New Zealand considers taxing cow and sheep burps to combat climate change
The government of New Zealand has proposed a novel way of fighting climate change: charging farmers for the burps, farts and waste of farm animals.
"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," James Shaw, New Zealand's climate change minister, told BBC News last week.
Methane is the second-most prevalent greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, and the majority of methane emissions come from human activity. Since methane causes much more warming than carbon in the first few decades after it is released, but then dissipates in the atmosphere more quickly, clamping down on methane emissions is essential to averting catastrophic climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. President Biden and the European Union unveiled a global effort to cut methane emissions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, last November.
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