This article from AGWEB blasts the European Commission and their European Green Deal.
To put it bluntly:
The European Commission has a plan to eliminate modern farming in Europe.
The details emerged last month, as part of a “European Green Deal” announced late last year that calls for the continent to become “climate neutral” by 2050.
The commission speaks of “turning climate and environmental challenges into opportunities.” It also talks about “making the transition just and inclusive for all.”
It should have added three words: “except for farmers.”
That’s because the EU Commission just released its “Farm to Fork” strategy, which is the agricultural portion of the European Green Deal. It announces a series of unrealistic goals: In the next decade, farmers like me are supposed to slash our use of crop-protection products by half, cut our application of fertilizer by 20 percent, and transform a quarter of total farmland into organic production.
The article details the various policies and notes the actual problems they would create vs. the stated goals.
What the European Commission now proposes, essentially, is smaller harvests. For consumers, this will lead directly to one thing: Higher prices. Food will cost more.
There’s also a deeper problem. How are farmers supposed to make a living when we’re growing fewer crops and selling less food? The commission fails to consider one of the most likely results of its misbegotten approach to agriculture: When farmers can’t turn a profit, they’ll quit farming.
Farming will be outsourced to other regions.
It also raises the question of where our food will come from, if it doesn’t come from our own farms. We could always import more food from other places. Global trade already is an essential feature of food production. We should encourage more of it.
Yet the European Green Deal will lead to substandard farming in places with less productive farmland. This may help fill bellies in a Europe that has fewer farmers. It may even salve the consciences of activists and bureaucrats in Brussels. It certainly won’t help the climate.
The full article is found here.
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Why are Leftist plans always so terrible? Why?!
Klem
Because they are left, and central control is more important that a functioning society.
Also, if they were intelligent then they wouldn’t be lefties.
It also talks about “making the transition just and inclusive for all.”
Climate Justice: everyone gets screwed. Got to make sure it’s fair.
Normally in europe it’s for “SOLIDARITY “
Not everyone gets screwed, those who run the asylum always make out like bandits.
Gerry, England
But were it that simple.
Lot’s of intelligent lefties, the problem is they desire authority over others. Or rather, there is too many people who desire instruction.
The next time you hear someone saying “The government ought to do something about that”, give them a (metaphoric) slap as it’s yet another small surrender to the left.
Or, as they used to say, “There should be a law against that”.
Anyway, last time I checked, there were,
Laws against inciting a riot
Laws against looting
Laws against arson
Laws against destruction of public property
Laws against destruction of private property
Laws against assault
The left seems to have selectively repealed those laws, or as Orwell put it, “Some animals are more equal than others.”
Gerry, many Lefties are intelligent. They just have different priorities – specifically, absolute control. Productivity, efficiency, integrity – these values are way down the list, if on the list at all.
Well, when a ‘friend’ of South Africa’s president Zuma was appointed as head of the state airline SAA, she announced that her aim was to ‘transform’ the airline. Not to make it more efficient, more passenger friendly, or even more on-time. Just more ‘black’. When you get a short-sighted socialist in charge, reality goes down the drain – as did SAA (bankrupt).
They like social unrest.
The left-right/totalitarian-anarchist nexus is leftist.
The plan is to drive farmers out of business.
Then declare that since free enterprise has failed, yet another industry needs to be taken over by the government.
Good for Europe, they will learn the hard way. That will just make North America Ag products more valuable, and we then charge more to both Europe and China. That socializing of farming worked well in the Soviet Union, with their 5 year Gov’t plans. Especially Agriculture, which was a lot of what the Revolution was about, making the ‘collective’ farm wherein a lot of people starved as there was no incentive to produce and then they couldn’t enjoy the fruits of their labor. As the Russians were fond of saying for many years…”they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”.
Don’t forget the influence of Lysenko who persuaded Stalin that his theory of acquired characteristics was going to revolutionise Soviet agriculture.
He got Vavrilov, his former tutor, and was a leading figures on plant genetics, arrested and convicted.
He died in prison, probably from starvation.
So perish all those who go against the current thinking.
Vavrilov was rehabilitated in 1955 and is regarded as one of the leading plant genetics ists.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/07/03/can-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-save-the-world-from-climate-change/#comment-2395940
The “economic” model is like Zimbabwe – a murderous absolute monarch like Robert Mugabe sitting atop a sh!thole of poverty and oppression. That is the TRUE Marxist model, stripped of all the fancy rhetoric.
