US to follow Dutch in closing family farms?
John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate (aka, the "climate czar"), announced a sharp turn in environmental policy, targeting not gas guzzling SUVs but the very production of food.
Move over CO2
Applying the term “net zero” to nitrogen emissions (it commonly refers to balancing carbon dioxide production with its removal), Kerry declared agriculture to be the “center” target of climate policy in an address to the US and UAE governments' Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate.
We can’t get to net zero, we don’t get this job done, unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution," Kerry, the special presidential envoy for climate, said at the AIM for Climate summit in Washington.
Family farms targeted
A Gateway Pundit report entitled, “John Kerry and Biden Regime Target Small Farms in Their Ongoing Climate Crusade – They’re Going After the Food Supply,” emphasizes that the brunt of net zero and other such regulations are borne by small, or family, farms.
The Biden regime’s climate czar says farms produce too much greenhouse gases. He wants that to stop in order to combat the climate “crisis.” Farms also happen to produce food. Kerry is not worried about that. The global elites are not worried about that.
Recently, the Netherlands announced they were shutting down family farms to combat global warming . . . The Dutch Government announced they will close up to 3,000 farms to comply with their global warming goals.
As with other small businesses, small farms do not have the borrowing power or high powered attorneys and accountants on call to help them navigate through burdensome regulatory schemes, as explained by the National League of Cities' “Municipal Action Guide”.
Unlike larger companies, small businesses rarely have in house human resources or legal counsel. The more time and energy a small business owner must spend meeting various regulatory requirements, the less time they can spend operating their business, and earning revenue. [P. 11].
Whether utilizing in-house or outside professionals, the costs to a large chain are divided amongst each of their branches — a luxury unavailable to small businesses.
No choice now
To better understand Kerry's intention in placing agriculture “front and center” in the march toward “net zero,” one may consider how Holland reached the point of closing thousands of farms through a combination of government policy and activist judges. The Guardian notes, for example, that the Netherlands has no choice at this point but to close farms if it wants to build new homes.
Dutch building projects needed nitrogen permission, putting government plans to build 900,000 desperately needed homes, windfarms and vital infrastructure at a standstill.
The Telegraph elaborated on the role of an activist court in creating a dilemma in which the Dutch must choose between food and shelter.
In 2019 a ruling by the Dutch Council of State meant every new activity that emits nitrogen, including farming and building, needs a permit. This has prevented the expansion of dairy, pig and poultry farms, which are major sources of nitrogen from ammonia in manure mixed with urine. . . .
The voluntary buyout scheme [of farms] was “the only way to finally create opportunities for the construction of homes, the construction of new infrastructure," said [the] chairman of . . . an employers' federation.
Voluntary, for now
As noted by The Telegraph, the farm buyouts are voluntary, for now. The Guardian points out that the quota for closed farms will be met, voluntarily or not.
For the first time, the government has said that forced buyouts will follow next year if the voluntary measures fail.
Reversing the Industrial Revolution
Tjeerd de Groot, the agriculture spokesperson for the liberal Democrats 66 party, which appointed socialist representatives to the European Parliament, celebrated the difficulties faced by the Dutch people.
de Groot . . . who believes the country must reduce numbers of pigs and chickens by 50% and graze cows on grass [said,] “I’m very hopeful now, because it’s not only voluntary any more. The whole economy has come to a stop because of this nitrogen question.
de Groot is not alone in looking forward to going backwards. The book, Sustainability Beyond Technology: Philosophy, Critique, and Implications for Human Organization contains a chapter entitled, “Reversing the Industrial Revolution: Theorizing the Distributive Dimensions of Energy Transition.”
Likewise, researchers led by Julia Maximiliane Schneider at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich declared, “Global cropland could be almost halved," though they claimed the food supply would be unaffected since “agricultural productivity [would be] increased [thereby] sustaining production volumes.”
One hopes these futuristic predictions, where closing farms does not lead to mass starvation, will fare better than some of The Jetsons' predictions. One person who did not share such optimism was radio broadcaster Paul Harvey, who had 24 million weekly listeners. Harvey considered climate change to be a hoax designed to scare the world into accepting the reversal of the industrial revolution, phasing out the very advances which allowed the production of enough food to support an exponential growth in the global population.
In 1992 Paul Harvey Warned About The Propaganda Hoax of Climate Change, And How Fake Press Releases Could Destroy What's Left of The American Economy, in an Utterly Unnecessary Attempt to Repeal The Industrial Revolution! 30 Years Later His Words Are Coming True...
In the clip below Harvey bases his rejection of climate fear on science.
MIT's technology review has made an exhaustive study of worldwide ocean temperatures since 1851 [and] has concluded that there appears to have been little or no global warming over the past century. In fact, the net rise in world surface temperature during the last century, which was about one percent, almost all occurred before 1940, and that was before aerosols, and that has since been reversed.
Former NASA Chief Robert Jastrow and former Scripps Director William Nierenberg, past president of the American Academy of Sciences, [and] Frederick Sites, all have concluded in a scathing rebuke of those who make money by predicting global warming, quote,
“if we allow ourselves to be influenced by press releases we could spend a trillion dollars over the next decade destroying what's left of the American economy in an utterly unnecessary attempt to repeal the industrial revolution.”
