The Dutch government is buying out certain farmers, paying them above market value (it sounds like the implication is that if they don’t sell, they will eventually be expropriated)…with the proviso that they will be banned forever from doing the same kind of farming anywhere in the EU.
Economically destructive…destructive of the food supply and of individual choice…destructive of knowledge accumulated over centuries.
In what sense should the EU still be considered part of the Free World?
Maybe we should be smuggling weapons to the embattled farmers in the EU in addition to those being sent to Ukraine. The EU is proving to be the 5th Reich more and more with evry passing day. This is a much bigger threat than a dying Russia.
EU , ONU , etc..are the greatest social cancers in the world,real socialist tyrants! And all the countries are aligned with them , specialy Portugal . Portugal is the most decadent with the most decadent people in the world, the portuguese people are real moron beasts. Why are always portuguese guys who rule or are top chairs of EU , ONU , etc… like António Guterres , Durão Barroso and hundreds other portuguese boys? Think about that! The next portuguese guy will rule one of those decadent institutions will be António Costa who is one of the most incredible guys in the world, but the decadent rotten socialism portuguese people love them! Do you know where is and what is Portugal the socialist country with the most decadent rotten people in the world. Just investigate and you’ll see..you’ll be stoned!
“…destructive of knowledge accumulated over centuries.” This.
Knowledge –particularly hands-on informal holistic knowledge such as farmers use– is much easier to destroy than to create. In fact it’s the positive residue from billions of “tons” of negative learnings –mistakes– accumulated over many generations. As that knowledge dissipates, it will not be replaced: sons and daughters of the paid-off farmers will go off to the cities to become Tiktok stars. And what will we all eat? The Eurocrats have no plan about that.
Winston….Michael Bloomberg thinks farming is trivial:
“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg told the audience at the Distinguished Speakers Series at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School. “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”
He said similar things about manufacturing.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/68434.html
“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,”
The father of a lady I was at college with was a farmer. Eventually, he sold the farm, went into town, and — because he had to do something with his time — got a job in a school district. He was astonished — his coworkers only worked 5 days a week! Every week!
Mao tried sending university types off to the countryside to work in the fields with the peasants. It is a practice which deserves serious consideration. The world would probably be a better place if the likes of Bloomberg or Victoria Nuland had to spend every third year working in the fields or on an assembly line
My father was the son of farmers and was the third generation of farmers in the US. He used to tell us a story about farming in Illinois and Iowa. There was a family of farmers back in the early 1920s who sent their kids to agricultural college. The other farmers laughed at anyone going to college to learn how to farm. Everybody “knew how to farm.” 50 years later, the descendants of that family own most of the farmland in that county, including my grandmother’s farm which her father had homesteaded in the 1860s. No, traditional farming did not survive modern methods, as Sri Lanka found out. Maybe Zimbabwe could invite Dutch farmers to relocate but I doubt they are that smart.
First, I’d point out that this isn’t so very far from numerous U.S. programs over the years. Many have aimed at taking land out of production either permanently or for extended periods of time. Usually accompanied by veiled and not so veiled threats. See any program with either conservation or reserve in it’s title. The newest wrinkle is using Eminent Domain to procure land for solar “farms”. Only large parcels of the flattest, most productive land will do.
Bloomberg left out a few steps. First, buy land for anywhere from $1,500 to $3,500 an acre. How many you buy is up to you, but for corn, most places about 1,000 acres is probably the smallest viable size. The good news is than you might clear close to $100 an acre though there’s always the chance to lose several hundred. Next you’ll need to till that ground, so you’ll need a tractor and implements. “No Till” doesn’t really mean no till, it just means different tools. If you buy used and have the time and skills to fix everything that’s wrong, you might get by for less than $500,000. Then you’ll need a planter, this will have a lot to do with how successful you are, again maybe $200,000 used with maybe $20,000 for repairs and bearing in mind that you’re starting out with a 10-15% handicap versus the best planters available. That would be north of $400,000. Then there’s fertilizer, seed, more fertilizer, pesticide, and in some places, irrigation. Have to hope it rains when you need it, even with irrigation, but not too much or at the wrong time or combined with hail or high winds. Prices at harvest time are always poor so you’ll need to bet storage costs every month against them getting better. The feasibility of hiring work done, besides the cost, is complicated because most of the equipment and especially the operators will be busy with there own land when you need them. Yeah, and Bloomberg left out the step of burying a fish next to each corn plant the way the Indians showed the Pilgrims.
