efficient than other kinds of agriculture for the same food
| output.
|
| This assumes that the land is equally usable for both
| activities. Many times, it isn't: a lot of land that's good
| enough for grazing cows doesn't have enough water available
| for growing plants that people want to (or can) eat. People
| can't eat grass.
|
| This probably isn't an issue in Denmark, but in many other
| places it is.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It also ignores that animals produce the manure that is
| used to fertilize soil to grow crops in.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| We use manure because it's coming out of the gills of the
| animal ag industry, not because it's necessary to enrich
| crop soil.
|
| Just because plastic bags are ubiquitous doesn't mean
| it's the only nor best way to carry items around, nor
| that we'd lose the ability to transport goods if they
| were phased out, nor that they don't come at a cost
| despite perceiving them as free.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > We use manure because it's coming out of the gills of
| the animal ag industry, not because it's necessary to
| enrich crop soil
|
| Crop soil needs fertilizer somehow
|
| What is your alternative to manure?
|
| Bonus points if it uses less energy to produce than
| animals, produces less CO2 than animals, takes up less
| space than animals, or also produces food at the same
| time
| braincat31415 wrote:
| Done any farming lately? You would not get enough yield
| to feed people without fertilizer. Of course it can be
| produced from a source different from manure. Nitrogen-
| based fertilizer is produced from cheap natural gas... oh
| wait... that is gone,too.
| jamil7 wrote:
| Cows still need water from somewhere in those areas
| you're talking about. If the land is particularly poor it
| also won't produce enough feed and will have to be
| supplemented with feed that requires water and energy to
| grow somewhere else.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Cows are extremely inefficient (2% conversion) at
| converting calories to meat, so putting cows on that land
| is also an inefficient use of that land. And land with
| bad yield for crops also has bad yield for cows and the
| grass they eat and the water they need. I don't see the
| proposition being made in these claims.
|
| Cows are so inefficient that we don't need to use
| marginal land at all to grow food. The majority of arable
| land is already used for cows yet they produce a
| disproportionately small amount of food. Weening off cows
| is a good thing.
| seunosewa wrote:
| Dairy cows convert calories to milk at over 24%
| efficiency. And you still get the meat.
| braincat31415 wrote:
| You do it then. I like my beef and milk, and I don't care
| if they use up the land or produce methane.
| benmanns wrote:
| I think we should start doing more taxes combined with
| subsidies. Give everyone a $1/t carbon tax. Give everyone a
| ~$1/t farming subsidy based on current carbon production.
| Nobody loses, but everyone is incentivized to decrease carbon
| production and the faster ones profit more. Phase out the
| subsidy over X years if you like.
|
| Otherwise, you're right. We're upsetting the balance of a
| very complex, very important system and causing a regressive
| tax in the form of price increases.
| manvillej wrote:
| a combined tax and subsidy to try to drive farmers into
| more sustainable practices in a fiscally neutral way isn't
| a bad idea, but I think it is just a very risky and
| necessary roll of the dice.
|
| I think inevitably, there will be price increases. The
| questions is just how bad and how many farms survive the
| transition.
| account42 wrote:
| You misunderstand, driving small farms out of businness
| so they can be taken over by Gates and other big farming
| monopolies is the real goal not an unwanted side effect.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| a casual American perspective here -- it is easy to
| mistake the cause when an effect is obvious. Yes,
| coordinated market regulation ends up increasing
| consolidation (with capital). Not everyone thinks this is
| a bad thing. No, it is not a plot by a few powerful
| individuals (easy to imagine, convenient emotional
| target). Rather there are "policy levers" and economic
| forces that operate at once, and interact in complicated
| ways.
| mmooss wrote:
| Currently the public subsidizes the agriculture industry by
| paying for the consequences of the industry's carbon
| emissions. Also, that subsidy distorts industry choices in
| favor of carbon.
|
| The industry might be accustomed to profiting from the
| subsidy, but that doesn't make them entitled to it! And
| certainly the industry has had plenty of time to anticipate
| and adjust to the problems of carbon emissions.
| manvillej wrote:
| Governments pay to keep food at the cheapest point possible
| to ensure stability. a fed population doesn't kill their
| governments. Agriculture is not a regular industry; its a
| national security issue
|
| Farming is not a profitable endeavor. There would be a lot
| less financial advisors in the world otherwise. A carbon
| tax will either drive up prices or reduce suppliers,
| increasing prices. Reducing farmland will require more
| efficient methods which will also drive up prices
|
| The result will be the public pays more for food, not the
| agriculture industry makes any more or less money. It will
| require more imports which will come from countries with
| less regulation and more exploitable resources.
|
| We've seen the story of disruptions to the food supply play
| out before. The reality is this is a more dangerous gamble
| than most people realize.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the masses interpret these
| changes as "let them eat cake" given that inflation is
| already hammering the middle and lower classes.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Denmark is a net exporter of food. In other words a net
| importer of agricultural pollution. So they could refice
| food exports without domestic political consequences. In
| theory.
| RayVR wrote:
| in Denmark, inflation is currently running at a 1.6%
| annualized rate, as of the most recent reading[0]. This
| is the full basket inflation rate, including volatile
| categories (food and energy). Core inflation is even
| lower, with the latest reading at 1.3% (annualized) in
| October 2024. Food inflation is, of course, volatile. It
| currently sits at a moderately elevated level of 3.9%
| (October 2024, annualized).
|
| Food prices declined earlier this year for two
| consecutive months, though that will be a minor
| consolation after the significant food price inflation in
| 2022 and persisting, though at a slower pace, through
| 2023.
