Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Local, a Danish Newspaper, reports that the Danish Council on Ethics, a government funded think tank, has recommended that red meat be taxed to try to combat global warming.
Could Danes face a ‘red meat tax’ to help climate?
Saying that “climate change is an ethical problem”, the Danish Council on Ethics (Det Etiske Råd) has called for a climate tax on red meat.
The council said that Danes have an ethical obligation to minimize their climate impact and that a natural place to start would be lowering their red meat consumption.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization states that animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, more than the the total exhaust from all forms of transport worldwide.
Cattle alone is responsible for ten percent of all emissions and conservative estimates state that at least 43,000 litres of fresh water are needed to produce just one kilo of beef.
The Council on Ethics said that in order to live up to global environmental standards, Denmark should use a ‘climate tax’ to bring down the nation’s meat consumption. The Council said it debated the issue for six months, focusing on whether it should be left up to consumers to make more climate-friendly choices or if government should push them in the right direction by taxing the food products that have the greatest negative impact.
Read more: http://www.thelocal.dk/20160425/denmark-eyes-red-meat-tax-to-help-climate
The Danish Government is less than enthusiastic about the proposal.
A spokesman for governing party Venstre said the government is very unlikely to act on the council’s suggestion, calling it “a bureaucratic monster” that would have limited effect.
“Maybe it would get beef consumption to fall in Denmark, but it wouldn’t do much of anything for the world’s CO2 emissions,” Thomas Danielsen told broadcaster DR.
Read more: Same as above
Perhaps the Danish Council on Ethics should go on tour, try to sell their message of helping the environment with more taxes to impoverished working class regions suffering carbon policy inflated energy costs. After all, the Danish People already pay some of the highest tax rates in the world, so they surely won’t mind paying a little more.
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I don’t eat red meat. That is a personal choice I made in the 70’s. But I’d certainly oppose this tax which is wrong-headed in a number of ways. This proposal isn’t about vegetarianism vs meat-eating, so those making arguments along those lines are confusing the issue.
B.Cobb, – I’m still waiting to see if “…it just seems like live longer …” not eating meat. Personally haven’t knowingly eaten beef, pork, or poultry meat for 47 years & managed to do so working on 6 continents. I don’t interfere with what other people eat & agree that any methid of surcharging non-vegetarian food is improper.
I wonder what the reaction would be if Danish Catholics demanded that Denmark pass a law prohibiting the sale or consumption of meat on Friday for “ethical” reasons? Wouldn’t that work just as well as imposing a tax? That would be a 14.2% reduction in meat consumption and would impose no economic hardship on anyone. Just a thought. I’m sure the government would prefer a ‘sin tax’. Of course I can’t think of a sin tax that has accomplished a significant reduction of sinners. By far those taxes are more likely to accomplish two things; turn into outlaws those sinners who avoid paying them and impoverish those who conform.
“43,000 litres of fresh water” per kilo of beef. So how many litres per kilo of human? How about taxing water?
From the much maligned Wikipaedia:
“In October 2011, Denmark introduced a fat tax on butter, milk, cheese, pizza, meat, oil and processed food if the item contains more than 2.3% saturated fat. However, in November 2012, the Danish Tax Ministry announced it would abolish the fat tax, stating that it failed to change Danes’ eating habits, had encouraged cross border trading, put Danish jobs at risk and had been a bureaucratic nightmare for producers and outlets. The proposed sugar tax plans were also scrapped.
Mette Gjerskov, the Danish minister of food, agriculture and fisheries, stated that “the fat tax is one of the most criticized we had in a long time. Now we have to try to improve public health by other means.” Although the tax resulted in an additional $216 million in revenue, it also led to numerous complaints from Danish retailers that their customers were taking their business to other countries, such as Sweden and Germany, to take advantage of their lower prices.”
Perhaps instead of trying to discourage Danes from eating ‘red meat’, the Danish Council on Ethics should try to get them to eat ‘long pig’ instead. This would be an acceptable substitute for beef and pork, and also help to keep the population down, thus automatically reducing CO2 emissions. For those who may be worried, this was foreshadowed by Jonathan Swift, in his “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick”.
Dudley Horscroft April 28, 2016 at 6:12 am
“the Danish Council on Ethics should try to get them to eat ‘long pig’ instead.”