The death tolls attributable to these “fearless leaders” of the left are approximately:
Adolf Hitler – WW2 on all sides: ~50 million killed
Josef Stalin – Russians in internal purges: ~50 million killed
Mao Tse Tung – Chinese in internal purges during the “Great Leap Backwards”: ~80 million killed
Pol Pot – Cambodians in internal purges: ~3 million killed
These numbers are from memory so may be imperfect – but I think Mao gets the record for sheer numbers of deaths, whereas Pol Pot gets the “percentage of total population” prize. Attaboys all around!
Fanatical ideologues are truly dangerous people – given enough power, they usually act the same way.
Justin Trudeau has openly approved of the effectiveness of one-party rule – and has admired Fidel since he was a pup.
Mao owned 25 Mercedes 600’s [the most expensive car built in the 1970’s and 1980’s] – so much for Socialism. Many other vicious leftist dictators have also owned them – including Pol-Pot, Tito, Kim Il Sung, Idi Amin, etc., etc.
Every time governments take over food production millions of people have starved.
That’s one way to address the obesity problem.
Yeah, Stalin did that. Ask anybody from the Ukraine how it worked out.
It is a tribute to Soviet Glorious Five Year Plans.
It’s because leftists give far too much weight to vacuous emotional arguments, especially if they support a far left narrative.
My theory is that it is because their emotions rule their brains, not their intellect. It becomes easy to make them believe narratives when fear is used as the tool to sell the narrative to them. Fear has always been a very good marketing tool, especially be authority figures like politicians and scientists.
But again, that is just my theory.
OK, CD, that’s a start (let’s say the fearful flight part of the ‘fight or flight’ options) but it’s the fight part that holds some real promise of ascendant self-esteem that keeps one’s feelings from otherwise being ‘down in the dumps’. It is so bolstering to cast yourself as heroicly bringing about some ‘great leap forward’ toward a much celebrated utopia portrayed to make things so much better for all. It amounts to self-medication against an existential depression without the pills (though hardly free of collective collateral damage). Besides, there’s been too much eating going on around here!
The Leftist interests have merged with the corporate interests, actually they were always the same. A financial bubble is being created around carbon offset futures. To keep the bubble growing and not popping, more fossil fuel industry needs to get shut down to drive carbon offset prices to perpetually newer highs. This destroys the real economy in the process and provokes a rebellion against the government at the same time. Corporate monopolists get what they want, Communists also get what they want.
Klem,
As per the above, it’s emotional issues.
They walk around all day long (all life long) with solutions … then they need to find (rationalize) a problem to associate with their solution.
If only, if only, they can apply their solution … they can then justify their being … they won’t be useless … in fact they will be superior ….
The Ruuskies have known about the true useful idiot psychology for a long time.
Klem, The wealth holding elite hire the central planners. Those that do the planning see overpopulation and limited resources as the roadblocks to long and bright futures for the privileged descendants.
In order to build that better future the elite need to convince the great unwashed to willingly take the poison pill being offered as salvation but in reality will remove them as roadblocks to the elites’ future plan, which will include abundant fossil fuel in a far less populated world.
If there is any humor to be found in this diabolical planning it is that the planners operate on the assumption that the elite will bring them along on their paved road to future happiness. Little do they realize that the elite intend to leave them waylaid on the roadside as poverty, misery and destitution rolls over them.
Because they want to destroy us.
The complete failure of our institutions thanks to infiltration by communists is not an unintended consequence of their actions. It’s the desired result.
Why? Simple: They have no idea how anything is produced, and just assume that it comes out of a box or a carton, and somehow magically appears on store shelves. They also think that electricity comes from a wall outlet, not from a power station. They really are that stupid.
When food has to be imported to feed even that small country, I hope that the farmers who are put out of business start laughing up their sleeves, and go on raising their own food like people used to do in them there Olden Times.
Quite right.
If it’s so easy to produce foodstuffs so cheaply, just do it….then you’ll get our attention…maybe even some willing followers.
And then you won’t need to go to all the trouble of starting civil wars and such to enslave all the world’s people in order to get your way.
I wish it were leftist. In Europe all politicians left and right are believers in climate scam.
Here in Ireland the 2 supposedly right wing parties have agreed a government deal with the greens, who got 7% of vote, accepting all the stupidity – 7% pa cut in carbon, €100 carbon tax, no imported fracked gas.
And not one will examine data.
The endemic problem these days is that we have built up an army of politicians, activists and
bureaucrats that are insulated from the consequences of their policies.