|
| All of that to say, "let them eat cake" mentality is
| unlikely in a country where they have consistently ranked
| at the top of a world happiness index. Additionally,
| while I'm not well versed in Danish politics, I am under
| the impression that the Social Democrats have responded
| much better to the mass immigration that has been an
| ongoing issue for many parties throughout Europe. I think
| this is indicative of a party that adapts rather more
| quickly to the consequences of their previous policies
| and is less ideologically stubborn - at least on some
| issues.
|
| 0: https://ycharts.com/indicators/denmark_inflation_rate
| lowkey wrote:
| Economists look at inflation on a month/month or
| year/year basis. This is not an accident as it purposely
| ignores the destructive cumulative effect of inflation.
|
| Individuals, by contrast look at the cumulative effect of
| inflation. If inflation runs hot for several years and
| then comes back to a moderate level, prices don't go down
| regardless of what economists would have you believe. The
| effect of inflation has memory.
| braincat31415 wrote:
| 1.6% is the _change_ in the CPI. The actual inflation is
| about 8%. There was a huge change in the CPI in 2022 or
| 2023, mostly attributed to sharply higher cost of energy.
| rob74 wrote:
| So, what are you proposing? Just do nothing about climate
| change, as we have done before, and have worse social
| consequences in the near future rather than now? Denmark
| is more at risk from rising sea levels than other
| countries (https://cphpost.dk/2023-02-17/news/rising-sea-
| levels-threate...), so they want to do something about
| it.
| motohagiography wrote:
| not OP, but how about some technology innovation instead
| of governance and taxation? the effect of taxing farmers
| as though they were some kind of vanity industry will be
| similar to what nationalizing farms has done in prior
| schemes like this.
|
| it creates a national dependency on imported food from
| countries that do not bankrupt their farmers, and
| suddenly (shocked!) the entire Danish food supply crosses
| the borders to arrive and is then subject to federal
| management. this latter case is of course the purpose,
| and climate change is merely a pretext. I hope european
| farmers are able to organize a revolt.
| shakna wrote:
| What technological innovation do you think farming could
| adopt, that it hasn't already...? They don't operate with
| simple machinery. They regularly use some of the most
| complicated systems that mankind can build, such as
| satellite systems, chemical analyses, etc.
|
| Governance is needed, where progress does not occur
| naturally.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > how about some technology innovation instead of
| governance and taxation
|
| The history of solar, EVs, batteries etc. show these work
| hand in hand.
|
| Why invent a way to capture methane from slurry, or form
| a business to sell that idea to farmers if they're
| allowed to pollute for free?
| roenxi wrote:
| How will converting farmland to forests help with climate
| change? It seems like it would have no particular impact
| or make the situation worse w.r.t. climate change for
| Denmark. If it is a good idea I'd imagine it would also
| be a good idea if the climate was not changing.
|
| Denmark has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions at
| all. In fact nobody does except ironically the Chinese
| and their industrial-growth-at-any-cost coal based
| approach from the 90s and 00s.
| geysersam wrote:
| > how will converting farmland to forest
|
| Farming is very carbon emission intensive if the farmland
| is reclaimed wetland. Converting the farmland to forest
| and stopping draining (making it more wet again) can
| definitely reduce carbon emissions significantly.
|
| > Denmark has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions
|
| This is such a tiresome and logically hollow argument.
| Denmark has the ability to reduce a fraction of the
| worlds emissions. The size of the fraction is
| proportional to the size of their emissions. Every
| country has a responsibility to reduce it's per capita
| emissions to sustainable levels. China has lower per
| capita emissions than most richer countries.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| Note that China has no ability to impact global CO2
| emissions either.
|
| Let's split China population in k Denmark-sized groups,
| plus one smaller-than-Denmark reminder.
|
| None of the k groups has any ability to impact global CO2
| emissions (same as Denmark).
|
| We can reasonably assume that a smaller group has even
| less ability to impact global CO2 emissions than a bigger
| group. Hence the smaller-than-Denmark reminder has no
| ability to impact global CO2 emissions either.
|
| Thus China is made of groups that have no ability to
| impact global CO2 emissions either. And therefore China
| as a whole has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions.
| (Otherwise at least one group within China would have to
| impact global emissions and we just saw that it isn't
| possible).
|
| This is known as the CO2 impossibility theorem, loosely
| based on Arrow's concept of "(in)decisive" set.
| oezi wrote:
| Certainly you are just demonstrating the opposite.
| Everyone has the ability to impact global CO2 emmissions.
|
| We certainly need international coordination or actors
| with a minimal set of morals to achieve it.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| > Everyone has the ability to impact global CO2
| emmissions.
|
| I'm afraid most people are smaller-than-Denmark groups,
| and thus unable whatsoever to impact global emissions.
| It's just math.
| geysersam wrote:
| 1e-10 is reeeallly close to zero, therefore 1e10 * 1e-10
| is also close to zero.
|
| That's what your math sounds like to me.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| Isn't it true? f = lambda x: (1/x) * x
| f(1e309)
|
| yields NaN, not 1.
|
| (So I guess Denmark is at least 1e309-sized in some
| metric).
| itishappy wrote:
| No.
| oezi wrote:
| His math is x ~ 0, hence x / 10 = 0, hence x = NaN.
|
| The starting point is just wrong that Denmark can't play
| a role when it comes to climate change. Denmark can make
| a change. It is like saying that when voting that no
| individual vote or county matters, when the opposite is
| true: every vote matters in the same way.
|
| Every kg CO2 saved is good... (obviously we should strive
| for the most economic way to save CO2).
| fifticon wrote:
| I think he was trying to demonstratea point with sarcasm
| and a group of one with him in it
| roenxi wrote:
| Your logic is wrong - a Denmark sized group of Chinese
| people is probably all it takes to operate their solar
| panel producing factories.
|
| The reason Denmark can't do anything isn't because there
| are few of them, it is because Denmark isn't a
| significant industrial cluster for energy technology and
| innovation. For example, India has more people than China
| and they aren't in a position to do much unless there is
| some sort of tech breakthrough that hasn't made it to my
| notice.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Denmark basically invented modern wind power and still
| makes a big chunk of it (though China has caught up in
| that area recently).
