The Dutch kulaks farmers continue to protest
Once again, the Dutch farmer situation reminds me of the Soviets, who didn’t hesitate to sacrifice the kulaks for the cause. In fact, to them it was a feature, not a bug. There is something very independence-minded, as well as grounded in the realities of life rather than abstractions, about farmers, and those bent on authoritarian control don’t tend to like those qualities in their subjects. I use the word “subjects” purposely, because – as our own Founders knew – top-down control without representation is tyranny.
The revolt by the Dutch farmers is ongoing; I’ve written about it before, here. The title of of this more recent article on the subject interested me enough to cause me to click on it: “Farmer Protests in the Netherlands Show Just How Messy the Climate Transition Will Be.” “Messy” – like making an omelet. All those oozy broken eggs. Messy, but necessary, say those in power to those not in power:
“That’s what you get when you make people so very angry,” Sieta van Keimpema, secretary of the Farmers Defense Force (FDF), said July 27 as the group launched a fresh round of demonstrations.
What’s driving the dispute? Manure. The Netherlands’ intensive livestock farming system produces an unusual excess of animal feces. When mixed with urine, those feces give off ammonia and nitrous oxide. The former is a pollutant that can leak into air and water, harming local wildlife. The latter is a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in our atmosphere: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says nitrous oxide accounts for around 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
This is the rhetoric being used by the government:
The government said it was leading an “unavoidable transition” for agriculture.
Here’s the bottom line:
Trienke Elshof, a dairy farmer with 250 cows in the northern province of Friesland, says farmers feel blindsided: for decades, governments have encouraged them to increase yields. Meanwhile, other high-polluting industries, such as aviation, construction, and transport, have yet to face such severe environmental rules. “We know we have to do something about nitrogen, but not in this top-down way, and not at this speed,” she says. “It feels like they want to get rid of all the farmers in the Netherlands.”
The is the kind of seeming self-sabotage we’ve seen in so many countries lately, including ours. Government of the people, by the people, for the people? Hardly.
More:
…[F]ar-right figures and conspiracy theorists have also gotten involved. Twitter is filled with posts linking the Netherlands’ nitrogen policy to the Great Reset—a theory that claims international elites are trying to use the COVID-19 pandemic to establish an authoritarian global government.
Let me clue the folks at Time (not that they care): when you launch into that kind of language – “far-right” and “conspiracy theorist” and “claims” – it is a transparent attempt to label something false rather than demonstrate its falsity. The sad thing is that the Great Resetters have said plenty themselves that indicates they are indeed using the pandemic, plus climate change and other crises, to do just that: establish an authoritarian global government or at the very least a series of leftist national governments that are all on the same page. This isn’t some wacky hidden-conspiracy theory; this is what they’ve indicated by their own public words.
More (emphasis mine):
This may be just the beginning of much wider global unrest over agriculture. Scientists say dealing with climate change will require not just gradual reform, but a rapid, wholesale transformation of the global food system. As one of the world’s most densely farmed nations, the Netherlands is one of the first countries to grapple with how that upheaval will impact farmers—and how messy the transition will be. It won’t be the last.
Nah, no global plan there, right? And notice that gradualism will not do – this must be immediate and harsh, you kulaks! You don’t understand, but we do.
Even the Dutch farmers seem to be admitting there actually are some problems from the effects of too much manure. They’re objecting, however, to the speed of these demanded changes and the fact that they are generated completely top-down and are destructive to one of the main engines of the Dutch economy. What’s more, making The Netherlands much less self-sufficient in food production will make it more dependent on other countries for its food – can’t imagine that that will be a good thing.
It’s not just the Dutch, as we already know:
Farmers in Spain, Ireland, and New Zealand have all staged demonstrations in their capitals to challenge green reforms in the last few years. Populists in the U.S. and Europe, including France’s Marine Le Pen, are seizing on the protests to cast climate action as a conflict between rural heartlands, working people, and urban elites.
Populists seize!!!
Those “urban elites” will really love it when cities become “food deserts.”
The focus is on the farmers:
Van Maanen says farmers are being unfairly targeted: “If you come for us and our families, you come at a farmer’s soul,” he says. “We’ve proposed all kinds of solutions but we are ignored. And finally, they come up with a plan for a reduction in livestock. No other sector has reduced nitrogen in the last 30 years [as much as] we have. This is why there’s a lot of emotion and pain.”
It’s supposedly due to a court decision:
After a landmark court ruling in 2019, it needs to reduce nitrogen emissions in order to allow building projects to go-ahead in the country.
There is no choice, says Rudi Buis, spokesperson for the agriculture ministry. “Even if you stop with the policy tomorrow, the problem doesn’t go away. If you want to build a house or a road, a lawyer will say: first reduce nitrogen and then you get a licence. We have to do something. It’s not a luxury. It has to happen.”
This is why, he says, the farming sector was addressed first in parliamentary briefings which asked provincial governments to come up with detailed plans for reductions within a year.,,
The government plans, reports the Financieele Dagblad, will affect five times more farmers than is strictly necessary.
