Gassy cows and pigs will face a carbon tax in Denmark, a world first
apnews.comInsane to try to blame ruminants for climate change.
Not so insane given that they are far more numerous due to agriculture than they would be as wild animals. This ultimately is a human-caused problem not a natural one. And there is the issue that what we feed livestock affects how much gas they produce. It's a serious research topic
https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/why-do-cattle-produce-m...
The us cattle inventory is like 80 million or so head, and the peak wild bison population was estimated to be between 30-60 million, so its more, but not a crazy amount more.
Denmark produces around 29mio pigs per annum on a tiny k look and area inhabited by less than 6mio humans.
> And there is the issue that what we feed livestock affects how much gas they produce.
So maybe that is the problem. /s
But, hey, why not fix anorher problem and blame the first one. /s
Thank you for raising this valid issue. Ruminant methane output has been reduced by 98.8% with the addition of a compound from seaweed to the animals food. You are a small bit behind the science but thanks to people like you raising awareness we solved the problem!
This is a potential solution, but the problem isn't solved until the market actually adopts it.
Without a financial incentive to follow through (for example, a carbon tax on gassy animals) to offset the added cost of feed supplements, then most farms won't see the business justification (carbon footprint is largely externalized).
Sorry to double post this but you can think of it as being similar to a human taking a cheap charcoal tablet with their food to reduce flatulance.
Only a small part of the animals feed needs to be seaweed and thankfully it is one of the easiest and fastest growing organisms on the planet. So it’s extremely cheap for the industry to adopt compared to losses related to carbon taxes and loss of market share.
That means absolutely nothing until the majority of cattle farms incorporate the supplement into their operations.
Knowing a potential solution is not the same as solving a problem, unless you are performing an academic exercise.
A little difficult to parse your argument. It is the lack of implementation of the cheap solution that you are worried about and raising as a problem.
Do not worry.
When enough pressure is applied on the farmers thanks to people like you , the solution (seaweed) we have found will be implemented. We have already done the difficult part and found a solution to the problem.
And I am sure that all of the fat people (myself included) are thrilled that a thermodynamic approach to weight loss is a proven solution, despite the fact that I have not had much success applying it.
I am also strongly reassured that XSS is a solved problem when using content security, and climate change has been solved by mass reforestation efforts.
The difficult part of a technical solution is not inventing it (although those are rightfully hard problems); the real challenge is in driving adoption of the solution.
The industry will push back on this solution for a broad range of reasons:
1. Cost - what is the cost of both the supplement and the labour required to administer it, or the differential on unfortified vs. fortified feeds.
2. Marketing - how will you communicate to folks that they should do this?
3. Customer Satisfication - does the supplement meaningfully affect any of the metrics for customer satisfaction (flavour, texture, etc of the meat).
4. Availability - retooling and spinning up the aquaculture required to produce the supplements
5. Viability - what is the ecological impact of the proposed seaweed solution, and is it a net positive.
I spent a chunk of my career as a researcher, developing protoypes and proof of concept stuff. One of the greatest things of that time in my career was developing something to 80% and throwing it over the fence, which let me ignore all of that hard work and call my project a win. One of the worst things is that out of that multi-year period of experimentation almost none of the work I did actually yielded unique products or improvements (although the tools I built did drive improvements to address issues and flaws found).
Assuming that you did the research, your work was definitely successful in finding a solution. You have not solved the problem, and the hard work is very much ahead.
You are certainly putting in a lot of effort in this discussion and I thank you for that. I would prefer a discussion done in good faith however.
I say that only as it seems you have added paragraphs in all of your previous comments to retroactively protect yourself from points I later raised in my replies and you also seem to have deleted your paragraph that enough seaweed was not being produced and so you believe the problem is not solved.
Seaweed production is in line with current demand. When the market places enough pressure on Farmers to adopt the solution then seaweed production will naturally increase. Seaweed is one of the easiest and fastest growing organisms in the world.
Your most recent arguments regarding Marketing etc being a problem. You are scraping the barrel now looking for problems.
I haven't added or edited anything but spelling errors. It was another commenter who raised concern about scaling production, my point was that the viability of this as method for methane reduction also needed to determine if the aquaculture needed to produce the seaweed would be a net benefit from a climate change perspective.
