Denmark, cows, CO2 tax
Just when you think politicians couldn't get any stupider (or meaner), they always disprove the optimism
I have been writing about agricultural emissions on this blog for years . On the one hand, about the unfounded ideas based on flawed climate models, and on the other hand, about the fundamental difference between the biogenic carbon cycle and fossil emissions, which is not taken into account by policy makers and their advisors, who are fundamentally ignorant of agriculture, ecology and climate science.
In response, the Danes have introduced a tax on the 'emissions' of farm animals as a beacon of global stupidity and, in a fantastic idea, would smother agricultural emissions in organic carbon burning. The New Zealand government has previously tried to tax emissions from livestock but backed down. In the 1980s there were 22 sheep per capita, today there are less than 5. New Zealand's population has grown by 1 million in the meantime, but of course it is sheep that are responsible for emissions - of, course, not the unlimited use of fossil fuels.
Its economic impact was analysed in terms of metrics whose indirect effects were the least taken into account by economists completely unfamiliar with agriculture.
Of course, the professors and PwC consultants who created the Green Tax Report know nothing about agriculture or ecology, and most of them are economists who base their world view on infinite growth in a finite system. Not many people other than the mentally ill can do this.
These 'experts' ignore the fact that milk and dairy products are very difficult to replace in the diet (white liquids made from plants do not have any parameters covering the composition and physiological effects of milk) They propose reducing the area used for livestock and claim that more cash crops can be grown on this land. They ignore the fact that land used for livestock is usually not suitable for crop production.
They also ignore the fact that where livestock are disappearing, wild ruminants are taking over the land. The emissions of these animals are higher than those of domestic animals. This has already been shown in Africa by comparing wildlife with local livestock.
The authors of the Green Tax Reform are full of trite platitudes, such as that the tax will reduce diseases linked to meat consumption, which are not backed up by any authoritative and credible research. Danish meat consumption is 93 kg per capita per year, far below that of other countries and not much higher than the 88 kg per capita per year consumed in Hungary. But there is no mention of taxing sugar or doughnuts, which are clearly much less healthy than meat.
In fact, a decade ago Denmark introduced a tax on saturated fats. The result? People shopped in Sweden or Germany and within a year the measure was thrown in the bin.
Many questions were left open about the publication, but Hungarian journalists, as usual, just translated it without thinking or reasoning and then gave the articles loudly misleading titles like "fart tax". But let's leave that for now and get to the bottom of things.
The fearsome CO2 emissions
CO2-centric thinking on climate has already caused huge damage to agriculture, especially in light of the fact that models calculating the CO2 balance do not distinguish between the biogenic carbon cycle and fossil emissions.
But even if we use fundamentally flawed models, how can we interpret the numbers in light of the Danish plans?
To give you a better sense of the magnitude, the annual global carbon cycle has about 750 gigatonnes of carbon in circulation. 29 gigatonnes of this is estimated anthropogenic emissions based on models (not actual measurements!), which is 4% of the global carbon cycle. Of this 4%, Denmark's total CO2 emissions, including transport, transportation, aviation, industry and agriculture, account for only 0.08% of the world's anthropogenic CO2 emissions. To imagine that this statistically flawed emissions rate, of which only a quarter of the otherwise highly inflated agricultural emissions would have any impact on the global CO2 balance, while new coal-fired power plants are coming on operation every week in China, is a gross miscalculation. Nevertheless, the Greens of Denmark, one of the richest countries in European society, with the fourth highest GDP per capita in the EU, in a tripartite agreement, thought they would show the world how to save the planet from itself by taxing the 0.000001% of natural carbon cycle, calculated on the basis of models
Not reduce, tax.
That solves everything.
The calculated CO2e emissions from animals would be taxed at between DKK 120-300 per tonne. Around DKK 40 billion (EUR 5.4 billion) will be allocated to a new fund called the Green Landscape Fund ("Den Grønne Arealfond"). This money will support the creation of 250 000 hectares of new forest, the restoration of 140 000 hectares of peat bogs (peat bogs are a major emitter of methane, a GHG with a higher climate impact than CO2), further land conversion and strategic land purchases focusing on nitrogen reduction. In addition, a support scheme worth just over DKK 10 billion (€1.34 billion) will be set up for the production of biochar through pyrolysis.