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Land use is one of the big topics covered by the IPCC:
|
| https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/
| kvgr wrote:
| The food needs to be produced somewhere. If denmark
| exports, then the food will be missing somewhere. So you
| do not fix "climate change". You only fix local effects
| of agriculture. I am not saying it is good or bad. But it
| def makes denmark poorer.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Have they stopped oil production?
| vuxie wrote:
| Specifically on reducing farmland. Denmark is intensly
| cultivated, and the reduction targets the lowest yield
| land that for various reasons were reclaimed over the
| last two centuries. Using the high yield land more
| efficiently is intended.
| mtsr wrote:
| Denmark has a population of 5.8 million and currently
| produces enough to feed 15 million. There's no need for
| imports because of 15% less farmland. Besides, all this
| export only contributes about 1% of GDP. So it's not
| economically important either.
|
| One can even argue that the reduction in environmental
| and climate impact will create room for other industries
| that already are carbon-taxed.
| teitoklien wrote:
| 1. Agriculture is not a machine like consistent harvest
| giver, especially with more climate change (that'll
| happen regardless of emission slowdown), it is good to
| have produce enough to feed 5.8(=6 million approx), a bad
| harvest can bring that 15 million down to 7 million very
| fast.
|
| 2. All produce is not of same quality, 15 million
| people's produce will probably only produce 11-12 million
| produce that is marketable in stores after transporting
| it
|
| 3. Economies of scale matters, going from 15 million
| people's produce to a 10 or 8 million produce doesnt just
| means a linear cost reduction, the price per unit for
| crops also rises, which can potentially make it hard to
| compete with other agro hubs in the Eurozone, dwindling
| Denmark's independent source of food supply over time.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| As you point out, there are several valid reasons to
| subsidise farming. But then subsidise farming, not carbon
| emissions! And while you are at it, use those subsidies
| to encourage farming that is sustainable, both for the
| climate as well as biodiversity.
| jdenning wrote:
| What's the point of a carbon tax if it's balanced by a
| government subsidy?
|
| Edit: Genuinely curious what I'm missing..
| bramblerose wrote:
| The subsidy could be independent from the carbon
| emissions (e.g. by subsidies on the produced goods) while
| the carbon tax isn't, effectively creating an incentive
| to produce in a less carbon intensive manner.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| Low carbon farms balance would be: "low carbon" profit +
| subsidy - small carbon tax
|
| High carbon farms balance would be: "high carbon" profit
| + subsidy - high carbon tax
|
| If ["low carbon" profit - small carbon tax] > ["high
| carbon" profit - high carbon tax] (e.g. if the carbon tax
| is high enough), farms have an incentive to lower their
| carbon emissions.
|
| The subsidy is here to make sure ["low carbon" profit +
| subsidy - small carbon tax] > 0
| jdenning wrote:
| That makes sense - thanks!
| chgs wrote:
| If I can make 1 unit of food for EUR50 and use 50 tons of
| carbon, or make it for EUR60 and use 10 tons of carbon, a
| carbon tax and food subsidy would allow me to sell that
| EUR60 low carbon food for EUR50 and force me to sell the
| high carbon food for EUR60
|
| This gives an economic incentive to use the lower carbon
| method, funded by those who use more carbon, while not
| changing the end price or output.
| JacobJeppesen wrote:
| Just to provide the numbers: in 2030, a tax will be
| introduced of 120 DKK (~16EUR) / ton CO2e, which linearly
| increases each year until it reaches 300 DKK (~40EUR) /
| ton CO2e in 2035. However, the farmers can get subsidies
| for changing their practices and adopting new
| technologies, in order to reduce their emissions. I.e.,
| the government will give you money to change your
| production, so you can minimize the carbon taxes you have
| to pay. There are more technicalities to how it works,
| but that's the gist of it. The important part is that the
| goal is to transition to new technologies and production
| methods, which reduces emissions per unit food produced.
|
| There will be no food subsidy, however, and a rough
| estimate of the increase of food cost is something like
| 1.5%, with beef having the highest increase. Take this
| estimate with a grain of salt though, as it's difficult
| to estimate. An increase in food cost is expected though.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| You tax the carbon (something you want less of) and you
| subsidise something else you want more of. So you might
| end up with the average farmer not having a change of
| costs, but still disincentivising stuff we don't want
| e.g. carbon emissions.
| usrusr wrote:
| And that can be sustained in international crisis:
| farming that is a house of cards highly dependent on
| international supply chains of fertilizer, feedstock and
| fuel won't help you all that much under blockade.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| No-one mentions this when food security is discussed. The
| farmers here in NL use the security excuse too but
| absolutely no-one mentions that their food production is
| directly dependant upon the import of magnitudes higher
| tonnage of feedstock - soya from Brazil - than the meat /
| dairy it produces. Then I'm not even looking at the
| fertilizers / chemicals which are also imported.
| markvdb wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belaruskali comes to
| mind...
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| Isn't that what they are doing? They subsidize the
| farmers separately, and charge a carbon tax separately.
| Even if those are initially the same amount you would
| think that the incentive structure would encourage
| farmers to shift to less c02 methods, as that improves
| profit?
