Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart; In the face of last month’s UN warning that 49 million people in 43 countries face severe risk of starvation, the New Zealand Government has chosen now to introduce a new climate change food tax.
Climate change: New Zealand’s plan to tax cow and sheep burps
By Peter Hoskins
BBC NewsNew Zealand has unveiled a plan to tax sheep and cattle burps in a bid to tackle one of the country’s biggest sources of greenhouse gases.
It would make it the first nation to charge farmers for the methane emissions from the animals they keep.
New Zealand is home to just over five million people, along with around 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep.
Almost half the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, mainly methane.
However, agricultural emissions have previously not been included in New Zealand’s emissions trading scheme, which has been criticised by those calling for the government to do more to stop global warming.
“There is no question that we need to cut the amount of methane we are putting into the atmosphere, and an effective emissions pricing system for agriculture will play a key part in how we achieve that,” New Zealand’s climate change minister James Shaw said.
Under the proposal farmers will have to pay for their gas emissions from 2025.
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61741352
You might think that a tax on New Zealand lamb is a rich person’s problem, starving Africans or Afghans can’t afford New Zealand lamb. But that is not strictly the case – New Zealand exports significant quantities of unfashionable cuts of meat like mutton flaps to poor countries.
This trade is controversial – high fat New Zealand mutton flaps have been blamed for a rise of obesity and diabetes in Pacific Islanders. But worrying about long term excess fat intake, or climate change, is very much tomorrow’s problem, in a world where people face a real risk of running out of food today.
Why would New Zealand’s Prime Minister Ardern wilfully ignore a genuine global hunger crisis, and choose now to impose what is effectively a food tax?
We don’t have to look far back in history for comparable episodes of political blindness and indifference.
Great Irish Potato Famine of 1845-49 was primarily caused by potato blight reaching Europe, but it was also caused by neglect, by British landlords and politicians imposing impossible burdens on their Irish tenant farmers, by politicians ignoring the problems their unreasonable demands were causing.
When I first learned of the Great Irish Potato Famine, I read some of the horrible stories – of a priest who wrote about finding a little girl of his parish wandering the streets by herself. When he asked what she was doing, she complained her dad had gone all quiet and cold, and had stopped speaking. Her mum had died a few years ago, but her dad had struggled on, until he had starved himself to death, giving his last scraps of food to his child in an effort to save his little girl. I don’t know if the little girl survived, but with so many adults dying, it is likely she did not.
It didn’t have to be this way. In the mid 1800s the British Empire controlled half the world, they were near the historic pinnacle of their economic and military power. Likely all the politicians in charge of the Empire needed to do to alleviate the suffering in Ireland was reduce or defer the taxes and tithes they imposed on Irish farmers. But the British of the time chose selfishness over compassion.
I wondered when I read this how the authorities of the time could possibly have been so blind to all the misery and death, how they could have been so careless and unfeeling as to let a million people suffer and die, when a trivial effort on their part could have mitigated the situation.
I guess now we have our answer.
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‘But the British of the time chose selfishness over compassion.’
Sheesh! There’s no reason to impute Marxist b/s into the tragedy of the Irish Potato Famine when economic stupidity, aka, mercantilism was the culprit. Under mercantilism, nations attempted to protect local producers by enacting high tariffs on imports, e.g. Britain’s Corn Laws. The resulting high grain prices and shortages are what actually lead to famine when the Irish potato crop subsequently failed.
This ^
And some of the Government “solutions” such as the Work Houses, actually spread disease…. a factor which had been known for millennia, but for which no solutions then existed.
Ummmm . . . shouldn’t the citizens of New Zealand have first insisted that there be a meathead tax on government officials such as PM Jacinda Ardern?
In one day the atmospere breaks down 1.60 Megatons of methane, but 1.65 Megatons are emitted, so 0.05 Megatons are accumulated every day (0.007 ppm in a year). Methane is a 84 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 (mass/mass) so 0.05 Megatons are as potent as 4.2 Megatons CO2. The CO2-accumulation in one day is 50 Megatons (2.3 ppm in a year). The influence of methane is then a little less than 10 percent of CO2’s influence.
Note: Methane accumulation is rather variable from one year to the next, in some years it is even negative.
Methane is a trace gas; methane occupies 0.00017% of the atmosphere; CO2 occupies 0.04% of the atmosphere; there is 235 times the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere than Methane. Have you accounted for that ?
Not the actual concentration, but the increase of concentration matters
Watch this methane is a big nothing burger
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/28/climate-science-101-david-siegel/
19 mins in for the explination
All the wave lengths that methane effects are more than covered by water vapour .
Methane will never warm the world .
There are a lot of countries and states that no longer have a functioning democracy or constitutional republic. They are socialist dictatorships. I’ll start::California, New York, Illinois, and Canada.
Yup. Robbing a few Peters to pay many Pauls will always be popular with the Pauls. The only limit comes when you run out of Peters to rob. Or a few Pauls get annoyed that they have no chance ever to become Peters.