It’s to comply with EU regulations, according to this site:
Now, in a show of solidarity, German, Albanian, Italian, Spanish and Polish farmers have launched protests, in what is fast becoming an EU-wide campaign against “anti-farming” policies.
The farmers fear they could be next and that their governments will seek to impose similar climate policies to comply with EU rules, which they say would threaten their livelihoods and disrupt global food supplies.
Did the powers-that-be think these protests wouldn’t happen? I suspect that they knew they would happen and didn’t care. They are confident they can suppress the farmers and their supporters for the Greater Good.
NOTE: If you want a view on climate policy from a person I consider a very reasonable climate scientist, see Judith Curry’s essay on Plan B.
Two weeks ago, the loathsome leftist rag Salon published a piece on this issue, calling it the latest “far-right” cause (naturally alluding to “conspiracy theories”) and singling out for special vitriol Tucker Carlson and the accomplished and freedom-loving legal scholar Eva Vlaardingerbroek. Once upon a time, “progressive” magazines prided themselves (mostly, but entirely, falsely) as “speaking truth to power” and uncovering the misdeeds and the lies of “The Establishment”; now that they are that very Establishment (the lickspittles of our corrupt globalist ruling elites), their task is to use corporate and political power to attack any and all with the courage to proclaim the truth.
The latter is a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in our atmosphere: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says nitrous oxide accounts for around 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Wow. 6% of what the IPCC is now apparently predicting is a 1.04 deg C. global warming effect. Maybe they are scrambling before the whole thing evaporates like the junk science hyperbole that it is.
I wonder why methane has been left out of the verbiage on manure. I think the methane produced by the bio decay in the manure has a bigger warming potential than does the N2O. It could be because N2O persists in the atmosphere about 10 times longer than methane. Though that effect is already included in the warming potential calculations.
I know a guy who sells gas metering devices and about 10 or 15 years ago he told me that a big new market for them were the feedlot operators trying to cope with their manure.
At that time, they were covering the manure and piping the gases through a meter and then flaring off the methane. Many oil wellhead operations do this too. The idea is that the CO2 produced is much better that the methane emission.
The feedlot operators then get some kind of credits for the methane they didn’t emit. Hence the need for metering. Possibly they are already doing that in the Netherlands.
From Judith Curry,
Specifically with regards to climate science, there is some good news. Recent analyses from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicate that the extreme tail risks from global warming, associated with very high emissions and high climate sensitivity, have shrunk and are now regarded as unlikely if not implausible.
An evaporating crisis.
“High climate sensitivity.” That’s the positive (amplifying) feedback effects, that they used to be so sure would cause calamitous warming. Well, the conclusions said that they were sure, but a look at model inputs always showed them to be highly suspect.
They were taking very contradictory publications and analyses on feedback effects and merely averaging all the results. So if the people doing the more alarmist analyses publish more papers, then their numbers tend to dominate the average. Junk science.
“a rapid, wholesale transformation of the global food system.” Into what, one may ask.
As a reminder, we are witnessing a rapid, wholesale transformation of the electrical grid in parts of Europe, and in states like California. Given that experience, I would think that any sentient government functionary would be a bit loath to use that kind of language. Especially about such a basic human need as food. After, all we can live without electricity; although present day folk know little about the air quality back when people were burning peat or dried cow dung for heat and cooking.
No. The fools engage their mouths without thought.
Isn’t it strange? For decades the quality of the environment, and consequently the quality of life, has been improving throughout much of the world because of improved technology; but, now “activists” have grabbed the mechanisms of power and want to throw it all aside for some undefined alternative with unknowable consequences.
“Scientists say dealing with climate change will require not just gradual reform, but a rapid, wholesale transformation of the global food system.”
Besides the demonstrable fact that no actual scientist would make such a claim, the only way to achieve “a rapid, wholesale transformation of the global food system” is to push through ‘policies’ that will result in the premature deaths of billions.
Greatly reduce energy supplies, deeply cut back on food supplies, create deadly vaccines for engineered pandemics and facilitating financial collapse will have that exact result.
“What shall we do with all these useless people?” Yuval Noah Harari lead advisor for Klaus Schwab
In case you’re not noticing, nitrogen is being named as carbon dioxide’s Evil Twin in the Climate Emergency Games. Why have they given up on CO2 dangers, one wonders? Is it because its effect is to increase the greenery worldwide, in measurable, significant numbers? That is certainly the case, provable with the evidence. Or is it because the planet simply will not cooperate by warming as directed? Or is it CO2 fatigue?
Hard to say. But it seems clear that the shift in focus is away from CO2 and onward to nitrogen. And the shift is away from temperatures and onward to – what? What’s up with nitrogen? It’s over three quarters of our atmosphere.
It’s the reason being used as the motivation behind the march of nations, as mentioned in one of your previous blogs, toward using less fertilizer, abolishing animal husbandry, growing less food, and consequentially having less of those annoying proletariat people around.
