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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Don’t worry. If food prices rise, the government will just doll out subsidies to control costs. Because subsidies are funded by trees that grow money.
The “money growing trees” are the taxpyers, as usual 😀
Simply more demonstration that Climate Change policies have nothing to do with climate and everything to do with impoverishing the affluent middle class of Western democracies into serfdom. Climate and Green policies from the EU and UN elitists continue the march towards Orwell’s dystopian future a reality in our lifetimes.
Quite a few years ago, at a biodiesel/green farming conference in Montreal I heard a speaker talk about sustainable farming.
Big crowd anxious to hear all about it.
The speaker starts with:
The first rule of sustainable farming is:
Audience waiting with anticipation….
“need to make enough money this year so I can afford to farm next year”.
Imagine if farming performed the same way as the wind farms this past week, with production varying from
as little as 0.14 GW on five days and 10 GW on two days.
Imaging wheat yields varying from 10 tonnes per hectare down to 0.14 globes per hectare.
Talk about the biblical seven fat years and seven lean years.
Farming involves a lot of continuous decision making which is not possible under bureaucratic control.
For a start the effect of weather can result in plus or minus 15% of yield depending on rainfall, sunshine temperature and disease.
Much of modern agriculture has been an attempt to reduce the variabilty
Given the present track record of weather and climate forecasting I can’t see them being much help in planning agricultural production.
This may be a chance for the UK to capture a large part of the market for their agricultural products since they no longer are part of the EU and don’t have to cripple their economy because Brussels says they have to. I’m sure the US, Canada, and Mexico will be more than willing to sell the EU more food.
Composting humans will help meet the production quotas. Edward G. Robinson saw this coming long ago.
And where is Ayn Rand?
I’m 78 and got my first CCW permit this weekend.
All of these green ideas would die a quick death if the proposers or their political support had to successfully perform the propose task without financial subsidy. Solar panel and windmill blight would disappear.
If you have such a great idea see if you can do it successfully.
Re Allan Macrae
Lenin owned a Rolls-Royce (I believe it still exists)’
I have seen it suggested that the person responsible for more deaths in history than anyone else is Rachel Carson whose campaign against DDT caused such an upsurge in malaria. I’ve no idea if that’s really correct but it’s food for thought.
If greens really want to cut down fertilizer use, why not add more CO2 to the atmosphere? The modest rise in the gas in recent years is estimated to have raised world food output by around 14 %
HYPOTHESIS: RADICAL GREENS ARE THE GREAT KILLERS OF OUR AGE
By Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., April 14, 2019
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/14/hypothesis-radical-greens-are-the-great-killers-of-our-age/
Need to change the name of the strategy to “Farm to Forked”
I’m sure it will be another Great Leap Forward for EU farmers.
Obviously, the EU commissioners don’t have knowledge of China’s Great Leap Forward. Chairman Mao was a city boy and he thought he know all about farming and ended up with millions of dead Chinese.
Mao wasn’t all that great at steel making either, which was as successful as his farming skills. Or kill all the sparrows one year, and then pests eat what crops that do manage to grow. Come to think of it, I can’t think of one credible benefit that Mao brought to China. It’s amazing the Chinese still revere him as much as they do. I suppose in a few years when Chairman Xi is stabbed in the back by his own countrymen and Red China is no more, they will be tearing down the statues and murals of Mao. That would be richly deserved.
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.
Green New Deals always spell trouble and pain for those that they touch. In this case it will be those people in the EU still addicted to eating. Nevertheless Australia is standing by ready to fill the bowls of those Starving Europeans, after the implementation of this lunatic EU Plan.
It is right that European farmers contribute to this vision.
They voted. Have chosen.
They know that a political decision is wrong, but they don’t react.
It is time for them to learn to make sacrifices and not complain.
The European farmers do not vote Green, the larger urban middle class does and they impose their ideology on the rural populations. It is the farmers (Netherlands, Germany) and rural poor (France) who have most vocally resisted the Green agenda to date.
If these megalomaniacal psychopaths get their way, we may be down to a global population of 500 million yet.
(Referencing the Georgia Guidestones, for the unaware).
A bad idea from our great leaders in Brussels (Germans)? surely not.
I doubt this will be implemented anytime soon. The largest agricultural sector in Europe is here in France, and at the moment we’re “dans la merde”.
…….not that that’s stopped them before.
“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.”