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > A carbon tax will either drive up prices or reduce
| suppliers, increasing prices
|
| Of if there is an equivalent subsidy (i.e. the tax is
| basically redistributed) it would encourage to produce
| less carbon/methane intensive production
| danlitt wrote:
| I am not sure how this responds to the comment you are
| actually responding to. You say,
|
| > Governments pay to keep food cheap > A carbon tax will
| either drive up prices or [drive up prices]
|
| So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays
| either way. Ok. The comment you replied to says
|
| > Currently the public subsidizes the agriculture
| industry by paying for the consequences of the industry's
| carbon emissions.
|
| So the public pays in this case too. More number
| rearranging. Not at all clear why this makes prices
| increase.
|
| So why _do_ you think this implies prices increase? Do
| you think the price of carbon determined by the
| government is too high? Or do you just want to ignore
| this externality until we pay it all at once?
| Spivak wrote:
| We should simply ignore the externality all together
| because we're all paying for it anyway.
|
| Either the subsidies take into account the carbon tax or
| they don't. If they do then it's number rearranging.
| Government gives dollars and then immediately takes some
| of them back, it's a convoluted appropriations bill. If
| they don't then food prices go up which is contrary to
| the government's goal of keeping food cheap at the point
| of sale.
|
| If you want to reward reducing carbon emissions by giving
| additional dollars or paying for more expensive but
| better for the environment equipment then that could
| potentially be effective.
| dwallin wrote:
| Trying to reduce a negative by pumping resources into a
| positive rarely works out as expected and often has
| surprisingly distortionary effects. (see ethanol and corn
| production in the USA)
|
| I'm personally of the opinion we should be doing far more
| tying together of revenue neutral taxes and subsidies
| within an industry. When you want to reduce a negative
| externality you tax that and then redistribute the
| proceeds equitably back across relevant actors. When you
| want to increase a positive externality, you equally tax
| actors and then distribute it asymmetrically according to
| the behavior you want to encourage. Or combine the two
| approaches to address both negative and positive
| externalities in one go.
|
| These approaches allow you to be more targeted, while
| minimizing overall market distortions.
| variadix wrote:
| It's not exactly number rearranging, even if the
| government increases subsidy payments to offset the cost.
| E.g. say gasoline costs twice as much per gallon due to a
| carbon tax, but subsidies are increased proportionally to
| offset the cost increase so that food prices remain
| constant. This still creates an incentive for farmers to
| use "cleaner" forms of energy as the ones that do will
| increase their profit margins. Ultimately the increased
| subsidy is a burden on the tax payer, but in a more
| narrow sense carbon producing farms would be subsidizing
| some of the costs for farms that produce less carbon.
|
| Whether this plays out as intended remains to be seen. I
| think externalities need to be priced in somehow, the
| issue is determining the appropriate cost. If you want
| the market to decide the cost efficiently there needs to
| be some mechanism to tie the two measures together
| (increased environmental quality => lower carbon tax
| rate). I agree however that manipulating the economics of
| food production is dangerous and needs to be done slowly
| and carefully.
| mp05 wrote:
| We can debate the role of subsidies and carbon emissions,
| but framing agriculture as if it's uniquely nefarious
| misses the critical point that we all need to eat.
|
| The industry isn't "choosing carbon" but rather it's
| responding to the immense challenge of feeding billions
| affordably while dealing with slim margins and
| unpredictable conditions. Adjustments require viable,
| scalable alternatives, not just finger-wagging.
|
| I think we focus on supporting innovation rather than
| vilifying an essential industry.
| mmooss wrote:
| Who vilified it?
| fifticon wrote:
| I do :-) Farming 2024 is so consolidated on few big
| operations, that a very small number of people have an
| inordinate amount of influence on how the major part of
| our total land area is managed and used. Most people who
| work in the danish farming industry are reduced to wage
| slaves who have zero influence on how things are run. In
| some ways, we are back to feudalism, in terms of lack of
| influence from the people who do most of the work.
| chgs wrote:
| If I can spend 100k on a tractor cause 100t of pollution
| or 200k on a tractor causing 50t of pollution I will
| obviously choose the firmer tractor as the rest of the
| world pays the price of the extra 50t of pollution.
|
| If the externalities of that carbon generation are priced
| in I end up paying more for the polluting tractor so I
| choose the less polluting tractor and make more money.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| For farmers today, the choice is more stark.
|
| I can only speak to small and medium farms, but if we're
| talking large horsepower cultivators / row farming, It's
| really a choice between keep my old pre-emissions
| diesel/buy a pre-2006 used tractor from
| auctions/marketplace for 50k, or double down and lease a
| 250k-400k new mid-size tractor.
|
| You make it seem like many farmers have choices, but old
| "dirty" tractors are the only financial options for many
| without signing up for indentured servitude to
| JD/Case/etc
| chgs wrote:
| So they externalise their costs and get other people to
| pay?
| RayVR wrote:
| It's also important to note that, at least in this specific
| situation, the effects of those hidden subsidies are
| extremely regressive.
| space_oddity wrote:
| That said, the transition requires thoughtful
| implementation
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin
| margins.
|
| Will it or will farmland value take a dump but remain
| unchanged in use?
|
| I always thought of farmland these days as a use of last
| resort and if it could be marketable for buildings, it's
| already not economically worth it as a farm except
| speculatively
| chgs wrote:
| In the U.K. farmland has a rental value of about PS100 an
| acre but a purchase price over PS10k an acre.
|
| The value in the land isn't in its use (which is getting 1%
| ROI), but in speculation it may be granted permission to be
| converted to housing, or because of tax loopholes.
| blitzar wrote:
| The owner also get capital appreciation / depreciation of
| the land - ~5.7 per cent per annum over the last 100
| years bring the total return to a 6.7% ROI.
