Grow your own fruit and veg – and destroy the planet. Allotment produce, much prized by proud food-growing citizens the world over, has six times the ‘carbon’ footprint of conventional agriculture, according to a recent paper published by Nature. “Steps must be taken to ensure that urban agriculture supports, and does not undermine, urban decarbonisation efforts,” demand the authors. What have these people been smoking? Surely not some of the puff circulating at the recent Psychedelic Climate Week in New York. Highlights included a discussion on funding ketamine-assisted therapy and a panel on ‘Balancing Investing and Impact with Climate and Psychedelic Capital’.
The lead authors of the Nature paper are academics working out of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. They suggest using urban farms as sites for “education, leisure and community building”. Perhaps the locals could sit cross-legged and listen to early Pink Floyd music. Maybe clap the setting sun to some Atom Heart Mother. Excuse your correspondent if he cannot take this paper seriously. It is a classic example of greens picking on a human activity – almost any will do – and complaining that it causes the devil-gas carbon dioxide to be released. At the recent New York climate happening, according to the Guardian, revellers were told that using hallucinogens can spark “consciousness shifts” to inspire climate-friendly behaviour. What climate friendly behaviour, one might ask, given that almost anything humans do to improve their lot of Earth is demonised by an increasingly weird millenarian green cult.
The authors of the Nature paper seem to have a particular down on home composting. Poorly-managed composting is said to exacerbate the release of greenhouse gases (GHGs). “The carbon footprint of compost grows tenfold when methane-generated anaerobic conditions persist in compost piles,” it says. This is particularly common during small-scale composting, apparently. With a seeming complete ignorance of how small allotments farming functions, the authors suggest that “cities can offset this risk by centralising compost operations for professional management”.
Wherever these cultists look, there are gases being released that are contributing to their invented existential climate crisis. The high application rates of compost in urban agriculture can also lead to nitrous oxide, we’re told. Needless to say, “strategic management of application scheduling and fertiliser combinations may be required to minimise emissions”.
For allotment holders, few pleasures in life compare with a break from arduous work and a hot cup of tea in the shed. Surrounded by the tools of the trade, it is the labourer’s equivalent of passing around a few liveners at National Climate Week, with the added attraction that it doesn’t turn you into a self-important dope. But such pleasure will come to an end if the climate cops have their way. Infrastructure, we’re told, is the largest driver of carbon emissions at what are termed “low-tech” urban agricultural sites. As well as sheds, this includes beds (for vegetables, not a crash pad for ketamine heads) and compost facilities. A raised bed built and used for five years will have approximately four times the environmental impact as one used for 20. Other infrastructure supplies are said to include fertiliser, gasoline and weed block textile.
Plants need water, but only the right sort of water can help save the planet. In their site samples, the researchers found that most allotment-holders use potable municipal water sources or groundwater wells. Big no, no, of course, since such irrigation emits GHGs from pumping, water treatment and distribution. “Cities should support low-carbon (and drought-conscious) irrigation for urban agriculture via subsidies for rainwater catchment infrastructure, or through established guidelines for greywater use,” it is suggested. Presumably, the subsidies will come from the magic bread tree and the infrastructure will be of the special type that does not produce GHGs.
This crackpot climate paper is just the latest sign that the green movement is riven with disagreements as its climate crisis grift starts to fall apart in the face of reality. There are no realistic back-ups for intermittent wind and solar, while carbon capture is a colossal and potentially dangerous waste of money. Without hydrocarbon use, humankind is doomed. Billions will die and society will be returned to the dark ages. Hydrocarbons are ubiquitous in modern society, and so almost everything that humans do to survive and thrive on a dangerous planet can be demonised. Eventually, you end up with Sir David Attenborough making the appalling observation that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia. Or to read earlier this year the tweet from the United Nations contributing author and UCL professor Bill McGuire that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown was to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic.
Many green extremists seem to take the view that anything humans do, including growing their own veg, is causing existential harm to the planet. What they really hate, some may conclude, are humans themselves. Treble bongs all round.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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I can neither confirm nor deny that I might have ingested some hallucinogens in my early and middle decades, but the hallucinogens that I may or may not have taken were in no way intended to “inspire climate-friendly behaviour.”
More examples of crazy fringe mindset trying to level set the mainstream. We need to call this out for what it is. A huge threat to our children and the health and vitality of our country.