+1000. Activists. Activists everywhere.
Without a doubt we need a terminally efficient repellent for those buzzy little bar-stewards.
Decisions made by ignorant policy makers who know nothing about the subject of their decisions. Color me unsurprised.
The Nazis were born of the ultra green movement.
Nazis were socialists. Democrats, Fascists, Commies, Nazis, Greens – all the same Marxist breed.
Like defunding police forces, new left policies seem more and more purposefully designed to be unworkable. I think mass hysteria of the left is taking a toll psychologically.
They are virtually all white folk. Being taught in school for 18 of your first twenty-two years of life that you are a loathful, evil racist, privileged blight on this earth is tough for most to transcend. They spend the rest of their lives trying to work this indictment off and public service is the obvious path for this madness. It isn’t going to end well.
Their policies are designed to disrupt and dislocate society to create tensions and fears that enable ever greater control.
But in their minds that’s OK and the human cost is irrelevant because they will be the ones in control.
“I think mass hysteria of the left is taking a toll psychologically.”
The Left is completely divorced from reality, and seem to be getting even more delusional as time goes on. Most of it is fueled by the Dishonest Leftwing Media, telling lies for political gain.
This’ll be fun.
The UK will be out the EU on 1st January 2021, and it’s increasingly likely with No Deal i.e. for those not familiar with the fiasco that is Brexit; we will trade with the rest of the world, and Europe under the World Trade Organisation rules the rest of the world has been functioning on for many years, perfectly well.
The EU want’s to trap the UK into it’s restrictive and coercive trading standards that benefits few and adds layer upon layer of bureaucracy.
In this case, our farmers should be able to function independently of the wacko EU farming standards with red tape slashed. We’ll have a competitive advantage, for a change.
Leaving the EU without a deal will also enable us to have exclusive access to the rich fishing grounds of our international waters of the North Sea which, for the last 40 years, have been the domain of Factory fishing fleets from the continent. They have decimated the fishing industry around our shores, particularly the historic fishing areas of the NE of Scotland.
The Continentals will now have to make do with buying their fish from the UK for a change.
All in all, could I really give a sh!t about the EU? Not really (assuming we do leave with No Deal) as the Germans and French have treated Greece and Italy so badly, particularly over the last few months of the Coronavirus crisis, that I really can’t see it lasting for many more years in it’s present form.
Looking forward to trading with you again America!
I’m tempted to agree with you, but I fear I trust our politicians less on green issues than those in the EU. The future for UK agriculture is certainly not clear; the prospect that authorities will cede any control over farmers’ activities is a remote one.
From our green and pleasant land, we will, with the progressive relaxation of planning laws, doubtless cover more of our countryside with high-cost housing and distribution warehouses – where the priority should be providing more social housing in cities, where it is needed, and cheap energy together with less regulation to enable factories to be built – thus re-creating some of the valuable supply chains we have lost in the UK.
I am sorry Hotscot, have you been living in a cave? The UK left the EU at 11PM Greenwich Mean Time on 31st January in the year of Our Lord 2020.
But we are still in the transition period until new years eve…
Just saw an interview with the EU budget commissioner, who was really worried about how they were going to make up the loss of funding from the UK.
Extra taxes etc were suggested…
That doesn’t affect my correct statement that the UK is no longer a member of the EU.
But then when the morons in the media think we are still members then you find the shocking result of a poll is that only a third of the people believe we have left. Hotscot is obviously one of the two-thirds who must have missed the tears on the BBC, the solemn music on the night that we left. Mind you, can’t blame him for not wanting to want the socialist TV channel.
I would agree more with your comment HotScot if it weren’t for the fact that Theresa May signed us up to the same carbon neutral 2050 target as the EU espouses while she was PM. Johnson and Labour and LibDems have all enthusiastically endorsed this policy. So we can expect exactly the same termination of farming here in the UK, plus forcing people into smaller and more occupancy dense housing, minimal car ownership, restricted foreign travel and a severe cut in disposable income and living standards among the other things that go with it.
The Climate Change Act, a purely UK act of self destruction. The UK government has cut out the middleman (the EU) and is taking orders from the UN directly. I see no hope in the short term. Perhaps if there’s a cold winter with power shortages that kills more than Chinese Flu, then things might change however a lot of the weak and vulnerable have been removed fro tye at risk group.
So I don’t see much hope.
And don’t forget if we want to sell anything to the EU, we will still need to comply with their regulations, which could include “renewable” sources of materials.