I’ve even started seeing articles that notify us that we have too much protein in our diet which is leading to unacceptably high nitrogen levels in our pee (~!!). We need to kill the cows, you need to eat the bugs, which are an excellent source of….
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220707171849.htm
Yes, that’s right folks. Your pee is destroying the planet – Now: Line up behind those cows over there, Schnell!…..
Oh no, the end goal is population reduction, via global famine. It takes a village of idiots (EU, NGOs) to kill a civilization.
“I wonder why methane has been left out of the verbiage on manure” – Two things.
1. In the new Inflation inducing spending bill is 1.5 BILLION to address methane in the Oil fields
2. In my local paper there was a big article about methane produced in the Oil fields in Texas
So, they are not neglecting methane here in the US, they are just gearing up for the next big ISSUE that will be attacked as being bad bad bad.
Food production for the mass of peoples led to Civilization. Now, the idjts want to destroy Civilization. Do not they realize that they and their descendants will need to eat too.
Besides the demonstrable fact that no actual scientist would make such a claim
She’s a magazine reporter who appears generically intelligent but whose background is entirely literary.
It seems clear that either they want people to die in large numbers, or they are incapable of coherent thought.
Geoffrey Britain: Thank you highlighting the quote ““Scientists say dealing with climate change will require not just gradual reform …”.
It would be accurate if it started “Politicians say”. And, there are millions of scientists around the world, so you can almost always find 2 of them to make your statement be technically accurate!
The more crises the better.
This is “win-win” for the WTFers.
(And for the good of the planet and its denizens, obviously—don’t worry, they have it ALL worked out…)
…Which means quite clearly: more crises are on the way…And more and more..
Someone is making a profit of of this, always ask, qui Bono?
We know Al Gore, and John Kerry are, and I am fairly certain they are slipping The Big Guy his cut.
We know Bill Gates wants millions of the World’s population dead, so this is right in line with him.
Yikes! Another crisis!!
(That was fast!)
Looks like “Biden” is going to have to export oil to another one of “his” allies….
“Havana announces blackouts, cancels carnival as crisis deepens”—
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/havana-announces-blackouts-cancels-carnival-as-crisis-deepens/ar-AA108aex
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During 2020 I listened to a number of lectures on British/European politics from Gresham College, London by Vernon Bogdanor. I got the impression from him that a significant part of the EU is agricultural subsidies to a far greater degree than we in the US realize. This is part of the reason the Brits resisted joining the EU for so long as it disrupted their policy of favoring food imports from the Commonwealth rather than Europe. I’m sure this factors into the reaction of the farmers.
‘m still trying to figure out how they calculate the global average temperature. If you have taken a course in thermodynamics, you learn that intensive parameters such as temperature do not average. How do they average temperature which does not average?
Transitory average?
I’ve never understood Judith Curry. She seems to have been caught between being a scientist and wanting to be a climate policy wonk. If you think that the models are junk no one is going to talk to you about policy. At some point she became a lukewarmer so that people would listen to her. It didn’t help that she was forced out of her position at Georgia Tech and left to form her own weather company.
There are at least thirty models, none of which agree with each other or with the satellite temperature measurements, and they all run hotter than the atmosphere. In the physics department they would be trashed and ignored. The models also violate the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, a minor problem. There is no science and Plan B is nonsense.
Koonin, in his book Unsettled, also fell into the same trap as Curry. He lays out all the problems with the climate models and the massive disagreement among them, which should disqualify them for use as predictors of what the Earth’s atmosphere will do. Yet, he caves at the end and discusses mitigation strategies for CO2 emissions. If the models stink and have no predictive value, why bother?
Ray at 10:35. You’re absolutely correct, global average temperature is a meaningless number. No one has ever explained to me what it means to average the temperatures of the polar ice caps and the equatorial climate.
Paul in Boston, well said.
Tha average global temperature is calculated using a supercomputer to compare and average temperature readings from all over the world. It has two major problems.
1. There are no temperature readings from about 60% of the Earth. They claim they make educated estimates for those areas. And they further claim that the average can be measured to a tenth of a degree. Huh?
2. Weather station temperature records are often misleading because of the “urban heat island effect.” Stations are placed in an area with little infrastructure around them, but as the years pass pavement, buildings, air vents, vegetation and other infrastructure that affects the temperature readings occurs around the station. This makes comparisons of earlier temperatures with later ones an inaccurate process. Anthony Watt has done quite a lot of work on this issue. The Climate Cultists claim they have figured out a way to juggle their figures to bypass the urban heat island effect. Sure, and I can read my wife’s mind.
There are BIG questions about the accuracy and meaning of all their claims. When they claim the “science is settled,” it’s a signal that it’s anything but.
“When they claim…”
Actually, when they claim ANYTHING, you just know that something’s really outta whack….
At least they’re consistent, I guess…
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According to environmental idealists, the planet can only sustain 500 million people. So that’s all the food and energy the 8 billion people on earth are going to get and let nature sort it out.
I would have thought that was a nutty idea, except it seems to fit the facts.