Old MacDonald had a farm...until the Environmental Protection Agency took it from him. Why the EPA? Apparently, the EPA is considering taxing cows and other farm animals for their methane production and their general emission of carbon- and nitrogen-rich flatus, under authority of the Clean Air Act.
So much for rumors of a ‘Gas tax’ holiday.
Worldwide, according to the United Nations, nine percent of the carbon dioxide emissions and 37 percent of the methane emissions from human activity come from animal agriculture.
If animal “emissions” are indeed such a widespread problem, contributing an actual, nontrivial impact on the environment, the taxes reaped could be necessarily substantial. But the tax could place an equally substantial burden on farmers.
According to AP, the proposed flatulence tax would “require farms or ranches with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs to pay an annual fee of about $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle and $20 for each hog.”
The New York Farm Bureau estimates that an animal emissions tax would cost New York dairy farmers alone $110 million per year. Medium-sized farms might be expected to pay as much as $40,000 in fees. In this economy, when farmers are just barely hanging on, the added tax could force some closer to foreclosure.
Of course, if it comes to that, Congress can just bail out the agriculture industry. Right?
While the government asks for increasing fees from farmers, the US Department of Agriculture spent $7.6 billion in “assistance to farmers” in 2008. Subsidies and tax credits go in, taxes and flatulence fees come out. The government pays farmers and farmers pay the government, as if neither had anything better to do. It’s a merry-go-round of money comparable to farming itself: plant, harvest, plant, harvest. But Earth to EPA: do not harvest more than you plant. Bankrupt farms will do for American diets what bankrupt banks did for American credit.
It’s unlikely farmers and legislators of farming states will stand for taxing gas in the name of environmentalism. Many farmers around the country have expressed outrage over the proposal, despite the law having support from some environmental groups looking to get Americans to eat less meat and curtail animal-induced global warming.
"Who comes up with this kind of stuff?" said Perry Mobley, director of the Alabama Farmers Federation's beef division. "It seems there is an ulterior motive, to destroy livestock farms. This would certainly put them out of business."
Rather than taxing what animals emit and place an even greater financial burden on farmers and American families, a better solution may lie in harvesting it to produce energy. It would be a dirty job, but there’s at least one federal agency that can’t smell the stink of utter crap.
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