Hmmm A whole knew meaning to “Swedish meatballs” I presume. Quite a change to the import export market also; with an increase in “take out” dinning”.
michael
I stand in awe of my moral and intellectual superiors. They have singled out one of the essentials of life, and deem it necessary to tax it to the point of privation for the citizenry. I note that such a tax would not have the desired effect until it is large enough to cause privation, that is the point. Why then, to pursue such a seemingly immoral and evil policy? Because, Ethics! The kind of Morality and Ethics which are only discernible by these towering intellects and are invisible to us mere peasants.
On a seemingly unrelated note:
I count 1 battleaxe, 4 medium broadswords, and a short sword in the forward ranks. There are a couple of helmets, some body armor, and a whole bunch of shields. Then some spears and pikes to round things out.
They all seem to have an attitude problem, as well.
43 cubic meters to produce ONE kilogram of meat is a pure lie.
One year ago a leftist french newspaper “le Nouvel Obs” launched a similar hoax claiming that making ONE hamburger needed 17 cubic meters of water. I demonstrated that while one cubic meter of tap water currently costs about Eur 2.00, how can the hamburger shops sell one hamburger about 3-4 Euros?
The bigger the lie is, the better they swallow it.
Getting between a Viking and red meat can be dangerous.
Does this apply to pet foods? In the US, there is a trend toward “grain-free” dog foods, in part due to dogs having allergies or intolerance to grain. Cats have always been eating meat in their “fancy” cat food. So does the cost of pet food go up? Will there be a cry to cut the meat out of pet food, even though it is detrimental to cats and some dogs? I wonder just how far this whole idea can go.
(Denmark exports most of the meat they raise, much is reportedly pig, not beef, and that farming has declined in Denmark in the last decade. Raising the cost of meat will not put many people out of work while giving the Danish government more money to spend on the vegan population. If they were serious, they’d just outlaw meat production altogether, along with importing of meat. IF this were about global warming…)
Gee, you’d have thought that people that live in Denmark wouldn’t mind it if the climate there got a bit warmer.
But, what went wrong with the Danes? They used to be Vikings, hard men and women who didn’t put up with nonsense.
Hmmm well, even discounting climate change completely the environmental impact of cows is so incredibly large (tropical deforestation, agricultural runoffs, over fertilization because of manure, water use, etc. etc.) that it makes sense to try and reduce red meat consumption by a fair amount.
(If anyone is interested in the actual figures, google is your friend, or be an interested citizen and follow a couple of MOOCs of course 😉
benben, you are so right. Buffalo Bill was one of the first American naturalists that tried to save the plains from the devastation wreaked by herds that stretched as far as the eye could see, according to accounts of the day. As ruminants, they pushed so much methane into the air, and cleared millions of acres of grass, over-fertilizing as they went. The Indians didn’t understand the damage these huge herds were doing, and did little to control their numbers. Because of Buffalo Bill’s dedication, AGW was postponed by nearly a century. What a great man! /sarc off
I applaud your literary efforts at sarcasm, dear Kook. It must be so nice to live in a reality of my own choosing!
That beats Jerry Brown’s crafted version of reality by a long shot.
benben,
You do live in a reality of your own choosing. It’s your personal bubble, separate and distinct from the real world.
I’m guessing that benben’s mom was scared by a cow while she was pregnant with him.
I find these reactions quite interesting. So I fully understand the doubt about the climate change scare, it being based on models more than actual observations. So there is somehow a valid reasoning behind it.
But this apparent dismissal of other environmental issues is strange. If you clear out a whole bunch of jungle because you need to feed your cows, that is just a fact right? And nobody disputes that this is happening on a very large scale (just go look at some google maps satellite images). So is the problem here that you guys don’t believe that the meat industry has any impacts, or that you just don’t understand why you should care about environmental impacts if they are on a different continent?
I’m not trolling here, please discuss 🙂
Benben, having an impact is not the same as having a negative effect. Does planting a crop in place of prairie land have a net benefit? Does controlling the proliferation of weeds, insects, fungus, and bacteria help? Remember, farmers are in the business of feeding 7 billion people, so weigh that in your cost/benefit analysis.
