Here's a thought, Jacinda: start insulating your houses. Jfc it's like living in a tent here.

How is this related in the slightest

Cutting down emissions by not wasting so much heat, instead of whatever this plan is.

without reading the article I can say with 99% confidence that this is a tax on greenhouse emissions, not exclusively 'cow burps'

You understand that you can do more than one thing at once.

Whatavoutism

Agriculture is the largest contributor to methane emissions globally. Livestock, in particular cattle, produce a significant portion of the methane in our atmosphere. Cows produce most of this from the front end. Methane itself contributes about ~14% of greenhouse emissions.

I'm saying go with a plan that definitely works instead of something that just looks good on paper, mister one-word-comment can't even spell it correctly.

You will eat ze bugs

Are people protesting carbon emissions taxation or is everyone just ok with this shit (it's not been implemented where I live yet)

So, change the feed to one that produces less methane in the digestive process?

No, just tax it to make it more expensive. Except that while that may reduce some demand, it can also just raise the price to the point where imported beef is less expensive, so they end up raising the same quantity of cows on a global level, but the New Zealand ranchers and processors aren’t getting the business; and more energy is used and more emissions are generated to import it.

Then, as there is less and less domestic beef production, the lower and lower tax generation from it and the government has to keep raising the taxes to maintain the expected revenue and it creates a feedback loop that accelerates the offshoring of the industry.

Breaking news! New Zealand proposes taxing a kind of carbon emission, in order to reduce carbon emissions! How weird!

Do you not think that taxing the emissions would encourage the New Zealand beef industry to switch to a less methane producing feed?

She bought in the healthy home standards. Look it up if your home doesn’t measure up.

you're correct, although the taxes are specifically for greenhouse emissions produced by farms and livestock so I guess technically the headline is correct

People should be okay with this.

Give me a good logical reason why I should be taxed for a natural emission

Industrial scale animal farming is natural? News to me

Theres a lot of ways to help the enviroment, but you really wanna ve careful when fucking with the food supply, more taxes on farmers just means more expensive food.

Changing the food supply so that our food is far more plant based isn't just good, it's inevitable.

No it means that certain foods are more expensive to produce, incentivizing the supply chain to decarbonize

It’s not your burp ya goob

How long do we have until we get to pay per fart?

So you expect cattle farmers to switch to plants over night?

Well you can’t force what products people buy. You can but it takes a huge amount of legislation…instead you over tax the bad stuff so people gravitate towards the better option

After some googling, it seems the NZ building code will be a lot stricter from this november forwards on new housing. Still trying to figure out what rules there are for existing houses. So far, I see things like "double glazed windows are recommended" while triple should be the norm. Gonna do some more reading in the morning.

>creating a feedback loop

Taxes lost from methane-producing cows will be gained from non-methane-producing cows and other non-beef products. There doesn't have to be a loss of government revenue.

Taxing big businesses is just taxing customers with extra steps

Unless price controls are introduced, which tends to just make the whole situation worse.

But agriculture is also the most productive per emission so between cattle and jets flying to Davos the choice should not be cattle.

This happenned in the Netherlands first and it's gonna happen everywhere. People really do not associate farms and food as easily as you would expect. They think food os still gonna produce itself by magic. Plus , the alternative is going to be importing food from somewhere else and pretend we are green has we are doong with pretty much everything else already

Different feedstock can change the carbon footprint of cattle significantly

I hate this era of living in the most obnoxious and misleading news titles designed to anger people

Nothing wrong with plant based food but it won't naturally equate clean production. You still have GMOs and pesticides that you should ban or control properly

Ah, thats pretty interesing, got any link for that? Would love to read about it. That sounds like a more reasonable switch.

Oh, of course there's other things unsustainable practices in industrial scale farming, but we can do more than one thing.

Phasing out meat from our diets is just a matter of thermodynamics. The amount of resources needed to feed animals to get them ready for butchering would produce more food if put towards growing food.

Undeniable yep , but still the taxing won't really produce this kind of outcome i'm afraid.

>You still have GMOs
>
>that you should ban or control properly

Why banning gmo?

I agree there are other avenues besides piling the heap on struggling farmers, I was just providing a little more context. Seems like one of the contributing factors however is also to push people towards more sustainable eating habits by upping the price on beef

cows are not the problem

https://www.wur.nl/en/article/changing-the-cows-diet-reduces-methane-and-nitrogen-emissions.htm

The banning was for pesticides. Sorry , bad phrasing.