The only thing simple about having 1-2% of Americans producing all the food we eat along with a big share of the rest of the world is fools like Bloomberg.
Works for me. Stopping meat production, as it is among the highest producers of Greenhouse Gasses, is what I would do, if that were my purpose.
But then I am a vegetarian and don’t care about your meat freedoms. ;) I am a vegetarian, because I will not kill to eat.
The Eurocrats have no plan about that.
No, of course they have a plan.
It’s for most Europeans to eat bugs or starve.
This is roughly the same plan our so-called elite have for us in America.
Don’t mistake evil for incompetence.
“because I will not kill to eat.”
The carrot was perfectly content before you pulled it out of the ground and stuck it your mouth.
MCS
May 8, 2023 at 6:49 pm
First, I’d point out that this isn’t so very far from numerous U.S. programs over the years. Many have aimed at taking land out of production either permanently or for extended periods of time.
No, what the Dutch and EU are doing is not even close to conservation reserve and acreage restriction/deficiency payment programs that were typical of US commodity (mostly corn but also other food grains and ag products but conspicuously never soybeans) price supports. Those programs were entirely voluntary in terms of acreage taken out of production and in the case of CRP entry to the program was restricted, there was no restriction on returning the land to productive use once the reserve period ended, and no restrictions on what farmers could do after
I was reading the book “Unsettled” by Steven Koonin over vacation (highly recommend for an inside if left-leaning look at how the ACGW sausage that PenGun swallows is produced) and a few of the comments he made regarding methane made all the angst over cow burps snap into perspective.
Also @PenGun, *everything* you consume was *alive* at one time unless you’re subsisting on rocks. You’re just drawing the line of what you consider to be ‘living’ at a convenient place for your virtue-signaling.
Here’s a little family dairy farm in New York state. The rest of us can lose sight that there’s part of New York west of the Hudson too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6BanBqhsVE
If you can’t see that taking an animal’s life is nothing like like eating a vegetable then you are stupider than I thought you were.
A life long commitment as a Buddhist to harm as little of the life around me as I can, is virtue signalling. Don’t get me started.
What surprises me is that a group of EU bureaucrats in Brussels decide polices for all member nations on large things and small – such as drinking water standards and a ban on internal combustion cars after 2035.
It takes a different mentality to surrender your soveignty to an external power. But someting I have thought of – some people here are more comfortable lettings the govt make decisions for them. And witness the desire of some to surrender authority to the UN.
Bill Brandt @ 3:03: I twice visited a small town in North Wales. The first visit was about 1987, the second was about 2005. The first time I was amazed at the variety of cheap, well-made, hand-knit sweaters and other woolen goods offered in the shops. The second time there were almost none, and they were mediocre, expensive and made in China. I asked the shopkeeper what had happened. “Brussels made us pay too much for the goods that local women were happy to sell us for less; so now we have none.”
PS: The Steve Koonin book (“Unsettled”) is IMHO required reading for anyone wanting to get a good critique of the climate change scam (biggest in human history). I also heartily recommend a very new book by Alan Longhurst, “Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science.” The author is a highly experienced oceanographer and his work sheds a lot of light on the many weaknesses in the CO2 hypothesis: which among other things fails to address the role of the oceans.
The Dutch farmers story has been going on for several years with large farmer protests in response to eco-activists and now EU regulations.
Long story short, this is what you get when you turn-over policy making to bureaucrats in Brussels. The Dutch government gets a nitrogen mandate from the European Commission and thanks to a Dutch court decision forbidding it to implement innovative solutions, like a nitrogen futures market, it now has to implement a heavy-handed solution to make it work. There was a curious reference in the Hot Air link by van der Wal to “economic lockdown.” There was a great article about it in FT (unfortunately pay-walled) and apparently all new construction in Holland is blocked because of nitrogen concerns. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/05/the-guardian-view-on-dutch-farmer-protests-a-european-test-case
Why go after the farmers? Well for the same reason you rob banks because that’s where the nitrogen is. Also with the fore-mentioned eco-activists, Dutch farmers with their capital-intensive, industrial farming methods have fallen into a bit of disrepute. In order to please Brussels and your local Greens, somebody has got to get the chop. Moo.
So what’s going to happen? Apparently 3,000 farms on the target list. I assume many will have to shut-down/ Global food supply? I am sure Brazil will light some more of the Amazon afire to create more range land and the world in general will lose more natural spaces to cultivation because a) the Dutch farmers are the most productive in the world in agricultural yield per acre and b) the Global South isn’t going to worry themselves about burning jungle or filling in swamps to create more pasture. We’ve seen this action plan before with mining, manufacturing, energy, etc… we cripple ourselves to show how virtuous we are but all we are doing is pushing the economic activity (and pollution) off-shore.
