Starting this year, Danish fishermen are paying a tax on every litre of fuel to offset costs associated with CO2 production. The tax is significant at DKK 2.25 (EUR 0.30) per litre—but it seems huge for a sector of the fish industry that is already operating on a slender margin. Fishermen and their representatives are starting to protest against what they view is an unfairly large burden on them to switch to production processes that will someday benefit society but that don’t exist yet. As part of Denmark’s—and all of Europe’s—long-term climate strategy, a shift away from fossil fuels toward alternative energy sources that pollute less is vital. The status quo is causing the planet to heat up, and the resulting warmer waters are already shifting fish migration patterns, individual fish growth, and disrupting commercial fisheries. This is but a part of the broader economic and social impacts caused by global climate change. Society as a whole must share the burden of adopting new technologies, if it as a whole is to share the benefits of slower climate change.
The problem for fishermen is that there are currently no practical alternative energy sources to power Denmark’s fishing fleet. Therefore, the fuel tax is “fixed” in a sense and must be paid despite the fact that no conversion to an alternative power source is possible in the near term. The tax will someday help finance the development of new energy sources, but fishermen’s groups wonder when that someday will be. The Danish CO2 tax—the first tax of its kind to be passed by any EU member state—could force fishermen to land their catch in neighbouring countries, depriving the Danish supply chain with necessary raw material. Production and employment in this chain could suffer. Added to that, Danish fishermen say, are the needs of the aquaculture industry which uses feed processed from industrial fish species that make up a large part of the Danish catch. In value terms the Danish industrial fish catch amounted to one billion Danish kroner (EUR 130 million) in 2023. At the same time that aquaculture is growing, the raw material caught by Danish fishermen will decline, partly because of the CO2 tax.
Commercial fishing is typically carried out by small enterprises unable to finance new technology by themselves. Without the large sums needed for research and development, fishermen need government, universities, and other large organisations to come up with these new technologies. To turn the argument around and require the financing to come directly from a CO2 tax on fishermen that already operate on slim profit margins is, according to fishermen’s representatives, to force near-term costs directly on fishermen to pay for uncertain long-term gains to society.