The aquaculture needed to produce seaweed has to be a net benefit now?
Net zero is not satanic enough?
It is odd that you are so hellbent on finding additional problems and moving the goalposts on this. When billions of people in the world are starving.
Seaweed is one of the the easiest and fastest growing organisms in the world and there have been many threads here pushing for it to even be used as food for humans.
> The aquaculture needed to produce seaweed has to be a net benefit now?
No. The concern is about the overall impact of the aquaculture required to scale this seaweed feed supplements production to have a meaningful impact on the methane production from livestock. If you ramp up seaweed production, and reduce methane, but the overall process (aquaculture, processing, distribution) produces anything but than a net negative in GHG emissions, then the only value of the process is greenwashing cattle ranching.
I am not hellbent on finding additional problems, the point is that a lab based solution doesn't solve the problem, and most of your comments have ignored the very real market realities. I would also wager that your opinions are not necessarily grounded in reality - I chatted with my brother, who was a pig farmer for nearly two decades and is still involved in agriculture in both farming and ranching, and my cousin who runs a very large ranch in Manitoba. Some of the concerns I brought up in my previous point about market pushback are summaries of the questions and concerns they raised, although they both thought it was really interesting because they are both especially interested in sustainable farming practices.
Switching gears because you moved the goalposts, nothing I have said has anything to do with starvation or hunger. Since you brought it up, it is almost absolutely certain that building technology that mitigates, partially or wholly, the environmental impact of cattle farms actually exacerbates world hunger. The simple reason that is that the labour and resources that go into producing meat for human consumption would produce significantly more human consumable calories if we shifted those to plant based alternatives (up to and including feeding people seaweed).
Ok but a “plants only” diet is not a sustainable or natural diet for humans. Humans are not currently enmasse eating a carnivore diet either.
So you are putting forward the argument and problem - that we are currently omnivores and we should not be eating meat , due to environmental concerns and because it lowers the quantity of food we can produce overall.
You are saying it would be better if we all became vegans, so that higher quantities of food could be produced.
You think this is the solution.
The problem with going to an extreme position like you have done is that people will overall get sick from this unnatural diet.
We see thousands of people on Reddit have cured their “incurable auto immune” diseases by going carnivore and not ingesting any plants. After they previously ate too much plants and damaging their intestinal lining resulting in natural plant toxins created by plants to stop insects eating them , pesticides , fungicides, herbicides , glysophate etc leaking from the gut into their blood causing the cykotine response by the immune system and a build up of these toxins around the body (joints mostly with specifically it being the knees for rheumatoid arthritis and such).
Meat is clean of toxins as like in our own body , the animals bodies keep the blood clean of it , any toxins in the blood would cause the animal itself to get sick.
This is not the case at all regarding plants which are full of an assortment of toxins.
We have proof from thousands of individual case reports and published medical papers now that plants are making people sick. The medical establishment simply has not yet put all the findings together or discussed it properly.
Have some common sense. Vegans are sickly, weak and over time they turn into cucks (our personality Is just a manifestation of our physical state). Carnivores are strong, fit predators.
You’re talking about marketing problems , that’s a real marketing problem for you. Try selling this vegan and bugs diet to the masses. These are secondary problems (marketing) that don’t really have a place in our discussion.
Wow, you kind of went off the deep end there. I am not a vegetarian, nor do I promote a meat free lifestyle. You made an assumption because I said something you didn't like - a simple fact about the food production.
You see thousands of people on Reddit carrying on about being carnivores, I'll raise you 9% of India's population being vegan (that would be more than 125 million people), and another 40% of the population of India being some type of vegetarian. Find better data for your claims about the health impacts of not eating meat.
One other thing -
> Meat is clean of toxins as like in our own body
Uh huh. That's why farms routinely send meat to labs routinely to test for parasites and diseases, and mercury is a huge problem when consuming fish.
> Carnivores are strong, fit predators.
Eating meat does not make a predator; in the context of diet, if you are not hunting for your prey, you are a scavenger, consuming the remains of others kills (unless you think those Redditors you cited stalking the aisles of your local supermarket for the best deals counts as hunting).