Here’s an interesting article that puts numbers to the proposals.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/468708/farmers-set-out-costly-proposal-to-reduce-emissions
Something that costs huge amounts of money to set up, won’t have the desired effect and will create an extra burden for the people has been the Left’s modus operandi since forever.
Modelling estimates, we all know how reliable that’s going to be.
New “Zeal” land has its own permanent nanny.
Did anyone in New Zealand vote for a food tax?
YES! They voted for any and all possible taxes and tax increases when they voted for Jacinda and her crew.
That vote was also for increased restrictions of their freedom and personal choice on just about anything the “crew” can think of.
Just send a bill to Norway instead….
Fjords emit as much methane as all the deep oceans globally — ScienceDaily
Yes, go after the farm lobby in the U.S. I would love to see that before the midterm elections.
First we need to know what she is eating (if anything).
An apple through a tennis racket?
t’would seem jacinda arden is a most worthy heir to the ancient British Empire’s grievous policies towards the lower classes
How much warming is methane expected to
cause by 2100, if nothing changes?
________________________________________________________________
Climate science, the press and policy makers
steadfastly ignore that obvious question.
During the Cretaceous the earth was populated by a biomass of dinosaur herbivores including sauropods that probably matches that of farm animals today. Why did all those brachiosaurus 🦕 farts not drive the world toward runaway catastrophic warming?
By the inverted standards of the dystopian bizzare-world of climate alarmism, this is actually a serious question. They make up this nonsense as they go along without checking consistency with biosphere history or with science in general.
vegans beware. beans and veggies are magical
‘The plan also includes incentives for farmers who reduce emissions through feed additives, while planting trees on farms could be used to offset emissions.’
—
Cows and sheep eat grass. Grass absorbs CO2 thereby offsetting animal CH4 emissions.
Voters keep voting em in, no sympathy here.
Probably because of support by the ‘news’ media. That was one of the most important reasons that Biden got elected, despite hiding in his basement during the campaigning season.
Unfortunately, Ardern is in Oz at the moment talking to our new lefty PM Albo.
She is sure to convince him to do the same self flagellation in Oz as he is not someone who knows the finer details of anything based on his election stumbles.
New Zealand farmers are actually contributing to cooling. Ruminant methane levels are steadily falling and methane does not accumulate. It is all very ridiculous when you think all methane is 0.00018% of the atmosphere and ruminant methane is 14% of all methane with New Zealand having just 1% of the world’s ruminants.
Try finding one our methane molecules among the 70,000 – 90,000 H2O molecules!!!
Farmers in new Zealand have been bullied mercilessly by greenies over dirty rivers, nitrogen leaching, animal welfare issues, destroying natural vegetation and much more – all emotional claptrap but it has cowered them down and made them open to this absurd taxing plan.
Absurd because the way a farmer pays for taxes and other costs is to increase production.
Is this for real? It is hard to believe there are people in power that are this stupid.
You can run Modtran at double the methane concentration in the atmosphere and any reasonable locality and cloud cover conditions and the results will show a ground temp offset (the warming that keeps TOA Infrared equal to its previous level) of about 0.2 C. You have to consider that achieving this “twice as much” would require twice as many swamps and rice paddies, twice as much ocean, twice as much oil and gas production, twice as many termites, and so on…a really unachievable number in any realistic scenario. So reducing human methane emissions to pre 1800’s levels will theoretically achieve a fraction of 0.2 degrees, maybe .05 degrees…..in other words nothing, zero, zilch, nada…
This incredibly close-to-nonsense concept is an extension of the Global Warming Potential calculation methods that were developed by Sir John Houghton at the height of the ozone hole scare to incite action on man-made refrigerants’ effects on the ozone hole. Except that methane contains no chlorine or fluorine that are the catalyst for ozone depletion….and if methane actually heated 25 or 86 times as much as CO2 on exposure to IR, their molar specific heats would not be nearly the same…..
Thanks for that run-down 0.02C is pretty much what you get with plain old arithmetic using the definition of the Global Warming Potential numbers and a value of 1.2C for doubling of atmospheric CO2.
Just when you thought the lefties couldn’t get any more retarded … they prove us wrong.
If the NZ voters don’t send her packing then they deserve all the taxes that come next.
Fat; is New Zealand’s largest export… and has been for decades.. What will take its place?
AGW cultists what’s the plan, you need to let us know…Convince us you are not Crazy!
Delusional on so many levels.
Ardern is about as thick as they come. The Fart Tax is next. Hard to imagine a more poorly read and childish individual given the reins and blinkers to “lead” a country towards economic penury.
She is only Prime Minister because a majority of Members of Parliament on her side voted for her to be the leader.
We voters only get to vote for a PM if as an MP they represent our electorate.
Same old British Parliamentary set up in Canada. Except with modern social media they become dictators rather easily, like Trudeau, and seem immune from their own egregious decisions…media-masked in virtuous sounding story spinning.
An additional tax surcharge on horse meat?