Lessons?
One, nothing in life is free and therefore all policies have trade-offs. We can congratulation ourselves all we want on how we are going to “solve climate change” but all these targets and mandates, whatever their validity, have real costs on real people. How could it be otherwise when the EU decides to cut nitrogen levels in half by 2030? Remember policy-making and politics is a lot like sales, you get the customer excited about the benefits and hide the costs. There was an article in the Washington Post about how the average cost of a new car is now $48,000; some of that high cost is from supply-chain issues but a lot is from regulation and that cost is only going up as the new tail-pipe regulations go into effect.
Second, the EU with Commission policy-making is what happens when you cede your sovereignty to a distant. administrative state. The EU was supposed to have been a way-station on the road from the European Coal and Steel Community to the European Super State, you know a bunch of brilliant technocrats imposing the “right” solutions on a continent that if left to their own choices just launch wars and make lousy economic choices.
We’re not that far here as far as an out-of-control administrative state but we are getting there. There’s a lot of stuff in the news right now about attacks on various conservatives on the Supreme Court. Clearly they are coordinated and are driving at some goal and I can only assume that it will either be about making the Court a campaign issue in 2024 and/or some move toward nullification of a future Court decision. I thought it wouldn’t happen for a few more years, but the Court has taken on a case (Loper vs. Raimondo) which may lead to the overturn of Chevron. Chevron is the bedrock of the American administrative state and there is a lot of apprehension down in the Beltway about this case, this is going to be as big if not bigger than Dobbs. Compare what’s going on with the attacks on the Court now with what the Washington establishment did to Trump and I would say we’re about “January 2017” or so on that timeline and will get real when the oral arguments are heard this Fall.
Mike @ 10:47: What you said. The Administrative State knows how to protect itself, and it will. There is a clear axis of advance against the Supreme Court, which I fear is barely aware of the scope and scale (let alone the tactics) of the assault, and arguably is institutionally incapable of defending itself as it should: the more the Justices try to engage and rebut the attackers, the more they weaken their claim to be the disinterested body properly entrusted with ultimate judicial power.
I see this, as you do, as a deliberate and discrete aggression with fatal consequences. But I recognize that the animus and skepticism toward it are part of a much wider pathology in the culture: many institutions have been exposed (often self-exposed) as incompetent, unworthy of trust or utterly corrupt. They range from school boards to Presidencies, media godlings to “journalists,” attorneys-general to activists, health experts to high military commands to college deans. These institutions cannot function without the public’s trust, and they are losing it, daily, in double handfuls.
“Kulturkampf” may be the right descriptor for what we’re going through; I don’t know. But I do know that I’m worried.
A life long commitment as a Buddhist to harm as little of the life around me as I can, is virtue signalling. Don’t get me started.
The last thing any of us would want is to “get you started.” As for reverence for life, those Buddhist Japanese soldiers in WWII showed us how reverent they were. As for meat eating, some Australian POWs found out about that as they were eaten by Japanese soldiers in the Owen Stanley Mountain Range,
I both respect the commitment of a Buddhist or a Jain or others to harm as little of the life around them as possible including through dietary choices, and disdain the countless millions in western societies who don’t just make the same choices for themselves but presume also to lecture the rest of us on the matter, without it even coming from an origin in a profound religious and philosophical tradition.
I think it possible to respect the former groups of people and their position and attitude without respecting the latter, who strike me often as poseurs and if not that then at least having arrived at their conclusions by more modern or arbitrary methods.
Trying to make that distinction often can mean asking someone to elaborate their views and the sources of same. In practice, though, I’ve never encountered someone coming from an authentic tradition like Buddhism among those inclined to deny me meat. They’re always the other kind of person. Save perhaps in their own household, where I suspect a Buddhist would have no meat for me, and that’s OK- no Buddhist needs to have meat on hand for me in his own house. That’d be unguestly to even ask for.
Similarly, I appreciate the distinctions one might draw between an animal and a vegetable. Even though the plant too is life, I still hold the traditional view that an animal is a higher form of life. Much. I don’t think that means I can’t eat them.
And I live in a country that long has been able to produce meat for its population and export at such prices that only the poorest have not been able to afford it some of the time, and in recent generations most can, most of the time, and has been able to trade on good terms with similarly prosperous friendly nations for other foods including other meats, and see no good moral, economic, or indeed environmental reason that this state of affairs need change.