The only reason I responded to this was because someone else might accidentally read your garbage post and be swayed by it.
A citation for those who (as I) didn't know about this:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26388081.2022.2...
Don't know how widely adopted this is.
It’s not a solved problem. This is a hyperbole less accurate than saying vehicle emissions are a solved problem because EV’s exist. Seaweed is not a widespread additive in cattle feed and global production of seaweed would need to drastically increase to handle demand. There is also a plethora of other factors to consider with the increased farming of seaweed and the dietary changes that make adding seaweed to a cows diet anything but a “solved problem”
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/arti...
You can think of it as similar to a human taking a cheap charcoal tablet with their food to reduce flatulance. They will not take such a tablet until they are aware they have gastritis. When enough pressure is applied the solution will be implemented.
Only a small part of the animals feed needs to be seaweed and thankfully it is one of the easiest and fastest growing organisms on the planet. So it’s extremely cheap for the industry to adopt the solution when compared to facing losses related to carbon taxes and loss of market share.
Sorry, edited my post while you were replying.
Your underestimating the amount of food cows need to eat a day and likely overestimating global seaweed production in relation to even supply only 1% of cattle feed.
89 millions cows in the US alone eating eating 20+ pounds of food a day is 890,000 tons or nearly 325 million tons per year. That’s per day. Global production of seaweed was 358,200 tons in 2019. Only about 11% of what would be needed to be included in 1% of feed of every cow in America. And that wouldn’t leave any seaweed to be used for any of its other uses or the millions of other cows around the world.
https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-cows-in-...
https://beef.unl.edu/cattleproduction/forageconsumed-day
https://fppn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s43014-022-0...
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/0990814231045205...
Seaweed grows very quickly. The historical production was much higher a hundred years ago, but there's been relatively little need for seaweed in recent decades. It would not be hard to farm more of it, if there were demand.
> Seaweed grows very quickly
This is like saying that trees grow quickly.
"Seaweed" means thousands of different species. When we see a cluster of seaweeds in a rock some of them are not even in the same kingdom than their neighbors. Its life cycles and chemical properties are totally different.
The truth is that some species are really picky and some take decades to regrow after harvested. Just because brown seaweeds are fast growers does not mean that red seaweeds are.
> there's been relatively little need for seaweed in recent decades
You may not be aware of how much of our everyday stuff includes algae. The demand of toothpaste has not fell. I would dare to speculate that the demand of laboratory stuff is probably higher than ever since Covid.
> This is like saying that trees grow quickly. [...] The truth is that some species are really picky and some take decades to regrow after harvested.
It's more like saying weeds grow quickly. If it were slow-growing, I would probably just call it macroalgae. In any case, I was under the impression from previous discussions that the particular variety needed for the supplement grew quickly.
> You may not be aware of how much of our everyday stuff includes algae. The demand of toothpaste has not fell.
The demand for alternative sources of potash in Allied nations, however, has declined dramatically since the end of WW1. They required a tremendous amount of kelp for manufacturing explosives.
> Ruminant methane output has been reduced by 98.8% with the addition of a compound from seaweed to the animals food
I had debunked this yet a lot of times. This is a dead road and will fail. With the current data available is obvious that is a false solution.
I would strongly suggest to read the article with a critical mind
You sound like a shill from snopes.com with your “debunk” argument. If you have already proved this to be “debunked” (please use the correct word - false) then copy and paste your findings here and provide citations
This isn't blaming ruminants for climate change. It's just proper accounting.
It's not ruminants that have to pay the tax.
They emit 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. Directly - as farts. You drastically underestimate the scale of the meat problem.
Not insane.
Methane.is what the.problem is.
The serious denialism that avoids actual science on HN is astounding.
Farming contributes to a third of Denmark’s CO2 emission.
We can phrase anything in a negative light. Food which fuels 100% of Denmark’s population causes only 33% of Denmark’s emissions. This is a wonderful achievement.
But consider that if they eliminate all food it would reduce their carbon to 0.
> Food which fuels 100% of Denmark’s population causes only 33% of Denmark’s emissions.
Are you saying that Danish eat a 0% of fish, seafood and vegetables?