I agree that this decisions may come from the fact that we all know that people have to be "forced" to change eatong habits. But the healthier options aren't really all that affordable yet. So maybe the order of things should be reverted. Put organic /bio/plant-based options in a affordable price cap , then increase the vost for everything else.

So let's think this through ... Farmer owns cows. People eat his products. Cows fart (so do humans so to be fair, we should tax human farts, too). People tax cow farts and burps. Farmer can't afford to pay taxes per head of cattle so he reduces inventory. Farmer no longer can feed people who eat his products ... people go hungry. (Or die from eating too many man-made products that also require a bigger carbon footprint).

Seems logical to me.

Edit: Oh, BTW ... Farmer and his friends all still have meat on their tables because his neighbors still benefit from the farmer/rancher's work. But all you city dem/libs ... I hope you like the world you've created.

Thanks a lot, really interesting read.

No worries, there was also something I saw a while ago about seaweed also being good but I can't remember the details

Oh that sounds interesing, lotta space in the ocean.

These are the kinds of headlines that the right wing sees, and then uses as their argument. “Crazy liberal countries like New Zealand tax cow burps… What’s next? Are they gonna tax me when I fart? Snort snort”

Does the bill have an out for that? Does it include measurements and taxing on the results or is it just a tax per head?

Go ahead an ban it. Sri Lanka would like a word

So industrial entities are responsible for 80% of all carbon emissions. We know what the issue is, but the rich have us fighting over stupid trivial shit like this so we can't all collectively get our shit together & see them for the frauds they are.

It wasn't all that simple in sri lanka. The guy went balistic and did it overnight.

My thing is, a lot of people are equating gaseousness to the cause of the carbon footprint. But the thing is, how is that the contributing factor when at the end of the day, it’s all circulating around?

Like, i remember ads going around telling people to stop burping and farting to protect the ozone layer.

The methane molecule is created by the cow, not ingested, its a reaction that happens as it digests food. The article linked mentions it as well.

Plant base foods also emit a ton of carbon emissions in their respective industries. Furthermore studies have shown cattle can be a carbon sink if their diet is grassfed rather than the cowcorn we normally feed them. Lastly we got a carbon tax here in canada and it made not much of a difference in emissions. It made everything else much more expensive though.

Wether you do it overnight or over a decade you have the same problem: you go from feeding 3000 people per acre to only feeding 1500 people per acre. Unless you have half your agricultural land unused, can create more arable land (difficult to do quickly and long-term), your economy can afford supplemental imports in perpetuity from trusted sources that would never put political pressure on you some time in the future, or you can convince your population to starve or die off willingly, you’re going to have a bad time

The other day I was like, why haven’t they monetized ambiente breathing air. I mean we a absolutely need it to live. Surely there must be a way to charge people for some thing they cannot live without.

Or just install fume hoods over cattle barns. A funnel shaped roof with an aperture at the center. Apply a small negative pressure (suction), and collect all the free methane. Sell it for extra income. You can also process manure in bio reactors to extract even more methane. Then either use the depleted manure as fertilizer or burn it in plasma gasifiers, which produce syngas. It’s free money!

r/sounding

People also do not associate agriculture and climate change as easily as you would expect. If we don't reduce these emissions drastically, producing food will become a whole lot harder, and therefor more expensive, over the coming decades.

So what will it be? Medium price increase now, or increasingly larger price increases over the coming decades?

Who's that? It increases the price for animal based food without an increase in plant based food. Thereby making the former less and the latter more competitive. That is literally the way you control consumption in a capitalist system.

That's right. There is no choice. If we want to keep this planet habitable in the long term, both need to be scaled back significantly.

Where does it not increase the price of plant based food? If we shift into plant based food without guaranteeing the increase of production , it will increase the plant based food price for sure. I'm not saying it is what i want to happen i'm saying it is what is likely to happen .

Not sure where that myth comes from, but when I stopped eating meat, my spending on food decreased by about 1/3. Meat is expensive.

Not exactly the cow. It’s the bacteria that helps the cow digest the food.

Even for humans when we eat certain vegetables like beans or broccoli, we have bacteria that breaks down some of the food and it makes us gaseous.

Yeah, methane can carry some heat, but it’s not exactly what is making our environments bad. If anything, it’s transport more or less leaving the carbon footprint. Here, I have a video that explains the whole methane theory from 2006. It does explain the errors from the UN documentary and how animal populations from times before certain eras like colonialization were much larger and their output contributed very little to the carbon footprint.