|
| Land at the edge of cities and towns where there is a
| _reasonable_ chance of development happening costs orders
| of magnitude more than the average.
|
| The person renting that land then farms it (presumably
| for a profit) for additional ROI.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yes, this came up in the recently closed inheritance tax
| loophole; people were buying "family farms" purely to
| leave to their children while doing the minimum of
| farming.
| chgs wrote:
| Yes speculation and tax avoidance. Neither of which are
| behaviours we want to encourage.
| teekert wrote:
| Depends on the type of agriculture? If it make veggies
| cheaper in comparison to meat, I'm all for it. Hopefully it
| spurs development of sustainable nice tasting protein sources
| ;) (like synthetic meat etc.)
| madmask wrote:
| This is exactly what should not happen. Meat is great,
| especially when grass fed.
| perlgeek wrote:
| ... unless the "meat" being grass-fed is actually cows,
| which produce lots of methane. Not so good for climate
| change, at least if done at scale.
|
| It's never that easy as "Meat is great".
| blitzar wrote:
| We should slaughter everything that produces metheane to
| save the planet.
| valval wrote:
| Cow farts being harmful for the environment is the
| silliest hoax I see repeated over and over.
|
| Spending two minutes reading about the biogenic carbon
| cycle destroys this misconception.
| shafyy wrote:
| I read about the Biogenic Carbon Cycle on the UC Davis
| website:
|
| " _As a by-product of consuming cellulose, cattle belch
| out methane, there-by returning that carbon sequestered
| by plants back into the atmosphere. After about ten
| years, that methane is broken down and converted back to
| CO2. Once converted to CO2, plants can again perform
| photosynthesis and fix that carbon back into cellulose.
| From here, cattle can eat the plants and the cycle begins
| once again. In essence, the methane belched from cattle
| is not adding new carbon to the atmosphere. Rather it is
| part of the natural cycling of carbon through the
| biogenic carbon cycle._ "
|
| According to that logic, burning fossil fuels also is not
| harmful for the environment, because the CO2 eventually
| gets consumed by plants.
| blitzar wrote:
| Unfortunately powerplants dont graze on a field of grass
| shafyy wrote:
| A few of things:
|
| 1) Even if cows would only eat the grass that was there
| (and we would not have converted any forest or other
| vegetation into grazing lands), the methane and CO2 stays
| in the atmosphere for a long time before being used by
| plants again, contributing to the greenhouse effect in
| that time. The reality is, we can only cover a very small
| percentage of the demand with this "3 happy cows on a
| vast pasture" phantasy. Most cow feed is planted
| additionally, often in countries like Brazil, and then
| fed to the cows.
|
| 2) The carbon impact is not the only negative impact of
| the scale of livestock agriculture we run these days. As
| it says in the article, another big impact is
| eutrophication of water bodies.
|
| 3) Just basic physics: Livestock agriculture, especially
| beef, is a very inefficient way of producing protein and
| calories. Have a look at this data:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore
|
| So, please don't come at me with your cute comments. The
| reality is that we have too much livestock agriculture.
| It's not sustainable to feed 8 billion people like this.
| The scientific consesus is clear on this.
| valval wrote:
| The data you present again doesn't take the lifecycle
| into account. Also worth pointing out that protein
| bioavailability and amino acid profiles are ignored.
|
| Unrelated but since you brought the topic up, it would of
| course make sense that releasing vast amounts of CO2 into
| the atmosphere that took millions of years to bind into
| the earth in mere decades might be a bad idea. Then
| again, we're only guessing there as well. We have no clue
| if the world will be better or worse for us to live in 50
| years, and how much of it will be attributable to CO2.
|
| But I digress -- this comment thread was about cow farts
| and the utter silliness of grasping at such straws when
| speaking about an otherwise serious subject like the
| futures of our children.
| shafyy wrote:
| > _Then again, we 're only guessing there as well._
|
| Umm, no, we are not guessing. But I see where this will
| end, so let's stop this discussion right here.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This also ignores the different GHG effects of methane vs
| CO2.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > According to that logic, burning fossil fuels also is
| not harmful for the environment, because the CO2
| eventually gets consumed by plants.
|
| No, the difference in logic is based on the source of the
| CO2. Fossile fuels are burried in the ground and are not
| part of the carbon cycle. By removing them from the
| ground, we are adding new carbon to the carbon cycle
| rather. Coversely, if you burn wood, that carbon was
| (mostly) going to end back up in the carbon cycle and
| you've just sped up it's cycle and increased the portion
| of the cycling carbon that is in the atmosphere.
|
| There are changes we can make to the cycle that do affect
| global warming (cutting down all the forests and killing
| all the kelp would greatly decrease the capacity of the
| cycle). Conversely, we can expand the carbon cycle by
| planting trees (that actually survive and form forests.)
|
| However, you can't fix global warming by expanding the
| carbon cycle because you can't scale the natural cycle to
| match all the new carbon that is being added to it by
| buring fossile fuels. There are only two solutions,
| adding less carbon to the cycle by burning fewer fossile
| fuels and finding ways to remove carbon from the cycle by
| sequeresting it in long term ways.
|
| Carbon taxes can fail to actually cause change if they
| allow fossil fuel burning to be offset by temporary bumps
| to the carbons cycle capacity because this doesn't really
| solve the problem and at best slightly delay it.
|
| Cow "farts" (actually burps) are kinda the opposite, the
| methane is already part of the carbon cycle. However
| methane is a way more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 so
| by increasing amount of carbon cycle that is amospheric
| methane you are accelerating global warming until the
| methane decays into CO2.