Mike K-
Good points. FWIW, I read an essay once that laid out a reasonable path by which core Buddhist concepts can lead to very pure forms of militarism (which I’m willing to at least respect) and genocide (less so…). That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the religion or the concepts as such of course. One can derive such behaviors from almost anything. They’re human behaviors. I personally take the view that one has to go more aggressively against core tenets of Christianity than most religions to arrive at those ends, but even so putative Christians have managed to rationalize it. Other religions make it easier.
Lest your example be thought idiosyncratic, I offer also Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese as a deeply, deeply Buddhist culture that had no problem with such things over the span of decades. And not without premodern examples as well.
Humans are a very adaptable species.
random observer @ 1:21: “…Humans are a very adaptable species.” Ain’t that the truth?
In terms of what people can rationalize (whether in terms of making dinner, or making war), I am reminded of the observation, “It’s very hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
IOW, incentives matter. And hidden incentives probably matter the most of all.
About 15% of global carbon emissions come from cattle used for meat production. As that is a rather large amount, reducing that is a good place to start.
I at one time dumped Cargill and Swift on a regular basis. Garbage trucks can be a lot of fun, but those places were a horror show. Go have a look at where your meat comes from, it is disgusting.
“About 15% of global carbon emissions”
Global ‘carbon’ emissions? Are there animals out there farting graphite, coal or diamonds?
everything bleed carbon, it is the rich vein of mother earth,
“Global ‘carbon’ emissions? Are there animals out there farting graphite, coal or diamonds?”
Methane, or more pedantically, anaerobic bacteria in both the ruminant gut and in the manure release methane as they break down the fodder, thus releasing the carbon absorbed from the atmosphere the season before. Buy the insane logic of “climate science”, this counts as a harmful release while turning old growth forests into pellets, hauling them half way around the world and burning them to produce electricity is “Green”.
Of course, the commodities that the Dutch are no longer producing will be produced, most likely in either Africa or South America. Both places know for their prodigious overuse of both fertilizer and pesticides. Again, applying green logic, even though nitrogen, pesticide and oil use increases, not least from the difference between transportation from that field down the road to that continent on the other side of the world, EU carbon emissions go down.
Winston,
I am not too worried about the ability of the Supreme Court to defend itself in the short-term. It’s a separate branch of government and owes nothing to Congress; I heard a commentator last week say that John Roberts should accept Durbun’s invitation to appear in front of his committee just so that he could give an opening statement and flip Durbin the bird and walk out. Short of impeachment or packing the court there is not much Congress can do and there us not enough votes to either,
Medium to long-term? Problematic
I think with last year’s circus surrounding Dobbs that Pride Month won’t be the only seasonal celebration for June; there will also be Democrats and the media braying “Supreme Court is Extremist” as the it releases decisions. Last year it was Dobbs and Bruen, this year it will be the Harvard affirmative action and the student loan case, and next it will be Loper and I expect a gun control bill – probably the Washington state. The narrative for the Left of an extremist Court being a threat to the nation was already set last year with Dobbs and I expect that to build this year as the Left explains to poor college graduates and applicants that Court won’t give them a fair shake in life.
I expect the campaign to build to crescendo by next June with the twin goals of portraying the Court as extreme and corrupt. The extreme part is easier to understand. The Left has provided a narrative that our communities have become slaughter grounds because of the Right’s addiction to guns and the 2nd Amendment. I expect the Court to take on one of the various “assault weapon” bans that are working through various state legislatures and when it overturns said law the Left will have its cue. I also expect the Court will use the Loper case to overturn Chevron (we’ll have to see how the oral arguments go) and the Left will pitch that as the Court shredding the ability to fight climate change
The corruption part is a bit more speculative but I see the basic outline forming now. The various allegations against Thomas won’t amount to much in the short-term because none of the people involved (think Harlan) has had any business in front of the Court, but it does the Left a great service by creating the appearance of controversy. The thing I have noticed lately are headlines and throw-away lines such as “Thomas accepting gifts from GOP mega-donor.” I think that’s what all of this talk about ethics is about, to lay the ground work for next Spring when various decisions are released. The argument from the Left will be that Thomas, Gorsuch, et. al are corrupt not because their decisions have been swayed for the donor’s personal gain, but for the donor’s ideological preferences. The Left not only doesn’t feel that the Originalist perspective of jurisprudence is illegitimate, but it projects its own view of the judiciary as an another venue for political combat onto the Right. Proclaiming a connection between GOP mega-donors and conservative Justices pushes that point.