One thing i do agree with is that there is a large problem with indusialization. And i would propose more innovative ideas like cloning meat to reduce the amount of animals being inhumanely treated and exploited in industrial livestock farms.

So where does all the methane come from?

ok, first off, more than half of the food we produce is wasted because corporations would rather let people starve that let them eat food that they are not able to sell.

second, not because we reduce production of meat it means we dont have anything alse to eat, you know that alternatives to cows exist right?

Beef is , chicken not as much . It changes from place to place also probably. I mean , India is a pretty much vegetarian sub-continent do i guess i can try to produce some of their recipeed on my journey into a vegetarian.

A bit late to the cause its night in nz but thought I should clear things up. Lots of talk about beef in the comments nz agricultural emissions are primarily from dairy cows.

Yep , but conciously, not has we did with going electric

Yeah, i mean i dont think farming is the first place making cuts is relevant, its n incredibly important industry, and yeah absolutely, scalable lab meat is the future.

Yeah i do , and those alternatives are the biggest part of the waste you mentioned. Now , will corporations say "hey now that people are buying more of this , i'm not wasting so i can actually be cheaper than before" or " due to the higher demand i have to jack up prices" ?

Or you know do something that doesnt involve an animals bodily function and ban private jets

Yeah, think of the amount of jobs to be created. Just imagine being at a party when someone asks you what you do for a living… “I count cow burps”!

Just for context. This is mostly addressing dairy cows not beef, but they are included too. Also all cows in nz are grass fed only. Other than supplemental feed e.g. seaweed I would be very surprised if changes to the feed were the outcome in nz.

>Farmer owns cows. People eat his products. Cows fart. People tax cow farts and burps. Farmer can't afford to pay taxes per head of cattle so...

I'm with you this far, but then you go off the rails a bit. Here's what actually happens:

... Farmer raises prices to keep up with higher production cost. Animal products are now more expensive to buy. People change their diets to more plant and less animal based. Plant based food is now more in demand so framer expands production into areas previously used to produce animal feed crops. Emissions decrease. Land use decreases. Nobody starves.

Also, footnote: Yes, humans fart too. But humans have a different diets and are considerably smaller then cows. Thus human fart emissions are negligible in comparison.

What do you mean, industrial entities? What do you think diary farms are?

Global CO2 emission sources can be divided into five sectors of approximately equal size: Electricity generation, Heating, Transport, Industrial processes and Agriculture. We need to reduce emissions in all of these sectors. Agricultural emissions*,* largely coming from animals, are anything but trivial.

Where I'm from, dairy farms aren't really 'industrial entities', and I think that's more what I'm getting at. Sure, giant corporations making mega farms are NOT GOOD and should be held accountable. The family down the road from me that has been farming for 5 generations? Nothing wrong with them & their practices.

I just don't think farming should ever be monopolized the way it has been. The only reason it's so destructive as an industry is because actual farmers get jack shit for their crop, can't repair their own equipment legally, and are forced to use certain brands of seed & cow feed. Eventually they can't sustain the costs & have to sell to a giant corporate farming entity.

Yeah, farming is pollutive & destructive on a large scale, but people's insatiable greed is what bastardized the industry & made it that.

It's better to solve the problem by actually identifying the issue, and that issue is greed & forced growth by shareholders. Taxing Joe Farmer every time his cow burps is ridiculous. That's not going to solve the major problems with the farming industry or reduce the pollution in any way. Forcing farming entities to have better practices & fining them for refusing to change would be much more effective, and actually solve some of the pollution issue.

Oh goodness, if they taxed me per fart, I would be taxed into homelessness while the IRS garnished all of my wages.

These are the kind of headlines that news sites belonging the uber-rich capitalists write to make the right wing stop the rich being taxed. Don't attribute things to incompetence, when they should be attributed to malice.

Methane emissions not carbon, to be pedantic

I am a new Zealander and this is absolutely ridiculous. We already get fucked from beingtaxed through the roof for everything. They are just going to screw small farmers. It's not like any of us in this country can get ahead we are being taxed so much. Just look at our male suicide rates and work out how come that mite be. There is nothing to work towards here

the best part about it is how the price increased in everything just gets passed on to the middle class

Well ... lots of job opportunities for folks having to stand around in the fields and count those farts or burps. So, partial win?

Cows with cybernetic implants that upload fart and burp data to the cloud... Technology has finally not gone far enough.