Thanks for your reply htb1969! The main problem with cows is that you need to feed them a huge amount to get a pound of meat (100 pounds of feed for a pound of meat? something in that order of magnitude). So as you said, 7 billion people, a lot of those don’t eat all that much cow, but there is this pretty big transition going on right now where everyone is starting to consume much more. You can imagine what happens is a billion people start replacing a couple of pounds of vegetables with a couple of pounds of meat. A HUGE increase in demand for agricultural land, which is driving absolutely massive tropical deforestation (because almost all normal agricultural land on the planet is already in use somehow).
It’s not really about meat being bad per se, but more that it’s being eaten at an exponentially increasing rate. And if exponential growth hits a static boundary… well, we are all engineers here, we can imagine that does not go down very well on the long run.
benben, if you try to pass off garbage as accepted truth, then you are trolling.
Dairy cows also produce milk which can be used to make butter, cheese, cottage cheese and ice cream.
And water is recovered from the cow’s milk so not wasted. Source of calcium for strong bones.
Corn, beans and squash can provide all of the proteins needed by humans. Native Americans used all of them but also hunted for meat.
In the U.S. the average cow produces about 8 gallons of milk per day. The rest of it is fertilizer.
Much of this kind of agricultural climate scam material is produced for urban audiences. This kind of misinformation can be put over on rural residents.
A lot of “agricultural land” isn’t used for grain. Grain cannot be grown on it. It is stony or sandy pasture, or, in the case of western ranges in the USA, more or less desert.
Farmers seldom can afford to be wasteful. Land that can grow crops is used for crops. Land that can support cattle supports cattle. Land that can support goats supports goats. In the old days the buildings were often placed on the most worthless land. Pigs ate the garbage.
The people making the “economic calculations” often live in suburbs that were built on prime farmland. They forget to include how much food building their own abode subtracted from the “world supply”.
I think they forget a lot else, making their calculations. Perhaps they use new math. They seem to have about as much experience of farming as a school of fish. I imagine if one ever came face to face with a cow, they’d scream.
I recall reading (back around 1970) about how stupid third-world people are and how over-grazing in India would lead to starvation in India. The people of India forgot to study those books. It was truly amazing to me how greatly the landscape of the Deccan Plateau east of Bombay had changed between 1974 and 2000. It went from over-grazed to grassy, from nearly treeless to having groves of young trees on hilltops. One of the big changes was they were able to replace dung and wood with propane, for cooking, and another change was they herded their goats more responsibly, without boys ripping down the branches of trees.
Sometimes I fear that the people making “economic calculations” assume everyone else is an idiot, but perhaps the biggest idiots are in their own mirrors.
Thanks for the responses! MarkW, just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t make me a troll. It’s not nice to suggest otherwise. As to the rest, there are many, many studies on the exact life cycle inputs for meat, dairy etc etc. that take all this into account. There is nothing partisan or political about those and they all point in the same direction. It’s just basic accounting. And they’re quite easy to find on Le Internets. If you’re interested, go look them up. You’ll be surprised.
benben,
you say “It’s not really about meat being bad per se, but more that it’s being eaten at an exponentially increasing rate.”
Are you able to quantify the specific exponent to which you are referring? … and remember, you did say increasing rate, so no negatives. If you can’t find global data, just pick a country, any old country.
Given the high grad ChEng advanced degree’d wunderkind that you are, it should be an easy task.
How much tropical deforestation do you think is going on in Denmark?
It is a common fallacy to link Western habits of consumption to social and environmental ills in third-world countries. Eating beef and tropical deforestation, electronics and heavy metal poisoning, seafood and slavery … it is all nonsense. All these ills are due to local societal failings. It is not necessary to enslave people in order to let them catch shrimp. It is not necessary to mine heavy metals bare-footed and -handedly. It is not necessary to chop down rainforests or pollute rivers in order to feed cattle. It is not necessary to harvest crops with a scythe or sickle and stay forever poor.
Abundant agricultural and industrial production is possible without serious environmental degradation in North America and in Europe. It would be possible elsewhere, too, were it not for general backwardness and corruption of the third world power elites. Dysfunctional societies destroy the environment, not hamburgers.
yes. once iowa and nebraska and oklahoma were dense, tropical jungle. tarzan used to swing on the lianas as he yodelled.
and now the mississippi is nothing but an open sewer carrying cow pee to the gulf of mexico.
meanwhile, back on earth…
the siberian jungle has vanished due to centuries of rapacious burgerlust
Tarzan lost his grip.