However this is all just battle-space preparation. When the Court announces the next term’s decisions it will be about 7 weeks before the Democratic convention, in other words ripe for electoral exploitation. This will be even more so if 1 of the 3 liberal Justices breaks rank and either openly criticizes the ideology of the court or proclaims the need for an ethics code (I get the vibe from the cut of her jib that Jackson will be the one to do it) I expect the Court to be an electoral issue with perhaps court packing explicitly on the platform… I mean after all it will be for the children because if it was up to Clarence Thomas your child will be shot dead by a machine gun on a dying Earth and all the while Harlan Crow cackles from his volcano lair.
The other electoral element is one we don’t talk about enough and that is the implications of the new world of mass mail-in balloting combined with ballot harvesting. I think we’re all concerned about the fraud element but it has a dramatic effect on the legitimate conduct of elections. With millions of ballots flooding the electorate, public access to voter rolls, and the ability for third parties to collect and deliver completed ballots the crucial weapon in elections may no longer be the airwaves as much as an effective ground game in swing areas. In other words the primary challenge for a campaign is not to convince undecideds but to convert your followers into votes. During a planning meeting a few months ago I joked that our key goal should be to mobilize key supporters to act as ballot harvesters invoking Sonny Coreleone’s demand to Tessio “I want 50 good men” because he was going to the mattresses. If you are going to win a close election you need those “50 good men” to run your ballot harvesting program. The Left is going to get their 50 because they’ve already whipped their base into a frenzy over abortion and guns with them waving Roe as the 21st Century equivalent of the bloody shirt. Expect the current campaign against the Court to be part of this.
Mike: I think you have laid it out very clearly. My only quibble is on the logistics of elections. I think mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, same-day and motor-voter registration, broken audit processes on voting, counting, reporting etc, have hopelessly compromised the whole business. We need to get back to voters showing up in person at the polls on the actual Election Day, proving their identity as certified legit voters, marking a paper ballot with indelible ink and getting indelible purple ink on their thumb to prevent a re-vote; with the safeguarding and inspection and counting of the ballots done by competent bipartisan teams (with a tamper-proof video record of their work). And serious jail terms for those who play games with the system. No mysterious software counting anything: just well-guarded warehouses full of actual ballots to support the claimed outcome.
Until that happens, I think we’re kidding ourselves.
And I don’t see how it can happen, unless both sides sincerely want it.
Do they?
i’ve worked the elections at precint level from 1997-2012, in both dade and broward, the former part was the hanging chad episode, where bad polling called the election for gore,
then they insisted on digital systems, but when diebold !came on the scene, the results were not good enough in ahia for instance, then when they fixed the results in 2006 and 2008, it was democracy again, we never used diebold, we used chuch hagels es&S, the digital backup accounts for any discrepancy in ballot distribution, the dems have been complaining about dominion/smartmatic since 2017, and the usual suspects made their pitch as late as october 2020,
Mike:
With millions of ballots flooding the electorate, public access to voter rolls, and the ability for third parties to collect and deliver completed ballots the crucial weapon in elections may no longer be the airwaves as much as an effective ground game in swing areas. In other words the primary challenge for a campaign is not to convince undecideds but to convert your followers into votes.
The Left/Democrats have been playing (winning) this game for the past several election cycles while the Republicans, with exceptions as in FL, are clueless, inept and/or corrupt. But it’s never over. The Left generally overplays its hand. It takes but a few reversals, as with Twitter, to significantly impede the leftist project.
We seem to be in a period of unusual flux in mores, institutions and perhaps national fortunes. We may expect black swans, for example in national finances, that will upset many plans. No group or political movement has a lock on anything. Individuals and groups who remain flexible have the best odds of success. Which individuals and which groups are best/worst at adapting to unforeseen change?
Winston: “My only quibble is on the logistics of elections.”
That is a great list of things that need to be changed back to the way they were when we actually had “democracy”.
Let me suggest a new change that would be well worth having — to be elected, a candidate should get 50%+1 of the votes of the registered voters. In effect, a citizen declining to vote would be equivalent to voting for “None of the Above”. And if no candidate gets the required actual majority of the registered voters, then a person will be randomly selected from the Voters List to fill that office.
It won’t happen, of course, since that would undermine Swamp Creature UniParty rule. But after the inevitable economic collapse, there will be major changes.