Methane (CH4) is the second most impactful greenhouse gas, second to Carbon Dioxide (CO2). It has a CO2 equivalent of 84x, meaning every 1 litre of Methane released is equivalent to 84 litres of Carbon Dioxide. It contributes to a countries carbon footprint, and is therefore considered to be a carbon emission, to be pedantic.

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How does taxing it reduce the emissions?

> the right wing sees, and then uses as their argument. “Crazy liberal

Where we tax green house gas instead of regulating it, then let the market reduce emissions on their own? I'd think right wing would agree if they were sincere on their conservativism or willingness to address climate change.

Real problem is that conservatives aren't sincere, they are corporate stooges who aren't addressing catastrophic man-made global climate change.

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In a way? Yep. I think so. On one hand, i know it would be profitable for the meat industry in the long run. Means less livestock having to get killed and waste so much resources while at the same time it covers the ethics of cruel rearing that does happen in animal processing places.

On the other hand, you might have people who have an aversion to lab grown meat and they might give up meat altogether when they realize lab grown meat is everywhere....

They could add a supplement that potentially would cut down on the methane

Maybe yeah, i think there will still be a market for real meat no matter what, but if it can be significantly reduced in an economical way, then that could help free some land and help the enviroment.

I’m sure there will be, but it’ll likely be local butcheries and Farmers’ Markets that sell them.

I know speaking in the US since I live here, Livestock farming takes a small percentage of land here. Most of our farms deal with commercial agriculture, like the farming of corn and soy. Given a lot of our processed foods contain them both or some byproduct, that meets demand of food here.

There are a variety of industrial sources. Oil and natural gas systems, coal mining, combustion...

Cattle is basically the most wasteful regular food type. It's better to eat chicken or pork from the other side of the planet than a cow raised next door. It takes 8 calories in to get 1 calorie of beef out.

I am a New Zealander, and unfortunately we have right wingers like the wally above me, who would rather see the world burn than do something about climate change.

Most people's philosophy these days is "let's do something about climate change without changing anything about my lifestyle".

There are ways to reduce cow methane output...apparently feeding a small amount of seaweed makes methane output drop dramatically.

So this may just provide a financial incentive for farmers to actually do the things that we already know will help.

Here in Canada most dairy farms are definitely industrial entities in the sense that they've got hundreds of cattle and are largely automated.

And we already know that it's possible to significantly reduce cow methane production by feeding them a small amount of seaweed...there are probably other ways as well.

By taxing them for cow burps and then giving them money back if they do the right thing, it provides a financial incentive to do the right thing. This is known as a "Pigouvian tax" in economics.

Methane has carbon in it, and is way worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

Isn't that exactly what I said?

Agricultural emissions are NZ's biggest source of greenhouse gases (they make up nearly half)

Bruh do you know what carbon is?

In all fairness, this is pretty crazy. How do you even measure and quantify that?

It's a disincentive.

To farm? Thats smart

Livestock agriculture is the single largest contributor to methane in the atmosphere. It also uses up an obscene amount of land that could be better utilized (or not utilized). People also eat way too much meat. Taxing this is a no brainer.

What ever happened to that seaweed that was supposed to fix the cow burps?

ETA: https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/04/22/cows-methane-global-warming-climate-change-seaweed

Yeah, I fucking hate headlines like this. Pure sensationalism and stoking the fires without providing any useful information.

The red seaweed used for this is very difficult to grow. I think there has been an Australian startup on the books since the early 2010s trying to commercialize this. Nobody can figure out how to make it at scale and to get the cows to eat it, since it is salty and they seem to not eat as much on a mixed ration.

To farm meat. Meat is extremely overproduced in the world economy and it's been having disaterous consequences.

There are three ways- a satellite company out of Canada has a GPS style grid of small satellites that has been able to detect methane plumes from space. The other is a mechanical device that uses the RFID embedded in the cow's tag to identify the cow and then measure the methane output. Lastly, you put the cow in a neatly sealed cell and monitor all gases going in and out of the cell.

Cow farts are included as well

You can make pretty good estimates by what cows are eating, the number of cows, and their breed.

You measure a few cows, get some averages and use that average with the number of cows a farmer has.

Headlines about taxing cow burps w/o fining the corporations will always be treated as ridiculous and meaningless. People are so concerned about future. What about now? Wealth inequality is through the roof than ever before. Not everyone has the luxury of thinking about climate.

To farm dairy actually but same idea.

What are you on about? Our taxes are low.