The tax will entail a charge of DKK 300 (€40.21) per tonne of CO2e from livestock production from 2030, rising to DKK 750 in 2035, but with a 60% floor. The effective tax is therefore DKK 120 per tonne CO2e in 2030, rising to DKK 300 per tonne CO2e in 2035.
The target is at least 20% of protected natural areas. (This is a separate issue, as the biggest land grab in modern EU history is behind the EU's Nature Restoration (NRL) plans.) The planting of 80,000 hectares of private primeval forest, 20,000 hectares of public forest and the withdrawal of low-lying areas from agricultural production will significantly increase the extent of protected nature (and of course the profits of global financial investors from land grabs).
Pyrolysis as a “carbon sink”
As part of the scheme, Pyrolyse Danmark's fantastic plans to use biochar (prolifically known as charcoal, but this includes charred organic matter from any source) to capture and store 0.3 million tonnes of CO2 by 2030. To put the 0.3 million tonnes of CO2 sequestration in context, I will share a ratio.
In 2023, about 18.5 million km2 of forest burned world-wide in 6 months. Its CO2 emissions were about 290 megatonnes - 966 times the amount that the Danish coal burners are trying to remove from the atmosphere in 6 years with a subsidy of 529 billion HUF. Is the subsidy worth it? For the company, certainly, but not for the taxpayers.
According to Pyrolyse Danmark, biochar is currently produced mostly from fermentation residues from biogas plants, agricultural by-products such as straw and sewage sludge.
The first two immediately raise a question that calls into question the whole programme. Fermentation residues and organic agricultural by-products are valuable organic fertilizer for agriculture. They can be used as a substitute for synthetic fertilisers and are excellent compost base that can greatly improve soil fertility. In this respect, Marian Makádi has done a lot of research in this field in Hungary, with excellent results. With sewage sludge, my friend Padra Pisti has also achieved excellent results in reforestation of sandy soils, with a huge biomass increase - but the technology has so far been blocked by the government by all means.
The burning of such valuable, high biological value materials is a seriously damaging act from the environmental and ecological point of view, and supporting it is a crime.
But let's get back to the cows.
All livestock farmers would be taxed
The tax applies to cattle, sheep and pigs, not just ruminants, and is independent of the type of farming.
This immediately shows that CO2 is clearly not the problem with agriculture, because the CO2 footprint of a cattle herd on controlled grazing pasture, using regenerative methods, is nothing like that of a pig herd of thousands of pigs on a slurry system, on South American soy.
Since 1990, the Danish cattle population has been stable in the country - around 600 000 cows - but emissions from cattle farming have fallen by 8% since 1990. Dairy and beef farmers can - and will - continue to reduce their emissions without a tax.
But CO2 and methane emissions from livestock are part of a natural process, the biogenic carbon cycle. This, of course, is ignored by green communists and they are heading towards accusing the cows for climate change. For example, with such staggeringly brainless ideas as a vaccine to stop cows farts and burps, as the Boston start-up ArkeaBio has raised $26.5 million in venture capital funding from an investment fund set up by Bill Gates.
I wrote more about this and the media misinformation about agricultural emissions in this article Cattle and climate change
In short, almost all of the methane from livestock production, around 90 percent, is produced during digestion by animals through fermentation and is exhaled through their mouths in the form of burps. The main culprits in methane emissions are cows and, according to the Danish Statistical Office, there were 1 484 377 cows in the Nordic country on 30 June 2022. A typical Danish cow produces 6 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, and although emissions from pigs are lower, the tax applies to them too. This figure would mean that a farmer would have to pay a penalty tax of up to €600 per animal per year - which, in addition to price increases, could lead to farm closures because such a sum is difficult to afford. Most of the remaining 10 per cent of methane from livestock production comes from manure lakes on pig and cattle farms. The beauty of the idea is that cattle digest feed and convert only 5 per cent of the carbon sequestered by plants from the atmosphere into methane, a significant percentage of which is broken down from the air exhaled by naturally grazing animals by methane-oxidising bacteria in the soil and hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, plants exudate in roots up to 30-40% of the photosynthetic products, sugars, simple carbohydrates, bound daily through the liquid carbon pathway during their development, feeding the bacteria and fungi that live in the rhizosphere of the roots. This soil carbon is also the basis of humus formation, with a significant percentage of humus being glomalin from the filaments of mycorrhizal fungi that live in symbiotic association with most plants.