| madmask wrote:
| I can't believe this is a real problem. Refineries are
| bombed and stay on fire for days, some places in the
| world light on fire rubbish all the time, plenty of
| inefficiencies in heating, transportation, etc.. and the
| problem is.. cow farts.. yes sure
| pjc50 wrote:
| If you actually measure it, then yes.
|
| https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/
| 492...
|
| "Total GHG emissions from livestock supply chains are
| estimated at 7.1 gigatonnes CO2 -eq per annum for the
| 2005 reference period. They repre- sent 14.5 percent of
| all human-induced emissions using the most recent IPCC
| estimates for total an- thropogenic emissions (49
| gigatonnes CO 2 -eq for the year 2004; IPCC, 2007)"
|
| Surprisingly there are fewer cows than people, but
| there's still a billion cows, and a billion of anything
| adds up quickly.
|
| That's not to say that the other things aren't important
| as well. Gas flaring from refineries is a pure waste that
| should be drastically curtailed.
| shafyy wrote:
| Meat from grass-fed cows emit more GHG per kg than
| industry-framed meat. Industry farming is efficient.
| space_oddity wrote:
| It's a bold move, but like you, I'm not sure the potential
| consequences have been fully addressed
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Carbon taxes are by far the most effective way to get down
| CO2 emissions.
|
| But I'm doubtful that implementing them only for one industry
| in one small country is very helpful.
| hyeonwho4 wrote:
| Right. Why not carbon tax all industries (and imports),
| then subsidize select essentials like pumping water and
| growing agricultural goods?
| stainablesteel wrote:
| I disagree, carbon taxes seem to be the best way to ensure
| your country starts to outsource all of it's carbon
| producing activity to less developed countries who do a
| worse job containing their emissions. This has been
| happening in europe for quite some time with the
| manufacturing of their wind turbines iirc. It's a super
| carbon heavy emission to produce them, so the europeans
| have them made elsewhere to make it look like their
| emissions are super low, which is essentially a lie for
| politicians to sell environment-crazed voters.
| space_oddity wrote:
| It's always better to go to the source to avoid
| misinterpretation
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| So effectively offshoring carbon production to places that
| don't care?
| delusional wrote:
| No. The document spells out that denmark intends to remain a
| "strong" producer of agricultural products by increasing the
| yield from other, less ecologically damaging, farming areas.
|
| You should read the introduction.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| They write these things all the time while continually
| outsourcing their carbon emissions to other countries.
| Follow the supply chains.
| drcwpl wrote:
| Thank you for the links and clarification, it makes more sense
| now
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| > introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural
| industry
|
| Polish farmers are going to eat you alive for this.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| "They're in Danish, but upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and
| you'll have a much better source"
|
| Eh, people don't know that Google Translate can translate
| documents (PDF, Doc etc.) as well?!
| logtrees wrote:
| Tree logging is one of my favorite new jobs that will exist in
| the future.
| jojobas wrote:
| There are already tree harvesters that start with a standing
| tree and end on a ready log with waste mulched. It's only a
| matter of time it's AI controlled.
|
| The future has no jobs.
| logtrees wrote:
| Oh yeah that far into the future is singularity so at that
| point, what we're all doing is just interfacing with the AI.
| :) But I think that's still a while away, most likely? Or who
| knows, maybe sooner lol.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Incidentally this is one of the approaches described in Kim
| Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, a novel on climate change
| (more about the political ramifications of it than the ecological
| impacts). Interesting read.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Before anyone jumps into this book I would caution against it.
| This book had many very cool ideas and moments. The way it
| played out felt very "real". However, in the end there was very
| little actual story and was very boring at times. I actively
| dislike Neal Stephenson but if you want a near-future climate
| story I would recommend Termination Shock over Ministry For The
| Future. Just a random internet person's two cents.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I agree it doesn't have much of a story. It reads much more
| like a non-fictional recounting of events, but provides a lot
| of food for thought about how things might unfold. Just don't
| approach it like your typical novel.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Sounds a bit like The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkein. If you
| finish reading LotR and then try to read this book, you'll
| be in for a rude awakening.
| photonthug wrote:
| Since we're here.. These are probably everyone's top 2 eco-
| punk novels but the rest of an appropriate top 10 list is way
| more contentious, and imho sources like goodreads or whatever
| will always have many items that aren't really even in the
| genre.
|
| So I'll offer the "metatropolis" anthology, which as a bonus
| has an audiobook version read by the Star Trek cast. Anyone
| got anything else?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Thanks! I'm generally not into short fiction, but I'll give
| this one a go.
|
| One thing I like about The Ministry for the Future, is that
| it doesn't focus on the "apocalyptic" aspect (i.e., the
| usual fighting for survival), but rather examines the
| political and economic aspects.
| RayVR wrote:
| I also read KSR's book. It was interesting at times. However,
| the research on the financial topics, including the central
| banks and "global financiers" was quite bad.
|
| I don't recall the glaring errors right now, however, given
| this is an area where I (at least once upon a time) was an
| expert, it was quite bad to read this and realize there are
| likely other serious errors in topics with which I am not at
| all familiar.
|
| While this is of course a work of fiction, getting verifiable
| facts wrong, intentionally or not, ruins it for me.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I thought the idea of a "carbon coin" issued by central
| banks (the primary financial theme of the book) was on
| fairly solid ground. I'd be interested to know what you
| found implausible about it.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| The main thing that irked me is that the book focuses on
| technical solutions as if that's what we're missing (carbon
| coin! pumping water from under ice sheets! etc.) but
| completly glosses over the actual consequences.
|
| To piggyback on the rest of this thread, people like meat
| and don't want to stop eating lots of meat. People are not
| going to like things that make them stop eating meats,
| whether it's governement buying out producers, a carbon
| tax, a carbon quota, whatever.