Even if there are valid environmental reasons for cutting back on red meat, those are red herring arguments. They cite “climate change” as the reason. As usual, Climatists really don’t care about anything else, though they may pretend to. Their raison d’etre, their ultimate concern, false as it is, is “climate change”.
Michael Palmer, how is that nonsense? If your beef comes from brazil (and a lot of it does) then there’s a pretty clear link with tropical deforestation. If your electronics come from china (and a lot of it does) then there’s a pretty clear link with the pollution in China that comes from these factories. Yes in theory it could be different, but since its not, you have to deal with the world as it is, not how it could theoretically could be.
And to the rest, just because there are people that link eating beef with climate change doesn’t mean that one can stop thinking and not consider all the other aspects that come into play.
Benben, it is up to the Brazilians to preserve or wreck their rainforests. If you don’t buy their beef, they will find some other livestock or crop that involves wrecking it. Same goes for Chinese electronics etc.
All these Western guilt trips over trading this, that, or some other kind of stuff are nonsense. If you like taking the blame for the all the abuse in the world because you enjoy your iPad or your BBQ, suit yourself. Personally, I don’t find such crypto-religious self-flagellation sensible.
dear benben,
i hope you will make it abundantly clear to every brazillian you own: out of tender concern for his rainforest, lord benben will not tolerate burgers on his planet.
And what are those Brazilians going to do in order to feed their families if you stop buying their beef?
Think about the children man!!!
Michael, fair enough and I certainly concede the point that you don’t have to carry the weight of the world. But on the other hand there is an element of taking some personal responsibility. Just because our laissaiz fair economic system allows you to do a lot of things doesn’t mean you should be doing them. For example, if you know something is made using slave labour, you should not buy it, even if it appears on the shelves of your local store and is cheaper than the next, non-slave labour product. You’d agree with me on that, right?
benben says:
if you know something is made using slave labour, you should not buy it… You’d agree with me on that, right?
This may come as a surprise, benben, but very few commenters agree with much of anything you write. So maybe you can find the fault in a mirror.
Often there is a choice: “slave” labor, or starvation. Literally. No one rounds up those workers at gunpoint and forces them into slavery, so stop it with the inflammatory language.
It was no different in the West a couple centuries ago, when the choice was working in coal mines or starving. And putting together electronic parts is much preferable to mining coal.
So enough with your false equivalence, benben. You’re wrong about almost everything, because you don’t think for yourself. You only parrot the media’s talking points. No wonder you get so confused.
The truth is this: those people want to work in factories, because it pays them for their time better than any alternatives. The ‘do gooders’ who object have no understanding of the real world. It’s pretty clear that includes you, with your false accusations of “slave labor”.
Hey DB,
You’re right we don’t agree often, but please read the following report:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thailand-fishing-sea-slaves-pets.html
And after you read this, let me know your thoughts.
benben,
Sorry, I don’t read the NY Slimes. If I want propaganda I’ll read IPCC Assessment Reports.
That’s really sad DB. Just because we don’t agree on one topic doesn’t mean we can’t agree on the universally accepted thing that slavery is really really bad. Honestly, you’ve completely disqualified yourself with that last statement. I’ll ignore you from now on.
@ur momisugly Benben
“For example, if you know something is made using slave labour, you should not buy it, even if it appears on the shelves of your local store and is cheaper than the next, non-slave labour product. You’d agree with me on that, right?”
—
I would indeed not buy a product of slave labour knowingly. However, I do not believe that this would make much of a difference. This problem can only be addressed effectively (in your chosen example) by the people in Thailand, not by the consumers half a world away.
Legos are hazardous for children too.
They need a Green Tax. Any product that claims to be Green/Eco-friendly/Sustainable/Vegan/Low Carbon Footprint etc… has a 5% added tax that is paid to a fund that these greenies can access for R/D. That way we could actually see what their commitment and leadership really means.
As usual, the eco-contingent never considers any cost/benefit analysis. They never ask themselves: What could possibly go wrong?
Leftists know themselves to be superior beings.
So it’s impossible for their plans to be anything other than perfect.