Wild-caught fish are likely not included in that statisic, but vegetables surely would be. Growing vegetables is the quintessential example of farming.
I'm not sure if farmed fish would be counted, since that is not traditional agriculture.
But fishing still burns a lot of diesel. If this statistics don't take in account Denmark emissions from activities in the sea or from commerce fleet out of Denmark, they are probably misleading to wrong results.
And if we take in account that Greenland acts as a buffer in this sense (they don't have probably a lot of cows, so the emissions effect should be diluted). This perfect "one third" statistical value seems just a raw assumption, or just invented for filling a report hiding the lack of data.
If we want to bet for a future, we have to be extra careful to not just repeat slogans, dogmas or cite incomplete studies, even if they say what we want to hear. This only will delay the necessary measures
What makes that wonderful? What do you think the #s would look like if Denmark wasn't one of the top pork exporting countries?
> “We have succeeded in landing a compromise on a CO2 tax, which lays the groundwork for a restructured food industry -– also on the other side of 2030,” its head Maria Reumert Gjerding said after the talks in which they took part.
Yikes. All this is is a successful attempt by the ruling class to convince the subjugated to give up even more rights and freedoms. “It’s for your own good” on steroids. If you want to see clear proof of this, just note that on the strict numbers, this practice won’t meaningfully move the needle on the climate issue. In fact, will it even move the needle overall? Once you feed the animals better, namely with some seaweed incorporated into cow feed in particular, this total emission from these sources drops by some 80% or more. But of course that solution won’t do, because the entire point of these co2 laws is to have more control over people’s lives rather than to solve problems. If climate change ended tomorrow, these same people would try to push the same laws because the intention is to control the masses and to tax people more to feed the bureaucracy machine.
People should be wary of hall monitors and bureaucrats aiming for “restructuring” of food systems, especially for moral posturing reasons. In history that tends to lead to starvation.
> the entire point of these co2 laws is to have more control over people’s lives rather than to solve problems.
Interesting take, so the absolutely massive subsidies on meat that completely change the overall affordability of meat vs vegetables isn’t a problem. But trying to renormalize costs so the environmental impact of meat isn’t hidden away in subsidies is “control the people”.
If we removed all subsidies tomorrow the problem would go away as everyone just naturally cut 90% of their meat consumption because of the cost.
Subsidize produce too. The point of the subsidies is to normalize reliable access to food. Otherwise during low seasons, farmers would get wiped out and it would compromise food security.
So now they’ll just import the meat from places with even less environmental concern.
Not that it matters as the people who support these types of broad punitive measures are mostly just virtue seeking idiots who only care about complex issues to the extent it can be used to advertise their own feelings of moral superiority.
Most meat produced by Danish farmers gets exported to countries like China. Only a small fraction gets consumed by Danes in Denmark. The pigs are transported alive to meat packing plants in Germany and Poland where wages are lower, and most farm hands in Denmark are cheap imported labor who often live under slave live conditions.
As a Ukrainian growing up and still living in Denmark and who has spoken to other Ukrainians working at those farms, I have never heard of “slave like conditions”. I’ve heard of hard manual labour and occasional disagreements with the owners of the farms though
Here is example https://fagbladet3f.dk/nu-faar-han-efterbetalt-loen/
This is an egregious ad-hominem attack, which is both against HN guidelines and a failure of rational discourse.
The people who want to reduce pollution most likely just want to reduce the harms associated with that pollution, not your wacky accusation of their motives. And even if someone's motives were some weird bad thing, if their actions are good (eg, helping us all live better lives in a lower-pollution world) that would still be a good thing.
I think most here can see the people pushing climate problems keep moving the goal posts and seem hallbent on just making it more difficult to produce food.
When we post solutions to their problems to areas of a well rounded discussion, they enter into a backs against the wall mindset , posting paragraphs and paragraphs back to us with any wacky counter arguments and not picking of the solution they can think of.
In this thread it was “we don’t have enough seaweed” and then they went trawling the internet for opinion pieces to try and back themselves up and reply within minutes.
A person with good intentions and who was genuinely interested in solving the problem would take more time and research papers that support and go against the solution and make a more balanced response to the good news they were given.
