"Denmark will be first to impose CO2 tax on farms, government says"

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This is a linkpost for https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/denmark-will-be-first-impose-co2-tax-farms-government-says-2024-06-25/

While subject to approval by parliament, political experts expect a bill to pass following the broad-based consensus.

The deal proposed taxing farmers 300 Danish crowns ($43.16) per tonne of CO2 in 2030, increasing to 750 crowns by 2035.

Note that the bill is not approved yet.

This might be good for the climate but potentially bad for animal welfare if beef becomes pricier and consumption of chicken increases.

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MichaelStJulesJun 2714

Could be bad for animals, causing a shift from cattle and other ruminants to chickens. Chickens are killed in much greater numbers per kg of meat and I expect have worse lives on average.

EDIT: And it could increase the consumption of eggs, fish and shrimp, too.

MarcusAbramovitchJun 272

I wouldn't just say could. I'm fairly certain this will be quite bad for animal welfare

MichaelStJulesJun 282

Well, it might also reduce chicken and egg consumption, because those are also more carbon-intensive than plant-based foods. And then there could also be symbolic effects, e.g. people might come to believe that animal agriculture in general is bad for the environment, not just ruminant farming. It could also support plant-based and cultured food R&D, which could then be good for chickens.

I don't have a strong view either way. I don't think such symbolic effects matter much for the vast majority of people, and I'd guess the price effects push towards increased chicken and egg consumption. How plant-based and cultured food R&D is affected seems super speculative to me, and this doesn't seem like a reliable way to increase it anyway.

Regardless of which way my best guess would go, I wouldn't have pushed for this to happen, because I definitely wouldn't have been confident it was robustly positive for animals, and I'd guess there were more effective and reliable ways to achieve the same upsides, without the potential downsides (or similarly large ones, per unit of resources or work).

Nathan YoungJun 274

$43 per tonne is very cheap, right? in my head it needs to be 150-500 to have about the right incentives?

i guess offsets are cheaper than that though (though perhaps not when uncertainty of effectiveness is considered ?? )

jackvaJun 274

I would expect the main effect of stronger regulation of agriculture to be the innovation signal for alternative proteins.

If passed, this would be a pretty strong carbon tax and a pretty clear signal that at least some countries will get serious about decarbonizing agriculture, so even if it leads to suffering-increasing short-term changes I would expect the long run effect for animals to be positive (essentially, it seems to me the complementarities for AP-innovation between chicken and beef seem larger than the short-term shifts one would expect -- we do not get AP beef without ever getting AP chicken).

JamesÖzJun 274

Can you unpack your thinking on the complentarities of AP chicken and beef a bit more? My hunch is that the cost differential between beef and chicken is relatively pretty big e.g. the cheapest chicken costs around £2.5/kg and the cheapest mince is £5/kg (see photo and data below from Hannah Ritchie) so the former is just extremely hard to compete with. As such, I think it's very plausible/likely that we'll get price parity alternative proteins for the cheapest beef but maybe not with the cheapest chicken, in contrast to your comment.

Additionally, there are effects like:

Companies are much more likely to try to compete with beef as price parity is more plausible, so there's more innovation, talent and competition there, which makes the likelihood of reaching price parity higher.
Innovations that help beef won't necessarily spillover into improving chicken products (e.g. mince is much easier to make than whole-cut chicken, there is no need for the iron/heme taste in chicken, etc.)

So overall I'm not convinced that the carbon tax is net good for animals as the complementarities between chicken and beef don't seem that great. Curious to hear more though on your thoughts on this.

jackvaJun 2811

Sure! Here is the unpacked version (trying real hard to sound like an LLM):

There are lots of complementarities (or also just similar effects applied to beef and chicken) that I think complicate a picture focused on short-term marginal consumption shifts:

(1) I think investor confidence / durable public support is the single-most important predictor of most “easy” technological transformations (APs aren’t like fusion, there isn’t really a world where APs fail for lack of technical feasibility, APs are modular technologies that can be made reliably cheaper and better if invested in).
(2) APs and climate regulation are not exactly having a great year and an ambitious carbon tax covering agriculture is a signal bucking this trend (if indeed passed), something that could give investors more confidence to continue investing in APs. Historically, Nordic carbon taxes have been a leading indicator and inspiration to ambitious climate jurisdiction so I also do not see this primarily as a Danish thing but as a broader signal where the ambitious climate policy coalition will move.
(3) If one believes the basic AP theory of victory – APs get cheap and competitive and this makes norm changes and regulatory policy feasible in the long run (and there is a mutually reinforcing dynamic or near-competitive technology and changing political feasibility as we are seeing with other forms of clean tech) – then I find it pretty hard to imagine that we end up in a world where we say “the Danish carbon tax increased suffering on net” based on short-term marginal dynamics. I find it pretty implausible that people at scale will say “I will eat AP beef, but this does not affect my view of animal suffering at all and I will continue to eat animal chicken”. I am generally pretty skeptical based on such arguments based on current techno-economic dynamics since I think getting serious about investing into technologies usually unveils lots of new opportunities to make things cheaper and easier.
(4) One should also not forget that there is a strong signal here for chicken as well, there is a clear signal that “yes, we will get more seriously about regulating animal agriculture”.
(5) By close analogy, the most important short-term effect of a carbon tax on electricity is usually to make natural gas more competitive than coal. But I think it would be mistaken to conclude that ambitious carbon taxes are good for the natural gas industry in the long run.

I haven’t done the math on this. My original comment was mostly motivated by the prior discussion being what I found too focused on short-term marginal changes that I think are likely to miss the big picture here. So, I mostly wanted to provide an alternative take and considerations not reflected here before.