|
| "Ministry of the Future" is full of stuff like "and the
| central bankers could reshape the economy, so they did by
| doing XYZ" as if "XYZ" was important but barely discusses
| the fact that "reshaping the economy" might upset lots of
| people. How were they convinced to give up air travel,
| cars, etc?
| psiops wrote:
| I think in the book those people were convinced to give
| up air travel by the eco-terrorists known as the Children
| of Kali shooting commercial airliners out of the sky, and
| not shooting down cleaner alternatives like airships. A
| persuasive argument, to be sure.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > People are not going to like things that make them stop
| eating meats, whether it's governement buying out
| producers, a carbon tax, a carbon quota, whatever.
|
| I think the point of the book is that when the
| consequences are serious enough, it pushes significant
| social and behavioral change that people would not
| consider or accept otherwise. It's hard for us to imagine
| how society could actually change so drastically, but
| when people have been through a crisis of immense
| proportions, they think differently. India completely
| transforming its governance structure seems implausible
| but only because we haven't experienced 20M people dying
| at once from a preventable cause. These kind of events
| are triggers for social revolutions. We've seen this in
| history.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| Sure, but then the story is about 1. the Indian heatwave
| and 2. the transformation; whether the transformation
| came about through carbon coins or carbon quotas or
| whatever is a detail. But it's the focus of the book.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Right; that was my takeaway.
|
| the eco-terrorism was an interesting aspect that I hadn't
| thought of before, but actually seems quite plausible
| silenced_trope wrote:
| > I actively dislike Neal Stephenson
|
| Why is that?
|
| I really liked Snow Crash and Anathem. Reamde was okay. I
| don't remember much about Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I've never felt that in author is wasting my time while
| reading a book until him. He desperately needs a different,
| or any, editor. He manages to cram a 400 page story into
| 700 pages. Just non-stop side tangents and long passage
| after long passage that goes no where and means nothing to
| the story. It's fine to have stuff like that to build a
| world but this he goes overboard. If a character needs to
| get groceries, he'll turn one sentence about needing to go
| get groceries into three pages of nothing about how grocery
| stores work. I find it extremely boring at times, and after
| you read one of his books and get clued into this, it's
| hard to read a second book and stay interested.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Shifting production to less regulated countries like China is
| not going to fix climate change.
| sentrysapper wrote:
| IIRC in _Ministry for the Future_ it was 50% of all land was
| reserved. 10% is a good start though for conservation efforts.
| thecleaner wrote:
| How will it impact food supply ?
| 9front wrote:
| From https://cphpost.dk/2024-11-22/news/round-up/we-are-in-
| crisis...
|
| "Danish Crown, one of Denmark's largest Danish meat producer, is
| facing significant financial challenges as pig deliveries to its
| processing plants have dropped in the 2023/24 financial year."
| titaniumtown wrote:
| Meat is too cheap and resource intensive. A market correction
| has been incoming for decades.
| jamil7 wrote:
| Good.
| mrweasel wrote:
| On the other hand Tican is doing pretty well and are hiring,
| while Danish Crown is firing. So at least some of the pigs
| which would normally go to Danish Crown, is being sent to Tican
| instead. Tican is also giving farmers a better price per pig.
| https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/seneste/mens-danish-crown-lider-lo...
|
| Danish Crowns problems aren't entirely due to external factors,
| part of it is also that Danish Crowns is struggling to run its
| business properly.
| jacobgorm wrote:
| Because the pigs get transported alive to Germany and Poland to
| get slaughtered, as wages are lower there. Denmark, with a
| population under six million, still produces 32 million pigs
| per annum.
| throwuo wrote:
| America should learn from this
| titaniumtown wrote:
| This upcoming administration won't though.
| nicman23 wrote:
| i read 1B and my mind immediately went to llama. i have a problem
| Refusing23 wrote:
| It's not exactly true
|
| the government will offer to buy the land from farmers etc.
|
| but they can just say 'no'
| batushka5 wrote:
| And in case they choose "no", that carbon tax for farm animals
| help to think second time.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| In case they farm carbon intensive animals like cows, yes.
| For the pigs farmers no so much. However those pigs farms
| totally destroy Denmark fishing areas which traditionally
| feed the population.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Yeah, it's much better for farming to be moved to countries
| with less labour and environmental regulations.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| That concern has already been discussed
| https://www.regeringen.dk/media/13261/aftale-om-et-groent-
| da...
| iagooar wrote:
| Let me get this right. Farmers, who are already struggling to
| meet ends, will have to pay CO2 tax in order to produce FOOD that
| we all need to SURVIVE and not starve to death? What diabolical
| plan is that?
|
| I am the a huge fan of forests and spend a lot of time in the
| woods, but man, more trees will not feed us.
| edhelas wrote:
| A big percentage of the land usage are to grow crops to feed
| animals to feed us.
|
| If we bring back our meat consumption (especially beef) to
| something more balanced for our health we can free-up a massive
| amount of surface.
|
| I'm not saying that everyone should be vegetarian or vegan. I'm
| following the notes of the IPCC and studies that says that we
| can, and should, reduce some of our meat consumption and get
| those proteines from all the many other sources (peas,
| tofu...).
|
| Beef is the coal of food. Lets progress to something more
| efficient, dense and good for our environment and our health.
| jacobgorm wrote:
| They are already massively subsidized and this will only
| increase their subsidies. In Denmark farmers control government
| similarly to the way big oil abd gunmakers control government
| in the US.
| fifticon wrote:
| another point is: since WW2, denmark has one of the highest, if
| not THE highest, percentages of area under agriculture. During
| WW2, we temporarily allowed agriculture on very poor farmland. It
| was meant to cease after the war, but our strong farmer lobbyists
| kept extending the permission.. So it is not about giving up
| 'good farm land', it is about stopping abusive agriculture which
| is only possible with extreme chemistry. Source: am Old dane.