There are billions of people starving in this world. The parent comment is correct to question the motives of these people. I get the impression these people are dressing up satanism or communism as green policies. The same smell we all get when people push absurb woke policies.
I understand the "why", but there are like 8 billion people, I lost count, shouldn't gassy people be taxed also ?
I guess it is a way to reduce meat consumption. But I think there are far better places to look, Oil Industry and use of fossils (ie plastics) then Cows and Pigs. But no Government wants to do the hard thing because the pols will loose their jobs in the next election.
People (even "gassy" people) produce very little methane, which is the primary biological cause of global warming.
>But I think there are far better places to look, Oil Industry and use of fossils (ie plastics) then Cows and Pigs. But no Government wants to do the hard thing because the pols will loose their jobs in the next election.
This is talking about Denmark. They certainly haven't forgotten about oil and plastic. They have very aggressive taxation on ICE cars and were one of the first countries to ban free plastic bags.
Are there any reliable numbers on the holistic impact of ruminants? All of the carbon they emit came from the atmosphere via their plant diets, and a huge volume of that carbon is sequestered in the soil via their excrement. Ruminants help the soil, as opposed to modern agriculture which is largely reliant on fossil fuel derived fertilizer.
I have yet to see a paper that models this. Most of the estimates are purely based on output, which seems disingenuous at best.
This is propaganda from the livestock lobby that has been disproved again and again. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/15/beef-f...
What is propaganda? I was asking for a proper carbon model, not a link to an opinion piece.
In Denmark the pigs are fed soy imported from areas of the world where rainforests had to be cut down to make room for production. The short distance between Danish fields and sea, which is no where greater than 50kms, means most fertilizer from the pigs runs off into the sea, causing algae blooms that kill all other marine life.
Thats not really what I asked.
But in this situation would you not be better off taxing the soy imports and fining waste outflow?
In practice non-western countries will keep on using fossil fuels to enable their development and nothing will stop them till they burn the last drop of oil.
Denmark is a tiny country and their emissions are frankly, negligible.
So, just another emotional decision from western politicians.
If you are spending 10$ a day on Starbucks and your net after a month is -1000$ sure, cutting the coffee won’t save your budget, but that’s no reason not to cut it, and it’s not “just an emotional decision”.
The idea that no individual small change will ever solve the whole problem so we should just ignore it completely is a childish emotional reaction to the fact that changes have to happen.
Well. Like every analogy, this one doesn't capture the issue.
You see, our biggest issue right now is that despite all efforts from the west, we (as in we the world) is not ramping down or fossil fuel usage significantly and on the contrary, we can expect it to keep on growing.
In the past, given the disparity of power between the G-7 and the rest of the world, we could rely more or less on diplomatic pressure to keep the developed countries more or less inline on this global effort, but, right now, our capacity has been diminished on this front.
And the problem with decisions like that, and other stupid ones like the insistence on renewables as the panacea, to the detriment of real solutions like Nuclear energy, we are increasing our costs, because no matter how much PR you do about LCOE, the real hard fact is that renewables are fucking expensive in a system-wide based opposed to the fairy-tale world of LCOE, and this is ensuring the west is less competitive and thus less powerful. The reason for that, I am afraid, is beyond the current midwit zeitgeist, so I won't elaborate more, but it is fact easily proven by analyzing energy costs for consumers viz. penetration of renewables in a given market.
So, you see, individual small changes are not always positive, because sometimes small changes have unexpected side effects that their proponents rarely take into account.
Right or wrong, the developing world thinks that they are not responsible for most of the excess carbon on our atmosphere and think that if we became rich by spewing gigatons of carbon, it is only fair they have the same choice. And as we use less and less fossil fuels, at the same time our energy costs increase, we are even helping them by making fossil fuels less expensive.
So, yes, probably we (North America and Western Europe) will get closer and closer to net zero, at the cost of destroying our economies and our ability to lead the world in a more sensible way.
Yeah, I agree with you that changes have to happen. But they need to be rational changes, they have to be taken based on the context of objective reality. Voluntarism, taking action just for the sake of action usually sucks. There are almost unlimited ways of doing anything wrong, and usually just a few ways of doing it right.