I don't see how the red seaweed being salty would turn the cows off since they crave salt. We add salt to nearly every cattle diet on my farm. On pasture they have free choice salt provided too.

They have a small level of aversion which can be overcome. The researchers at UC Davis used it in a molasses lick. I'm actually working on similar technology at work also in a molasses lick. https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/can-seaweed-cut-methane-emissions-on-dairy-farms

Asparagopsis is the name of the seaweed, cows in Australia are eating it no worries (actually controlling how much they eat is the problem) as for the growing of it; it’s been possible for them to grow it on oyster racks in the ocean and they are about to start mass cultivation indoors on the eyre peninsula in SA. It’s already had huge results and proven to work with CSIRO studies

So by phasing out cattle what do you propose we do with grassland pastures? Yes feedlotting is an environmental disaster but cattle raised regeneratively are actually drawing more carbon than the emissions they produce

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All New Zealand bovine will attend an etiquette course. They will be raised and instructed as ladies and be expected to act accordingly.

Everyone knows ladies don’t fart. And therefore it should be implied they don’t burp as well.

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Do you have a source to back up the claim that most of the wasted food can be considered "an alternative to meat"? and the hypotetical problem of prices can be fixed by supporting worker unions along with goverment regulations, its not hard to find solution to problems corporations made up for profits.

>So by phasing out cattle what do you propose we do with grassland pastures?

Pave over them and build skeeball arcades.

> Yes feedlotting is an environmental disaster but cattle raised regeneratively are actually drawing more carbon than the emissions they produce

And it's cool to drive your hummer to the shops if each time you do it you buy millions of tons of carbon offsets.

You ever seen regeneratively raised cattle at the supermarket? No? You ever seen it at restaurants? Again no?

Found the Yank.

New zeland is an insane place

dairy* industry, and less methane producing than grass?

Farmers, taking a page from Volkswagen's playbook, will now teach their cows to burp less while under emission test.

Crazy liberal countries with their 6 month waiting list for basic hospital procedures.

Crazy liberal countries with their 2 years waiting list to see a therapist.

Crazy liberal countries being top 3 for suicide rate on the planet.

Crazy liberal countries being top 5 for domestic violence.

Crazy liberal countries being top 5 for child molestation and rape.

Crazy liberal countries forcing a stay-at-home mandate that skyrocketed unemployment.

Crazy liberal country forces population to get injections and low-key admits afterwards they don't really do shit.

Crazy liberal country finds way to tax poor people even further, by taxing the food they grow which is round-house subsidized by the same people taking their money to meet trade obligations with China.

​

Dude there's a lot of reasons why NZ is a liberal shithole, now piss off.

This is the best idea ever. What about sheep farts?

In New Zealand, those are just known as mating calls. >!/j!<

It's simple we can just outlaw eating food and using leather.

I'd like to purchase a 30 fart concession card thanks.

Well this sounds familiar. I'm an NZer, and whenever a carbon tax is proposed there are headlines about the "loony left" wanting to tax farts. Doesn't matter that animal farts weren't talked about in the proposal they see carbon tax and that's what they jump to. Then they go on and on about how stupid it is and how this will ruin the country. Like this guy they are quoting thinking that farmers will give up their livelihood and walk away in indignation and how it will be even worse for the environment because somehow it leads to more meat and dairy product being produced in other countries and their animals fart more. Okay??

...complained the guy who lives in paradise. You are so hard done by. It's a tribute to your fortitude you've held on this long having the misfortune of having been born in New Zealand as one of the globes top 2% of wealthiest humans on the planet. Thank God you have a supercomputer in your pocket that enables you to post your plight and reach out to the rest of the world. Where do we send the emergency humanitarian aid?

Are you saying cows farmed for meat do not produce the same emissions?

No I'm saying that in NZ the vast majority of our cows are dairy rather than meat. Given the NZ context of the article.

Can't wait to John Bull the first one who asks if I got a license for that fart.

We're only 300 years in, we'll be out of the tunnel soonish.

I understand what you're saying now. Meat is usually the main reason for these bills so I just assumed, apologies.

I live on a farm in Australia..

lol that is sweet. I have all kind of questions about how accurate it would be but I love that people are actually measuring this

The whole cell is accurate, but quite expensive and awkward. The ground device is also expensive but not as much and only is cost effective if part of a carbon credit project and the satellites are good enough, but most of their focus is on fossil fuel plumes and other than a proof of concept, they don't seem to monitor cattle on a regular basis, even if they could.