Besides, so long as you can ensure that only other people suffer from any short comings in your plans, then those short comings really don’t matter.
The Eloi are restless.
If the protein alternative is to be soya & use USA annual average yield (single crop) of 19-60 bushel/acre then could produce 51-175 gram of soy protein/square meter cultivation. Most of that discrepancy in yield is from how well plants’ water needs are met & in some environments this involves irrigation. The human nutritional use of soy is not being parsed in this comment.
Poultry produces 55% edible product & for every 1Kg fresh weight requires 2.5 Kg feedstock. Pork also produces 55% edible product, while for every 1 Kg fresh weight requires 5.1 Kg feed. Beef produces 40% edible product & for every 1 Kg fresh weight requires 10 Kg feed. This data obviously is for managed husbandry & averages would vary for homestead practices.
1 Kg of broiler chicken reared on 2.3 Kg grain can be considered as indirectly using 3,500 liters of water that grain needed to grow. On range land forage 1 Kg beef can be considered using 200,000 liters of water that forage needed to grow. In cases where rain &/or soil moisture provide all that water this is a non-issue. However, if producing 1 Kg of beef via feedlot then need 13 Kg of grain (where use 5,400 liters water to grow 4 Kg grain) +
30 Kg of hay (where use 100,000 liters water to grow 100 Kg hay). Which is also not an issue if rain &/or soil moisture provide that water.
Where I farm it is semi-arid in a “developing” country. The cattle
require delivery of water during dry season & culled herds to be
profitable. Grazing is parched months at a time & feed must be brought in. I have invested in 2 potable wells & yet others nearby
dug wells that became unusable. Ranchers finance flat bed trucks to put black plastic water tanks on, drive to buy water or if can herd their cows seasonally to leased grazing in parts of the highlands having some rain during that season.
Goat rearing for may be in some readers mind as an alternative to cattle & the ranchers that went for goats gave that up years ago; they returned to cattle, which despite seasonal struggles still was more profitable. Pigs in “my” countryside are
fed slop scraps & whey from cheese makers if have the connections; they wallow under a tree. Poultry is truly free range – often in & out of kitchens as well. Commercial chicken rearing operations often struggle economically due to feed costs & disease crisis that arise periodically.
Interesting read. What is the country you describe, if I may ask?
clue = gringo
There is already a 25% tax on red meat in Denmark called MOMS (on virtually everything you can buy) or Value Added Tax (VAT) as opposed to say UK, where food is exempt. If the Danish Government tried to impose such an extra tax there would be a riot.
If I were a Dane I’d send in my red meat tax in the form of 10% of any steak I had for dinner. “There’s your cut, Mr. Tax Man.”
(If it happened to take a few weeks to arrive, well… I have a model that says 97% of the meat sent in won’t smell as bad as we thought.)
Isn’t Denmark the country that lost over $1 billion in the carbon market trading scam? I guess they need more of other people’s money for the next scheme. But then it isn’t ever your money in Denmark. It’s the collective’s money.
Marxist economics and Socialism don’t work. They are only partially successful for a short time till they run out of OPM. (Other Peoples money). Having exhausted other taxation methods, Trying to tax food is a sign that Scandinavian experiments in Marxism are entering their terminal stages.
The only question is what the forms of repression will take, Planned starvation, Gulags, or eco-justified Cannabilism?
Socialism only works in wealthy countries.
Even then it only works for a short time. Eventually as Stas mentions, you run out of other people’s money, and the whole thing collapses.
I love a good danish and eat them occasionally.
A government agency has studied the problem and concluded that the solution is to give more money to government agencies. How surprising.
Saying that “climate change is an ethical problem”, IS an ethical problem!
The climate correctness has no limit. Now the city of Copenhagen sell the shares they have in Maersk, and the reason is that Maersk extract fossil fuels. No one mentions that it is the users of these fuels that produce the “bad” CO2. Maybe Maersk is not the best investment, but the reason was purely moral.
-Svend, Denmark
Personally, I love to read about large groups divesting from oil companies.
It’s a great buy signal.
I’m sure the Progressives will find a climate application to enforce every single one of their agenda items.
to be followed shortly by a carbohydrate induced diabetes/obesity tax.
M.Palmer, – I respectfully decline disclosing country I chose for rural property.