I’m finishing up Mollie Hemingway’s “Rigged”, it’s a pretty fast read and has some real nuggets. The chapter describing the Trump team’s efforts in to head off any potential primary challengers by working through local party organizations was very instructive and very applicable to what’s going on right now with Biden and the Democrats. Also if you are a bit of an operations junkie, her dive into the nuts-and-bolts of election monitoring
I appreciated her analysis of issues with mail-in voting. I have the strong opinion that large-scale mail-in balloting represents a reversal of 200 years of effort to institute the secret ballot. The secrecy of the ballot is assured both by the secured privacy of the voting booth and the fact that once the completed ballot is placed in the box/tabulator by the voter it becomes indistinguishable from any other ballot. These criteria of course cannot be met with mail-in voting and in fact with wide-scale mail-in voting, it becomes profitable to build organizations to engage voters in regard to their ballots. One of our participants pointed out that given the date of when ballots are mailed you can pretty know to the day when the ballots will show up in people’s mail boxes. The opportunities for fraud let alone coercion, when combined with ballot harvesting, are numerous.
I haven’t read a good after-action report on the 2022 midterms, but the general feeling is that the Democrats were able to out-perform expectations because of their superior ground (read ballot harvesting) game. 2020 proved to be an inflection point for voting with the excuse of COVID allowing a number of very nasty practices to become wide-spread in the system. If you keep in mind Hugh Hewitt’s old dictum “if it’s not close they can’t cheat”, I can see harvesting being the key in the swing states, especially those with large urban cores. I might not be swing a million votes with harvesting, but say 80,000 given Philadelphia or Pittsburgh? Sure.
One of the things that has troubled me is that we have moved away from the notion of voting as a shared civic experience by radically expanding access to early and mail-in voting. We know the official reason why for these changes, to increase participation. My argument has been is that if voting is so important then why cannot people carve 30 minutes to an hour out of one day per year to engage in this vital function. I have watched people standing in line for an hour at the airport Starbucks, wait an hour for a taxi, but not be willing to do so for what they call one of their most basic civil rights. I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that our belief in voting as a shared experienced has declined at the same time that access to the ballot has never been assured.
Perhaps one day, in some magical happy-land where there are no lawyers and where we all live in gum-drop houses, we can make Election Day a national holiday, Not like a Labor or Memorial Day where the stores are still open and it’s just an excuse to drink and shop, but more like Thanksgiving and Christmas where everything shuts down and no one has an excuse for not showing up to vote.
“Rigged” is worth reading. It makes clear how the Democrats implemented major changes in voting procedures with the connivance of partisan state officials, and by manipulating naïve election bureaucrats, with almost no public scrutiny. This is in addition to any outright fraud.
I think you are asking the wrong question. The EU has long ceased to be a free place. A better question would be whether the EU can even be considered part of the civilized world. I think the answer to that is no.
pengun…no one cares what you eat or think.
how can you tell if someone is a vegan? don’t worry; THEY’LL tell YOU
PenGun
May 8, 2023 at 11:59 pm
Don’t get me started.
Too late. You started preaching with the very first comment. And it was definitely virtue signaling: “Oh look at how wonderful I am for practicing my virtue!” And your second comment was basically “And you all are a bunch of sinners for thinking otherwise” with a hint of killjoy added to your self-righteousness.
And, BTW, a bunch of the farms they’re taking out of production will be vegetable farms. So, you’re going to starve, too.
To rub salt in the Dutch farmers’ wounds, I read that the Dutch government has plans for that soon-to-be-unused farmland: massive housing projects for all those new, diverse, culturally-enriching immigrants.
“About 15% of global carbon emissions come from cattle used for meat production”
First, that assumes that carbon emissions are a problem in the first place (ain’t buying it). Even If you buy into that assumption, carbon emissions are a fraction of overall emissions, so you’re chasing diminishing marginal returns. So is it really worth shutting down that much food production?
It’s fascinating how these bureaucrats think that their moves will have any impact. How much nitrogen will be reduced? 80% of earth’s atmosphere is nitrogen. What difference will their piddly reduction make? I don’t think they care. These clowns will just pour concrete over the land they acquired in the name of infrastructure and pad that ‘accomplishment” on their resumes.
Lovely. Did you know that Wind Power is now the main supplier of electricity for the UK?
They are most definitely getting on with zero emission power.
To all those vegetarians….
The AGW cultists are now blaming rice cultivation for global warming.
Enjoy starving.
I do enjoy that you really do believe you are smarter that everyone else.
We have new info, and now medically assisted euthanasia for toddlers, is being introduced in Denmark.
Your search for evil was not very thorough.