Column | The cow cannot be digitized

I chew a little on the cow. Figuratively speaking. The cow is the most important topic of the twenty-first century, the linchpin of our permanent crisis. Because 9.8 billion people will probably live on Earth by 2050, food production must increase, CO . emissions must be increased₂ down, so the cow needs to be put together better. Scientists are changing the position of the cow’s udder so that it connects more adequately to the milking robot.

It’s quite a puzzle. Breeding formulas are used; surprisingly few bulls. The cows are shaped and controlled by algorithms, Hungarian artist Daniel Szalai wrote last year on The Correspondent. “Causes have thus become a type of animal of which there are about a billion roaming the earth at any given moment in time. And yet the male and female animals hardly ever meet.”

How handy would it be if we could completely digitize the cow and ourselves. That would save a lot of emissions. But the Thales Group, a global technology leader in smart farming, sighs that your animals (“the fundamentals of farming”) cannot be reduced to bytes. „You can’t digitize a chicken” – unfortunately the cow and the chicken and ourselves are still real.

The fact that reality cannot be reduced so easily is an important insight. Something to keep in mind as we start to manage not only the cow, but also the people. Because those 9.8 billion people will soon have to be streamlined just as well as the cow, there is no other option; the harmfulness of their presence on this planet must be limited or, to put it more officially, mitigated. That requires a plan. A formula.

Here comes the discussion about the CO₂budget in focus: it revolves around the plan to reduce people’s emissions. That is, not their own emissions, but the emissions they cause by manufacturing so many cows. The discussion about this is now heated. In the vigilant circles of society there are fears that there are plans to apply breeding formulas to humans and to change the position of our mouths in such a way that it fits more efficiently with the cow’s udder and the state robot.

This concern is not entirely without reason. Of course, setting a quota is the obvious choice if you want to distribute the scarce resources on the overcrowded planet. A clothing quota, an energy ceiling, a travel pars, a milk budget. But the scary question is how the government will keep track of those quotas and with which system it will weigh and assess citizens’ choices. Alarm bells are ringing everywhere about state interference.

So what exactly is the situation with CO₂budget, asks the Amsterdam Tolhuistuin in the announcement of a Warming Up Festival. Does the budget lead to some form of state terror? Or does it offer freedom? “Is inequality just getting bigger or is the world becoming more just?” That’s an interesting issue; I personally think it mainly depends on how you practically organize such a budget. It is clear that with ten billions we have to buy less clothes and cheese. But who should arrange that and how?

It is the administrative tendency not to arrange this through reality, but through models. For example, according to the models, in previous years farmers had to purchase more cows to afford more modern barns, which would then lead to less environmental impact. What they didn’t do, on closer inspection, was investing in technology that caused fewer emissions on paper, actually caused more. The models were not completely bleached up to date.

Something like this is possible with a CO₂budget can also be done easily. Proponents of such a budget want to make emission rights tradable, so that poor citizens who would not fly anyway sell their flying rights to rich citizens who do. It doesn’t seem effective to me. Before you know it, you will be reducing emissions with rules and data models that actually increase emissions.

Philosophically, this is an exciting century: Reality strikes back and responds to our intelligent presence with floods, heat waves, storms and biodiversity loss. In response, we become even more intelligent, we manage the world with old models and unclear dashboards, we trade shady rights, we design cows with algorithms, we move udders, and meanwhile reality is becoming more and more unruly.

The cows and we are in the same boat. We are real. The fundamentals of farming. Perhaps it would be realistic to accommodate a little, breed less, and stop eating each other on a large scale.