—–
Hmmm, as people go hungry because food is more expensive (and less nutritious after being shipped long distances) the bureaucrats and elites will feel so good about their virtue, it must be worth it, right?
I suppose it’s just a coincidence that this should greatly benefit China and Russia who will, no doubt, be among the chosen nations for providing food to Europe?
This makes no sense and whenever something makes no sense, I always think of this quote from Sowell.
“The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.”
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
When did this site morph from an intellgient source of scientific information on climate change and criticism of IPCC models, to a hotch-potchof of ranters – pro-Trump, pro-nuclear, pro GMO and big agribusiness, pro-fossil fuels and not a brain cell of scepticism regarding the direction of modern civilisation with major denial on soil loss, pollution issues, public health, inequality, water scarcity, forest loss and high population growth in poor countries? What a pity.
I eat almost 100% organic living on at the lowest economic level – basic state pension plus earnings as a writer come to £200/week (average weekly wage £500 per week in the UK) – cereals, fruit, chicken, eggs, milk, nuts, bread and vegetables….and spend about 25% more than I would if non-organic; but then I don’t smoke, drink wine maybe once a month, my clothes (mostly also natural fibres) last a long time and my car is twenty years old – and I do this because I am a biologist by profession (retired): when I visit organic farms or sustainable forest reserves, I see clouds of butterflies, buzzing insects, rich diversity of birdlife and masses of wild flowers; and these fill my soul. I buy organic not just to protect myself from glyphosphare residue (the whole of US cereal production is contaminated and foodchains all the way to the Dorritos), but to protect and posper the things I value.
Please WUWT – get back to your roots.
I think people are feeling a bit antsy at the moment with everything. There is a lot of frustration on all sides of the bench.
I’ve only just started posting here but I’ve been a long time reader, I don’t recall the tree hugging era at WUWT but it could have passed me by.
Re Allan Macrae
That’s an incredible paper “Radical Greens are the Great Killers of our age”. If only our politicians would read it, but they won’t as minds are made up.
Thank you Ian.
You are correct about Rachel – killer of tens of millions of children, a fountain of falsehoods about DDT.
I correctly called this called this global warming/climate change/green energy fraud in 2002. What’s the problem? Any false BS – climate or other! What’s the solution? Totalitarianism! Quelle surprise!
Now that the Marxist-Democrats and their Antifa Greenshirt thugs have come out of the closet, only the most obtuse cannot see their game plan. Whatever the question, their answer is totalitarianism!
The leaders of the climate scam always knew they are lying – nobody could be this stupid for this long.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/4/eye-gouging-and-powerpoint-project-veritas-infiltr/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/02/22/liz-warren-explains-why-she-believes-ocasio-cortezs-green-new-deal-doesnt-go-far-enough/#comment-2923090
When I started writing my current series of papers in 2019, almost nobody believed that the political situation could be as extreme as I then stated. Our core debate was still a scientific argument about the magnitude of climate sensitivity, and the skeptics kept repeating – correctly – that the alarmists’ estimates of climate sensitivity were far too high, and there was no real global warming crisis.
The reality is that the extremists’ argument was never really about the climate – their climate argument was always a false narrative, a smokescreen for their true objective – their use of the false climate scare was always political, not scientific, and was intended to achieve totalitarian control.
When I stated as early as 2012 – correctly – that the alarmists had a covert agenda and that nobody, not even the alarmists, could be this stupid for this long, my statement was initially rejected as extreme, even by many climate skeptics. However, the alarmists have recently proved me correct.
Since ~late-2019, the climate extremists have engaged in a bidding war to see who could propose the most costly and ineffective “energy” programs to destroy the economies of the Western democracies. For a while, the winner was “carbon-free by 2050”, as adopted by the leftists in the USA, Canada, Britain and elsewhere.
Recently, the Democrats in the USA have doubled-down, advocating even more extreme measures, to destroy their energy systems even sooner.
When I first started studying this subject in ~1985, I knew the alarmists’ argument was false. Like many scientists, I assumed the alarmists were simply technically wrong. It is now obvious that they knew from the beginning that their entire narrative was technically false. Still, with huge financing from largely unknown sources they have managed to deceive the public – wolves stampeding the sheep on the way to slaughter.
By now, even the most stupid of the global warming/climate change acolytes should realize something is amiss. Maybe, maybe not.
As Einstein said, “Nothing is infinite except the universe and humans stupidity, and I‘m not sure about the universe.”
