[edshuck]

Remember the farmer who was using the cow waste to generate electricity? Here is a followup.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...AG0T7D1FU1.DTL

Lots of links when searching "methane digester"

[kall]

Our politicians introduced what became known as 'The Fart Tax'.

Effectively it was a charge to farmers based on the amount of methane produced by their animals.

Needless to say, it didn't go down well.

[Darkling]

Originally Posted by kall

Our politicians introduced what became known as 'The Fart Tax'.

Effectively it was a charge to farmers based on the amount of methane produced by their animals.

Needless to say, it didn't go down well.

How could they possibly measure it unless they fitted compulsory fart filters to the sphincters of every farm animal or enveloped each farm in its own biodome?

Most likely some scientist came up with a figure of the amount of methane each type of animal farts in a day the tax was calculated based on the size of individual herds.


...or was it something else?

[Penny]

It didn't go down well. But when you look at how taxes work, it is quite senesible. I don't know an awful lot about exactly how it all works, so I could have gotten something wrong.

It was my understanding the tax was needed because we as a country have to reduce the amount of methane or what ever that is out there, and to do that we need money to put into the research. Since the Methane from the cows etc is the biggest area they wanted to put tax on them so they can get the money to do the research. I mean they could have just put some other tax up and used the money from that, but that is hardly fair on those people who arent part of the problem.

But then you can start arguing every tax we pay and whether it is fair or not.

[edshuck]

There is another issue here.

Remember Napster. Part of the problem was that the music industry had not figured out a way to make the internet into a revenue producer.

Transfer that thought to the power company the farmer and the methane. What is needed is a way to make the methane generation provide a benefit to the power company. There must be ways but we just have not come to them yet.

A link to the hole in antartica. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000911.html

I mention this and know that we in the US do, without a doubt, the poorest job of any country in controling our emmissions.

[trogg]

As I understand it another factor to throw in the calculation is the Kyoto Protocol on Global warming.

As methane from 'expelled animal gases' is technically a greenhouse gas it needs to be 'taxed' so that the Kyoto credits and debits can be put into ballance (even though the NZ government were not looking at giving 'tax credits' to the forest owners as the trees absorb greenhouse gases).

I have to wonder why we signed up to this when NZ's combined greenhouse gas output (after the vast amounts of forests do their work) is probably less than just one state of the USA which did not sign up.

As a side note, how is this for stupidity.... We have a power station at Huntly which is about to be refurbished, which is sitting on top of a coal mine but is being run on natural gas. The gas (from the Maui feild) is running out so there is work being done at the power station and the port of Mt Manganui (about 100km away) so that they can run it on coal again.... but the coal is being imported from Indonesia rather than being dug out of the ground behind the power station. The reasons given include the cost of mining the NZ coal (because of silly things like the first world pay rates that kiwi miners want and the costs of running a safe mine and therefore not killing to many workers), however this costs in overseas funds which are hard earnt by farmers etc.

[edshuck]

Thanks Trogg,

Kyoto. Geneva Convention.

Bush never saw an international protocol that the US would not violate.

I just hope that by the time this jerk is gone, the rest of the world will not have given up on us.

There was a war crimes thing that would have come in handy that the US also did not sign. Almost, but sadly not. Had we, the world would now have many of the Bush administration in custody.