> it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e
Your pig farmers must be thrilled.
It comes with quite a lot of compensation and subsidies, so they're less angry than you might expect. Also, an important note here is that they were part of the negotiations, and as such were part of the agreement which was proposed to the parliament.
All that being said, you're right, they're not exactly thrilled with the government adding taxes and monitoring them more.
> It comes with quite a lot of compensation and subsidies, so they're less angry than you might expect.
Do people really still buy this trick?
Agriculture has been subsidized for security and stability reasons for a very long time - this isn't a trick it's the status quo ex ante.
Subsidies will be cut by a future government so it's all fine :D
They've tried to avoid this by doing the negotiations between the government and interest organizations from all sides. The most surprising part of all this is really that these organizations, which included the main agricultural lobby organizations and the main nature preservation organizations, managed to sit down together and come to an agreement. This agreement was then proposed to the parliament, which voted it through with a broad coalition from both sides. So, that should ideally make it somewhat resilient to changing governments. Of course, that's not a guarantee, but at least it should be more solid than most of these political agreements :)
So you tax them for CO2 and then subsidize them for the same reason?
How does help anyone else than salaries for tax and subsidy administrators?
Not exactly. I'll just copy a reply I made further down: in 2030, a tax will be introduced of 120 DKK (~16€) / ton CO2e, which linearly increases each year until it reaches 300 DKK (~40€) / ton CO2e in 2035. However, the farmers can get subsidies for changing their practices and adopting new technologies, in order to reduce their emissions. I.e., the government will give you money to change your production, so you can minimize the carbon taxes you have to pay. There are more technicalities to how it works, but that's the gist of it. The important part is that the goal is to transition to new technologies and production methods, which reduces emissions per unit food produced.
Without having read the legislation, the two aren't necessarily contradictory. They only are if the subsidy mechanically increases with the tax.
A "climate income" is a good example of that. Everyone gets taxed by usage/pollution, but the collected tax gets redistributed evenly.
That way, on average there is no extra taxation, in fact it's typically a redistribution from top to bottom. And yet every individual will end up with more money the less they pollute. It's that individual incentive that makes the measure effective, but it's the redistribution that makes it socially acceptable (if implemented correctly)
It gets legislation that people in general want (better rivers and streams, healthier sea ecosystem) passed, by subsidizing the changes required for the people those changes negatively affect.
Is it ideal? maybe not, but it is the real world.
Ideally, you gradually ramp down the subsidies, to give folks a gentle offramp.
I had to look it up, Denmark is allegedly a world leader in pig farming exports. You make a really interesting point that I feel like garners more discourse.
https://agricultureandfood.dk/danish-agriculture/agriculture....
There's a great few episodes on this in Borgen where the PMs paramour goes to the hospital because there are so many hormones pumped into Danish pigs and how powerful the industry is in the country.
Denmark is also THE world leader in pork consumption.
This doesn't seem to be true. In 2002 it appeared to be true, but the way it was calculated was by calculating the full mass of pigs produced and subtracting the amount exported. This didn't take into account that exports tended not to include heavy bones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...
More recent data shows thir pork consumption as nothing noteworthy, though I have no idea how good the data is https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pork-cons...