__________________________
Note written 13June2020:
Since I wrote the above on 23Feb2020, Michel Moore has released his new film slamming worthless green energy schemes. Surprise! We’ve known wind and solar energy were costly nonsense since forever, and published that conclusion in 2002. Since then, trillions of dollars have been squandered on destructive green energy schemes that are too intermittent and too diffuse to be practical or economic.
Notice how the global warming cabal have linked the climate crisis AND the Covid-19 flu? How child prodigies like Greta and academics in non-technical fields have spouted drivel like “to tackle Covid-19 we also have to tackle climate change”? Remember this point!
We’ve demonstrated many times that alleged dangerous human-made global warming/climate change is not only false, it is fraudulent!
THE CATASTROPHIC ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING (CAGW) AND THE HUMANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE CRISES ARE PROVED FALSE
By Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc.(Eng.), M.Eng., January 10, 2020
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/the-catastrophic-anthropogenic-global-warming-cagw-and-the-humanmade-climate-change-crises-are-proved-false.pdf
There is a similar high probability that the Covid-19 full-Gulag Lockdown is also a scam. We have experienced many flu epidemics that were more dangerous than Covis-19, with NO lockdowns. Why this flu? Why now? Read my post below for details on Covid-19.
Also, why are Antifa and BLM suddenly exploding onto the scene, trashing downtowns and terrorizing people, allegedly based on the police killing of career criminal George Floyd, who violently abused women? Much better people than Floyd die every day, and nobody cares.
HINT:
All these scams are related, concocted by the Marxist Dems, and have nothing to do with the climate, the mild Covid-19 flu or USA police violence. These are Democrat planned political events by paid demonstrators, intended to derail the investigations into the attempted coup-d’état of Trump via the Russia scam and the false FBI charges against Lt.-Gen. Flynn, and to steal the election so the treasonous acts of the Obama regime remain hidden.
It’s all a smokescreen to hide the criminal activity of the Dems – Try to focus on the big picture good people – It’s not all that complicated.
PLANDEMIC OR SCAMDEMIC?
IMPORTANT: Everyone should watch this video AND re-post it.
https://youtu.be/X6pzXrEBqR0
The full-Gulag lockdown was completely unnecessary and that was obvious by early-mid-March. I wrote then:
wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/21/to-save-our-economy-roll-out-antibody-testing-alongside-the-active-virus-testing/#comment-2943724
[excerpt- posted 21Mar2020]
LET’S CONSIDER AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH, SUBJECT TO VERIFICATION OF THE ABOVE CONCLUSIONS:
Isolate people over sixty-five and those with poor immune systems and return to business-as-usual for people under sixty-five.
This will allow “herd immunity” to develop much sooner and older people will thus be more protected AND THE ECONOMY WON’T CRASH.
rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/21/end-the-american-lockdown/comment-page-1/#comment-12253
[excerpt- posted 22Mar2020]
This full-lockdown scenario is especially hurting service sector businesses and their minimum-wage employees – young people are telling me they are “financially under the bus”. The young are being destroyed to protect us over-65’s. A far better solution is to get them back to work and let us oldies keep our distance, and get “herd immunity” established ASAP – in months not years. Then we will all be safe again.
__________________________________
Why did New York have so many deaths from Covid-19? Because New York Governor Cuomo ordered state nursing homes to take in 4,500 patients with Covid-19, the Associated Press reported. These patients infected other nursing home residents, resulting in many more deaths. Cuomo issued the order to nursing homes and other assisted living centers on March 25, 2020 according to AP. He did not reverse that policy until May 11.
__________________________________
Now Democratic Governors are delaying the lifting of the lockdown, to further harm the economy in hopes of defeating Trump in November.
__________________________________
The violent riots over the unfortunate death of career criminal George Floyd were the next act in this saga. Floyd was not a great role model – he had a long criminal record, which included holding a pregnant woman hostage by pointing a shotgun at her belly, but he was all they had – so a false narrative was constructed of what a great guy he was and how all blacks were faced with such horrific police brutality.
Unfortunately, the data did not support that false narrative – in 2019, 1004 individuals were shot and killed by USA police, but only 56 of them were unarmed, and only 15 of those were black (A whole 1.5%!).
washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/
It will soon become clear that Antifa are the paid and programmed violent shock troops of the Marxist Democratic Party, and this entire charade was choreographed by the Dems to try to steal the Fall 2020 election.
__________________________________
LISENKOISM!