You could plant a trillion trees tomorrow but it won't help anything so long as places like China and India pollute the oceans with millions of tones of plastic waste trash every year. That's in the thousands of tones per day region. The sheer scale of pollution there makes Denmark's measly little contribution just that, peanuts. No wonder the farmers are upset. They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
This is a type of fallacy. Denmark as a country is politically relatively powerless compared to China or the US, or even Germany, but each citizen has about the same or more power compared to each citizen in those larger countries.
The fallacy is to say "I, as an individual in a small country, cannot do anything because these other large countries are, collectively, much more powerful". Well, no kidding. Any Denmark-sized administrative section of a larger country (say, a US state, a Chinese province, or a German bundesland) has the same or smaller influence on the climate. Often a much smaller influence due to how international diplomacy works.
It's a category error. Whether progress is made in Denmark-sized chunks or in US/EU/China/Germany-sized chunks is irrelevant, as long as the average velocity per human is the same on a global scale. It's not high enough at the moment, but it's equally significant wherever it happens.
It’s funny how I also feel peanuts when I vote for elections but also feel very engaged and powerful with that paper holding a nano-minuscule fraction of power.
> They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
The environnemental impact of their AG is peanuts on a global scale but cause massive problems on their own lands and coast. Food security will still be largely fine : there’s large surpluses and you are actually safer stocking grains than livestock, especially in modern silos. For industry and livelihood I’m sure those guys are smart enough to shift to others activities. That may be quite easy when you look at the current meat industry profitability.