In the absence of natural disasters or human ploughing of grassland and forests, the carbon released into the soil via the liquid carbon pathway is stabilised and acts as humus to continuously enrich soil fertility by storing organic carbon compounds.
The biogenic carbon cycle is therefore either zero balance, i.e. no more carbon is released into the atmosphere by a single atom than is sequestered by plants, or mostly negative balance, i.e. plants act as carbon sinks by absorbing the carbon stabilised in the soil.
Soil is also currently the largest carbon sink, storing roughly 2,500 gigatonnes of carbon, of which 1,550 gigatonnes is organic carbon, delivered to the soil by plants via the liquid carbon pathway and microbiology.
Cattle are part of this rapid, biogenic carbon cycle, so it is not only biologically absurd, but mathematically absurd, that they would increase the carbon content of the atmosphere in an essentially equilibrium or lossless carbon cycle.
Nevertheless, the Danes want to tax nature.
Peter Kiær of the Danish farmers' association Bæredygtigt Landbrug makes it clear that representatives of agriculture have not had their say in the negotiations.
Sustainable agriculture was not part of the tripartite negotiations and is therefore not behind the agreement. So, of course, we have concerns, frustrations and questions, which we will try to explore in the coming period.
A clear press release from the head of ARLA, which is owned by 8,400 dairy farmers, is not explicitly supportive of the ideas.
"It is vitally important to us that farmers who are genuinely doing all they can to reduce their emissions are not taxed now or in the future. It is therefore essential that the tax base for the CO2 tax is based solely on emissions that we have the means to eliminate. If we want to encourage a green transition, we must not penalise someone economically for taking appropriate measures in the economy. We are aware that the agreement in its current form may have some consequences for organic farmers, among others, who currently do not have the same tools at their disposal."
The piquant aspect of the idea is that this tax would hit organic farmers harder than conventional farmers - again, we see a qualified case of European self-indulgence being implemented with these lunatic ideas.
The Danish landscape is about to change significantly after the government and the Green Tripartite Group - Agriculture and Food, Danmarks Naturfredningsforening, Fødewareforbundet NNF, Dansk Metal, Dansk Industri and KL - agreed on a Green Denmark agreement. The agreement shows the way forward for Denmark to become a modern agricultural country and provides concrete answers to the climate and natural challenges facing agriculture. The parties will agree on a historic reorganisation of Denmark's territory, providing more space for nature and better conditions for biodiversity and drinking water protection.
It is impressive to see how harmoniously Danish metal companies, heavy industry and representatives of large-scale food processors agreed that burping of grazing cows is the world's most serious problem and that if taxed, it would already reduce Denmark's CO2 emissions by 70%. But what are Denmark's CO2 emissions?
The world of fake CO2 accounting
Denmark is approaching its 70% emissions reduction target, so the decline in CO2 emissions in recent years has been a suspicious phenomenon in one of the world's richest and therefore most energy-consuming societies. In addition to the usual 'renewable' energy sources, 22% biomass energy is appearing - translated, burning imported forests.
The Danish emission reduction thus has two strong legs: one is hypocrisy, the other is fraud.
The fraud part includes not counting biomass emissions in the balance under the Kyoto Protocol as "renewable", but ignoring many facts about it. And we have already caught the hypocrisy with the CO2 tax on livestock farmers.
What's wrong with biomass burning?
Burning biomass emits large amounts of CO2 and toxic particles, just like coal. This has been documented by more than 800 researchers, including the world's leading climate scientists and EASAC, the Pan-European Science Advisory Council.
