Livestock Farming Is 'Climate Neutral'

The Danish state has a little while ago begun to put animal husbandry under a decent penalty tax (Turnowsky 2024). The reason for this tax? The ostensible damage, which animal husbandry wreaks upon the climate. Why this in the best case is due to inadequate literacy and thought on part of the involved politicians and in the most likely case due to fiscal greed of the state, I'll demonstrate in this article.

The charges against animal husbandry (which includes pastoral farming) is, that our planet will be destroyed by the farts of these animals (yeah, they're serious). This alone should be enough to give pause. Not so for the uneducated or greedy politicians involved in the making of this tax.

I'll make it simple.

Yes, cattle do fart out a mixture of methane and CO2, which is produced by microbial fermentation of cellulose (a major plant component) in the gastrointestinal tracts of cattle. This may seem troublesome at first glance, but if we look but a bit deeper at the issue, we'll quickly understand, that it's all but troublesome. Looking deeper at the issue seemed to be too much work for the ingenious politicians that came up with this nonsensical tax, however, even though it's the entirety of their job to make intelligent decisions.

But, let's take a bit of a closer look ourselves.

The methane–CO2 mixture, which cattle farts out, arises as stated above from cellulose fermentation. The cellulose comes directly from the plants that are given to the cattle as feed. These plants themselves grow by photosynthetic fixation of CO2 from the atmosphere. They then turn this fixated CO2 into sugars and – amongst other things – cellulose. This means, that the CO2, which the cattle fart out can't be the problem anymore.

But surely, the ingenious politicians thought of the methane.

Maybe, but they still didn't think it through.

Methane is very volatile in our oxygen-rich atmosphere. The same properties, which make methane highly flammable, make it highly volatile in the presence of oxygen and solar irradiation. Oops, sounds a lot like our atmosphere, doesn't it? In oxidative degradation, methane is broken down into CO2 and water, and CO2 – as we've already noticed – can't be the issue, as it's fixated by the very plants cattle uses to fart it out in the first place.

The CO2 and methane farting of cattle are thus a closed loop. This isn't something we can say about most other agriculture.

Animal husbandry has no net CO2 or methane expulsion as long as the cattle is kept in pastoral farming, where we minimise the use of heavy machinery.

Other agriculture uses fertilisers produced in factories and uses heavy machinery, both of which use energy and burn subterranean fuels. How sustainable and 'climate-neutral'.

Welcome to our wonderful world, where inane and useless knee-jerk actions are enacted by politicians, who constantly increase their own pay instead of their education and literacy of centrally important topics.

Turnowsky, W. (2024). Dänemark führt als erstes Land CO₂-Steuer für die Landwirtschaft ein. Der Nordschleswiger. https://www.nordschleswiger.dk/de/daenemark-politik/daenemark-fuehrt-als-erstes-land-co2-steuer-fuer-landwirtschaft, last visited on 03/12-2024 at 1139 h.