(tobacco bad— Scrhooms good, THC good, LSD good, Estasy good–Completely NUTS!
Having spend my 40+ year career in the Medical/Psych world, I can tell you that hallucinogenic use is very bad for the brain. It adds nothing but crazy and fragmentation to your consciousness. Chronic use just makes people stupid and duranged if not frankly mentally ill and dead.
All the people I knew who used hallucinations chronically for more than 10 years have pre-deceased me by at least a decade.
So the loud stupid voice of the fringe who are seeking to capture the mainstream on this issue will not be around long. They may have a voice now but it will be gone in 10 years or less and they will be marginalized or completely gone in 25 years or less.
And there I was thinking that nitrous oxide came in balloons…
The entire “decarbonisation effort” is anti-science and anti-human. It is not based on a real scientific method. It is based on political science. The whole thing needs to be tossed in the trash. Everyone pushing it should be shunned as the fools, or grifters, they are.
Change “political science” to “politics” especially radical socialism and you’ve nailed it.
The “environmentalist” movement has always been anti-human to its core.
And every subscriber to this movement is a hypocrite, since none of them look in the mirror for volunteers for the “cull” they preach the “need” for.
Classic madness.
No-one these days thinks back to records of Roman times when things (and the supposed variation in climate) were (sensibly) just accepted. Yet here we are, not even at the position then seen, hand wringing about nonsensical nonsense-science. It not only beggars belief but it also is costing the world (other that China and India of course) a fortune.
Truly laughable – and scientifically illogical of course.
The authors should be fired, whoever approved the study should be fired, whoever paid for it should be fired, whoever reviewed it should be fired and whoever published it should be fired. Quit wasting our time, resources and money.
There are even today, some people who (still) think that others should adopt a veggie or even a vegan lifestyle. Yet the science is entirely clear. If vegetarianism or veganism was really beneficial to humans then millennia ago evolution would have long made us all herbivores. Yet there is not one species of human EVER that has been a herbivore. not a single one. Nor are there any such developing that way (naturally) as we speak. Indeed those vegetarian people who have been diagnosed with any form of cancer are (I believe) often or maybe always, advised to eat meat/fish at least.
Why then would any thinking person rush to embrace vegetarianism/veganism? – do they not realise what their actions are setting for their future generations?
“Grow your own fruit and veg – and destroy the planet.” Does that include growing my own weed? 🙂
“cities can offset this risk by centralising compost operations for professional management”
Sure, always room for another burro-ocracy- with 6 figure incomes and all sorts of benefits.
Frankly, who still believe in Unicorns ?
From when gases that emit more into space (170 W/m²) than they absorb from the surface (17 W/m²) can warm the atmosphere ?
Stark raving mad. Completely in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
The paper itself is so full of unmeasured assumptions as to be meaningless. Really, if there is a concrete pathway in the garden, they measure its thickness, width and length and assign the CO2 output of some concrete making plant to that volume of concrete…. and say it is to the account of the Urban Agriculture. They ignore the fact that without the allotment space, the entire area would be covered with concrete and asphalt and council flats.
My wife and I have a garden, use zero machines, zero gasoline, zero concrete and make our own fertilizer with hot composting of garden waste, kitchen waste, and litter from our chicken coop.
We don’t raise vegetables to save money (though we did in our homesteading years). We raise vegetables because they taste better home raised, fresh from the garden — gardening is a solid part of our vision of a good life.
Even the thought of “measuring the carbon footprint” of our garden gives me the heeby-jeebies, the same one I get when I realize that the guy next to me on the subway is suffering a mental/emotional breakdown and fingering a knife….
They would deficate themselves looking at the foot print for the 2000+ pound pumpkins being grown just because they can be.
The most harmful gas for the ‘Planet’ is that which is coming out of the mouths of the Alarmist Greenies.
I can think of a number of people who need “Decarbonising”.
This should put to rest any doubt that the green blob is anything other than useful idiots in service of the WEF, AKA the global kleptocracy. To paraphrase Klaus, you will live in a slum tenement, consume vile food like substances, avoid all activities that taint the global playground of the oligarchs with tacky plebian.presence, consume massive quantities of chemical and electronic drugs, and your happiness be damned. Saving the world indeed- for the tyrants.