When polititians screw around with your energy supplies thats one thing. …just costlier energy. When they make proposals like this and start screwing with your food supplies…that will cause a revolution
Starvation coming to city or town near you.
Think of it as the “Venezuela Diet”
Starvation just like Paul Ehrlich said in his controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he famously stated that ‘[i]n the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.'” Possibly right about the effect, but not about the cause or the dates.
This is an excellent example of why communist regimes always fail. Central planners are never experts in all things, although many bureaucrats will tell you they know enough.
From seed or birth to plate there are many, many steps. Too many for a central planner to take into account or to react to in a timely manner. The result will be not only expensive but a failure. I can guarantee that because of history.
I don’t care how intelligent these bureaucrats are or how much BIG data they use, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The planners make no failures. Never. /s
Does this story register with UK farmers and voters? Does it register with new and applying EU members states?
Organic farming is known to be less productive and less safe than modern farming methods. The fertilizers and other chemicals, GMOs to add nutrients and to reduce damage from pests (cue nervous sweats from the New Agers), crop rotation, and use of GPS to optimize location of plots, monitoring of soil moisture and soil conditions are all techniques that reduce land use and increase productivity. These are all positives for the environment and human healt
Delivering new power supplies and exporting modern farming technologies to other parts of the world is one of the most effective approaches to modernization and feeding the people in the poor third world. Only zealots would oppose.
“How are farmers supposed to make a living when we’re growing fewer crops and selling less food?”
Easy peasy. Just double your prices, and if that doesn’t do it, triple them. And if the peasants, I mean poor people can’t afford to buy food, let them eat cake!
As I remember the let them eat cake comment got more than a few heads of state beheaded…:)
And note the country. It’s along-standing axiom that politicians mess with French farmers at their peril.
Special food deliveries will be conducted at night for the EC VIPs, their modelers, and special friends.
ResourceGuy you are more right than many people will be aware. In the dark days of eastern Europe’s enslavement to the Soviet Union the members of the communist party had private shops in which food and goods not available to the general population were a feature of the system. Collective farms, which the green twerps of today would approve, were also a notably successful feature of the landscape.
I wonder why the ungrateful deplorable masses rejected all this. Let’s think…
The old GDR had the same system.
In the full article Herr Holtkoetter says that the EU has ‘reliable infrastructure, and advanced economies’ but of course they plan to do away with those things by have unreliable expensive power generation and in keeping with an economy that uses a power source that was dropped by our ancestor, a retarding economy as manufacturing leaves for cheaper climes.
The European Commission has a plan to eliminate modern farming in Europe.
Shouldn’t that read:
The European Commission has a plan to starve millions in Europe.
No. The European Commission is not Europe. The EU covers 27 states in Europe. It actually might be an incentive to the other nations to produce more food and sell it at the inflated prices that will exist in the EU.
Let Brussels starve
Let them eat sprouts
When you reduce the efficiency of something, be it farming or energy production; you just end up using more land; the complete opposite of what is required to prevent supposed climate change and the extinction crisis. How can the greens really be this stupid? (Rhetorical!)
Having farmers quit is the plan.
The socialist way has always been to bankrupt the private sector so that the government can take over.
“For consumers, this will lead directly to one thing: Higher prices”
Or imports
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/22/climate-catch22/
You guys are too negative. Michael Bloomberg already explained quite clearly that farming isn’t that difficult. Just poke a hole in the ground, throw few seeds in, cover it with dirt, and then water. What’s the big deal? And the agricultural minister of Chaz, the newest country on the planet, has been showing off the massive productivity of their community garden all last week.
You just need to think pure thoughts and believe!
Bureaucrats sticking their noses in farmers business. What could go wrong?
Everyone can eat what they grow. People can plant gardens in the road ditches. Yeah, that will work.
Zimbabwe has been a great success.
It has been estimated that subsistence farming can support a population of 23 millions in the UK. The current population is about 66 millions. Who is going to starve, the elderly, racial minorities, those who do not support the political party of the government, who else ? Can one see the millennials putting in the hours of labor required to produce a sufficient food supply. I can see them wasting their time growing plants that will make them high and then dying of starvation in the winter.
Doesn’t the farm animals you use to plow the fields in place of a tractor also generate GHGs?
All this self flagellation with the idea but not the evidence that humans can control atmospheric composition.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/06/14/responsiveness-of-atmospheric-co2-to-fossil-fuel-emissions/
New World Order?