| space_oddity wrote:
| Interesting historical perspective
| brodouevencode wrote:
| What percentage of output is accounted for in the lower tier
| (not good) farmland? If the land is truly suboptimal the
| additional costs will not scale with the reduction of output.
| fifticon wrote:
| I'm sorry I'm not directly answring your question. But part
| of the answer is, that we are not really intending to fix the
| CO2 issue. A/the major point with the initiative is that we
| have effectively killed marine/water life in our local
| rivers, lakes and near coastal areas, primarily by the
| leakage of fertilizer from low-yield farming areas (algae
| remove oxygen from our water, having thus killed off marine
| life). Because of this, we are no longer discussing the
| economics of it - once you kill off all marine life, the
| price is 'always' too high (the way we see it..) So, it might
| help or not help CO2, but our immediate concern is making it
| possible to have life in our local water bodies, and more
| oxygen than 0%. I'm describing it a bit crude, but this
| should paint the general picture. If we run out of food and
| starve, we can return to killing allmarine life again :-)
| space_oddity wrote:
| The 43 billion kroner earmarked for land acquisition suggests
| serious commitment, but I wonder how this will impact small
| farmers and rural communities in the long run...
| shafyy wrote:
| I think a good chart to keep in mind about this discusion is this
| one: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore
|
| Beef emits 49.89 kg CO2 eq. per 100 grams of protein. Tofu 1.98
| kg.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Be paranoid of how they will define 'forest'. Over here they
| included e.g. a middle lane divider with a small sapling every 30
| meters as counting as a full 'forest'.
| incomingpain wrote:
| Most of europe agreed to do this. I eagerly hope all of the EU
| immediately follows through with these commitments.
|
| Lucky denmark for being able to just be anti-farmer. France and
| other countries have to choose a major city to demolish to meet
| their commitments.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| The west is engaging in managed decline and moving production to
| places with less regulation and much worse environmental and
| social impacts. Why? What sense does this make? You would rather
| have some Muslim slave in China make your stuff while poisoning
| the ocean than make it in Denmark?
| guiriduro wrote:
| There are such a thing as tariffs. I think it makes sense that
| we both improve our local environment and adopt a carrot/stick
| approach to businesses in other localities that do/don't do the
| same. Same environmental standards with independent audit
| should grant (eco) tariff-free access. Likewise, wasteful
| environmentally destructive exporter = heavy tariff.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| This is not how tariffs are being used and the actual reality
| is that manufacturing and production is being transferred to
| places with much worse environmental and labour practices
| that are also antagonistic to the west. Germany "greeniefied"
| their economy by just outsourcing energy production to Russia
| and in the processes ensured 10,000 of Ukranians had to die.
| This needs to stop. Nobody wins from it, everyone loses.
| oezi wrote:
| Come on. It is not Germany's fault that Putin is a madman.
| Choosing cheap gas over more expensive gas, oil and dirty
| coal was a win-win. Until Putin was too irrational.
|
| Btw.: more than 50.000 Ukrainian soldiers are dead by the
| latest estimates I have read.
| boredumb wrote:
| Climate obsessed people are probably in it for the right reasons
| but are hysterically annoying from any third party perspective.
| Keep telling people that cow burps are what is driving bad
| weather and you can keep being baffled that "deniers" hate any of
| the solutions you come up with there after. People hate pollution
| across the board, people hate theoretical models of climate
| effects based on research divorced from reality that predict
| weather in 30 years to be a doomsday scenario because of
| something so obviously mundane while ignoring outsourcing
| manufacturing to china and india to bus, boat and flight. At this
| rate we may one day in our lifetime be able to have all the pigs
| and cattle raised in china and fly them on business class to
| europe in order to fight the weather via carbon credits.
| option wrote:
| I am amazed by the idea (also popular among many in California)
| that one can "outsource" climate change to poor, developing
| countries by not producing for yourself
| tayistay wrote:
| Google says: "California is the largest agricultural exporter
| in the United States"
| option wrote:
| California imports about 30% of its energy from other states.
| [1]
|
| More importantly, most of the gas Californias consume is
| imported as well.
|
| I guess its OK to drill and build coal electric plants as
| well as it is elsewhere. /s
|
| [1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-much-energy-
| california-...
| fuzztester wrote:
| Sort of related:
|
| IIRC, I had read somewhere a while ago that Denmark was going to
| convert to fully organic farming.
|
| So, just now, I googled for a relevant phrase and found this as
| one of the results:
|
| https://ecobnb.com/blog/2017/07/denmark-organic/
|
| This was the search I used:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=Denmark+doing+fully+organic+...
| woodpanel wrote:
| Even though climate-wise, the need for trees is overrated IMO -
| recently the list of benefits that forests provide has been
| extended:
|
| - More forests protect a country against sudden supply chain
| crises. It's is just a small protection (and only for the
| commodity wood) but still
|
| - Forests are the first line of defense in drone warfare as we've
| seen in the War in Ukraine, where maneuvers are often
| concentrating on, and gains are counted in, Tree-Lines.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| I can not emphasize this enough, we need more and better trees.
| jillyboel wrote:
| What will the united states do? Keep shitting out CO2 with no
| regard to the climate?
| xkbarkar wrote:
| The greyed out downvoted comments in this thread makes it look
| like that dreaded echo chamber that must not be named here.
|
| HN threads are usually much better quality than this ( anyone
| with opposed ideas are downvoted to oblivion ).
|
| Rubbish thread. Nothing to learn here.
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