Surprisingly, biomass emits more CO2 than if the same amount of energy were produced with coal. Since most biomass is made up of whole trees, the lower energy density means more CO2 is released into the atmosphere compared to fossil fuels.
Global consumption of biomass is increasing every year. A recent Nature study showed that by 2020, 10% of the world's total annual greenhouse gas emissions will come from burning biomass.
"Renewable" does not always mean sustainable or harmless. Europe still generates 60% of its so-called "renewable" energy from biomass .
Take Denmark, for example, which gets 35% of its energy from biomass, mainly wood pellets, often described by politicians and lobbyists as climate-friendly. But the environmental impact is much more complex and worrying.
Denmark is not a heavily forested country and is therefore the largest importer of woody biomass in the EU. More than half of Denmark's total consumption comes from imports. Just over 60% of imported woody biomass comes from other EU countries, with the remaining 40% coming from outside the EU - including from clear-cutting in the Canadian rainforest.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol classified biomass as CO2 neutral, immediately removing millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions from the statistics. But this ignores the fact that burning biomass immediately releases carbon stored in trees into the atmosphere. But couldn't we simply plant new trees and neutralise the CO2? The main argument is that the new trees will reabsorb this CO2. But the reality is that this will take decades (even hundreds of years) - the wood pellets burned today in unsustainable quantities may come from virgin forests that have been intact for hundreds of years and may only grow again in hundreds of years.
According to a recent study by the University of Copenhagen, 45% of the Danish population do not even know what woody biomass is, underlining the fact that biomass is not well known to the public. This is no different in Hungary, where biomass-fired power plants are swallowing up truckloads of ancient forests and field hedges, which they can clear-cut in my neighbourhood at any time of the year, even wih bird nests if they want it.
Moreover, increasing biomass consumption is not only threatening our climate, but also something equally important, namely the biodiversity crisis.
The global impact is huge. Countries like Denmark import most of their biomass, leading to deforestation and logging in foreign countries. Logging destroys entire ecosystems in the affected areas and can take hundreds of years to rebuild a climax forest community - if it is able to develop in an environment exacerbated by climate change.
Companies describe their biomass as "certified" and "sustainable". But recently, serious questions have been raised about these claims. US wood pellet producer Enviva, the world's largest producer of wood pellets, has been caught lying about its certification .
Experts claim that forests once cut down for biomass are not being replanted effectively. This leaves barren landscapes, destroying ecosystems and eliminating vital CO2 sinks.
In 2015, the Estonian government allowed logging in parts ofprotected nature reserves. These forests are part of the EU's Natura 2000 network, which aims to protect forests and provide shelter for rare and endangered species. Has this caused problems for 'renewable' biomass energy users? Not for a minute. To this day, protected Natura 2000 forests are being clear-cut and Danish power plants are burning 'renewable' biomass.
While Denmark has made significant progress in wind energy, its reliance on imported biomass, mainly from the Baltic States, is calling into question its 'green' image. Can a country that gets more than 30% of its energy mainly from burning wood still be called a green leader?
The lesson? Not everything that is called "renewable" is truly sustainable or harmless. The case of biomass burning in Europe is a perfect example.
The Danish energy policy is thus one of the most hypocritical among European countries, which, by targeting food production, serve business interests with obscure backgrounds.
The tax will result in food price increases, farm closures and the destruction of small farmers in the name of "climate protection".
If you have come this far, you will understand that this has nothing to do with climate protection and environmental protection.
If it did, the Danish or even European politicians would be pushing for a switch to regenerative agriculture, but they are not.
The first principle of regenerative agriculture is to look at the context, always to look at the context.
Never believe what you are told at first sight, because the simple sensationalism of the media is rarely true. I have been writing about agricultural emissions on this blog for years . On the one hand about the falsity of the ideas based on incomplete climate models, and on the other hand about the fundamental difference between the biogenic carbon cycle and fossil emissions, which is not taken into account by policy makers and their advisors who are fundamentally ignorant of agriculture, ecology and climate science.