"Denmark will be first to impose CO2 tax on farms, government says"

Well, it might also reduce chicken and egg consumption, because those are also more carbon-intensive than plant-based foods. And then there could also be symbolic effects, e.g. people might come to believe that animal agriculture in general is bad for the environment, not just ruminant farming. It could also support plant-based and cultured food R&D, which could then be good for chickens.

I don't have a strong view either way. I don't think such symbolic effects matter much for the vast majority of people, and I'd guess the price effects push towards increased chicken and egg consumption. How plant-based and cultured food R&D is affected seems super speculative to me, and this doesn't seem like a reliable way to increase it anyway.

Regardless of which way my best guess would go, I wouldn't have pushed for this to happen, because I definitely wouldn't have been confident it was robustly positive for animals, and I'd guess there were more effective and reliable ways to achieve the same upsides, without the potential downsides (or similarly large ones, per unit of resources or work).

Sure! Here is the unpacked version (trying real hard to sound like an LLM):

There are lots of complementarities (or also just similar effects applied to beef and chicken) that I think complicate a picture focused on short-term marginal consumption shifts:
 

• (1) I think investor confidence / durable public support is the single-most important predictor of most “easy” technological transformations (APs aren’t like fusion, there isn’t really a world where APs fail for lack of technical feasibility, APs are modular technologies that can be made reliably cheaper and better if invested in).
• (2) APs and climate regulation are not exactly having a great year and an ambitious carbon tax covering agriculture is a signal bucking this trend (if indeed passed), something that could give investors more confidence to continue investing in APs. Historically, Nordic carbon taxes have been a leading indicator and inspiration to ambitious climate jurisdiction so I also do not see this primarily as a Danish thing but as a broader signal where the ambitious climate policy coalition will move.
• (3) If one believes the basic AP theory of victory – APs get cheap and competitive and this makes norm changes and regulatory policy feasible in the long run (and there is a mutually reinforcing dynamic or near-competitive technology and changing political feasibility as we are seeing with other forms of clean tech) – then I find it pretty hard to imagine that we end up in a world where we say “the Danish carbon tax increased suffering on net” based on short-term marginal dynamics. I find it pretty implausible that people at scale will say “I will eat AP beef, but this does not affect my view of animal suffering at all and I will continue to eat animal chicken”. I am generally pretty skeptical based on such arguments based on current techno-economic dynamics since I think getting serious about investing into technologies usually unveils lots of new opportunities to make things cheaper and easier.
• (4) One should also not forget that there is a strong signal here for chicken as well, there is a clear signal that “yes, we will get more seriously about regulating animal agriculture”.
• (5) By close analogy, the most important short-term effect of a carbon tax on electricity is usually to make natural gas more competitive than coal. But I think it would be mistaken to conclude that ambitious carbon taxes are good for the natural gas industry in the long run.

I haven’t done the math on this. My original comment was mostly motivated by the prior discussion being what I found too focused on short-term marginal changes that I think are likely to miss the big picture here. So, I mostly wanted to provide an alternative take and considerations not reflected here before.