In an apparent backdoor effort to tax meat, the burps and farts of cattle and sheep are set to be taxed by the leftist government of New Zealand in a bid to, they claim, save the world.
The left-wing Labour government of Jacinda Ardern has drafted proposals to levy taxes against farmers for the methane emissions produced by cows and sheep in what would be the world’s first green tax on livestock.
“There is no question that we need to cut the amount of methane we are putting into the atmosphere, and an effective emissions pricing system for agriculture will play a key part in how we achieve that,” the government’s climate change minister James Shaw said per The Telegraph.
New Zealand, which is home to 5 million people, is a net exporter of meat, with approximately 10 million cows and 26 million sheep grazing on its pastures.
As a result, around half of the country’s emissions come from farming, mostly from the methane produced by the belching or flatulence of cows and sheep. Previously, agriculture has been exempt from the government’s carbon emissions trading schemes.
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Yet, despite the large livestock population, the Pacific Ocean island country only ranks 74th globally in terms of carbon emissions, accounting for just 0.09 per cent of the world’s emissions, meaning that such a tax would likely have negligible impacts on supposedly man-made climate change.
However, the tax will likely serve to increase the cost of lamb and beef in New Zealand and in the countries to which the meat is exported, with farmers likely to pass on the added expense to consumers.
The draft proposal, which would come into effect by the year 2025, is set to be finalised by December.
The move from the socialist government comes amid a wider effort by governments and globalist institutions to push people away from meat. The United Kingdom, under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has also discussed levying border taxes on meat and dairy to, they claim, fight climate change.
Institutions such as the World Economic Forum, which has long advocated for the consumption of bugs, recently called for the widespread adoption of veganism and the eating of “climate beneficial foods” such as seaweed and algae.
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