It’s a constant wonder that people who can’t build or grow anything – who contribute the least to the world – always tell those who “can do stuff “what they can and can’t do.
The climate fanatics and their cult followers are zeroed in on both farming and ranching, claiming that growing food and raising animal stock produces nearly 30% of greenhouse gases that supposedly create climate change and global warming. The assertion is that operating machinery, manure, and methane from animal stock, tilling the soil, releasing buried carbon, and using nitrogen-based fertilizers and insecticides will burn up the Earth.
These folks are insane, but they’re as dangerous as rabid dogs whose bite is almost always fatal, left unattended.
(Faithful readers may recall that in 2019, newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, joined the chorus of official climate madness, stating, “We’re, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Her office declined my request to update the end-of-world timeline or provide details on how the Congresswoman was preparing for that fateful day. AOC, of course, is also famous for discovering that vegetables grow in dirt (here)!
According to green religionists, the problem with farming and ranching is that nitrogen-based fertilizers and their by-product, nitrous oxide, are released into the atmosphere while animals expel methane gas. Nitrogen naturally constitutes 78% of the Earth’s atmosphere, and methane is a trace gas, so if this all seems a leap, that’s “settled science” for you.
Nitrogen, of course, is a crucial building block of life on Earth and is essential for plant growth. Since most soils have little naturally available nitrogen in forms that plants can use, introducing nitrogen-based fertilizers, phosphorous, and potassium has increased crop production for well over one hundred years. (From the Egyptians through the eighteenth century, animal and human waste and composted material were the primary fertilizers used in every civilization.)
In the last fifty-plus years, synthetically produced nitrogen fertilizers made by capturing nitrogen from the air have become common worldwide, and the dramatic increase in crop production they have allowed has been enough to feed a far larger world population. Without these fertilizers, it’s fair to say that mass starvation would quickly follow for half the world’s population. (See the crop yield contrast below.)
The simple reality is that without nitrogen-based fertilizers, crop rotation techniques, and pest control methods, the world would not have enough food. But the stampede in the West and across the world to implement the insane remedies proposed by bureaucrats and politicians who have never grown grass, much less crops, is well underway.
But the resistance to the green fanatics is growing – and the storm warnings are up.
In the last few years, mostly ignored by the corrupt and lazy mainstream media, farmers worldwide – from Ireland to India, to Holland to Germany, and points in between – have been raising a ruckus as citizens deal with massive food inflation and shortages.
(Wheat crop comparison with and without nitrogen fertilizer. Credit: Deli Chen, the University of Melbourne.)
The Canary in the coal mine in the West was the Dutch farmers’ massive and successive protests (much like the Canadian truckers) clogging the roadways with tractors and trucks. The protest movement began in 2019 over impossible new restrictions on nitrogen-based fertilizers to fight “climate change” and realize “net zero” goals, as well as other regulations that threatened the financial viability of many farms. The draconian restrictions also threatened the entire Dutch economy since they are the second largest food exporter in the world, behind only the US.
In his stunning election win late last year, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom promised to remake these policies, much to the European Union’s horror.
In 2021, also largely ignored by the media, Sri Lanka sank into chaos as hungry and fed-up citizens took to the streets in massive protests over incredible food price inflation and food shortages in the marketplace. The cause? Sri Lanka’s wannabe ruling family (who attempted to consolidate political power in the family) decided to follow the most unqualified people on the planet, banning nitrogen fertilizers and implementing “organic farming” techniques virtually overnight. Predictably, the ban caused a rapid collapse in food yields, and prices skyrocketed as the nation’s financial reserves emptied.
One farmer told Reuters, “Last year, we got 60 bags [of rice] from these two acres. But this time, it was just 10.” A tea farmer lamented the collapse of his once flourishing business, where he had to let go of three of his six workers. “My country is very beautiful but politicians destroy it [sic].”
The production of rice alone in 2022 dropped by 60 percent.
The Sri Lankan ruling family left the country under threat and in disgrace, and the new Government has since been struggling to secure loans and working capital. In 2023, the nation finally had a positive growth of under 2% – led by agriculture.)
Greenpeace – a collection of the unproductive who yearn for some version of a feudal tomorrow – bemoaned Sri Lanka’s experiment in insanity and repeated its demand for a “ban on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. It sounds radical, and it is, but it’s also possible, and it would be a win-win for people and planet.”
It’s a constant wonder that people who can’t build or grow anything – who contribute the least to the world – always tell those who “can do stuff “what they can and can’t do.
In addition to nitrogen, methane, a naturally occurring greenhouse gas and the simplest hydrocarbon and principal component of natural gas, is also blamed for climate change, even though its trace presence in the atmosphere is measured in parts per billion. (Its presence in the atmosphere actually declined and remained stable between 2000 and 2014.) Methane also dissipates more quickly than CO2, the other greenhouse gas blamed for heating the Earth – claims that co-exist with hundreds of internal scientific contradictions.
Methane is the new poster child for climate change, with the taxpayer-funded climate brigades clamoring to do away with gas appliances, heating systems, cows, and other livestock. (One can only speculate when humans will be on the list!) Yet, methane microorganisms exist throughout the animal and insect world, in the soil and the oceans. They convert cellulose, wood, and fibers into energy and release methane. Farming, especially grains like rice, also emits methane. Then, wetlands, swamp gas, and decomposing organic material across the globe are burping up methane.
Like CO2, methane is a marker of life. Life as we know it depends on these gases, and talking about “net zero” emissions is pretentious on its face, to say the least.
Why has methane become the new target for climate fanatics? One reason may be that the general public has never accepted the scare-mongering over CO2. The premise upon which it rests shakes like a politician on a lie detector machine. Simply too many contradictions, half-truths, and institutional scandals have demonstrated that the claims can’t stand on their own.
One might also suspect behind the methane scare are corporate conglomerates, oligarchs, billionaires (think Bill “Bugs” Gates here), and their obedient government lackeys who want to force private owners off farmland and ranchland. Small to medium-sized farmers and ranchers prevent the total consolidation of food production and distribution by international mega-corporate operations. As an example, in the Netherlands, it seems perfectly obvious that the highly productive small farm sector was in the way of the “ruling class’ dreams of everyone eating processed bugs, lab-made protein, and artificial meat (not to mention opening up thousands of acres for migrant housing which they openly talked about).
Elsewhere in the world, governments are racing into the madness of jeopardizing food production and availability to the unsettled science of what the climate “should” be at any given time faster than a pyromaniac can strike a match. The Canadians are committed to reducing nitrogen levels by 30% by 2030. The European Union has also established 2030 and 2050 goals, which have started protests in Ireland, and both France and Germany have seen massive protests generated by subsidy cuts – directly tied to the impending cuts of various emissions and the cost of production.
When the elites and ruling class of the world, in their well-documented hatred and disregard for average citizens, start a multiprong attack on growing food and processing foods stuff, all designed to flip the world upside down, then that effort needs support from the mere peons who make the world work and have to eat. It also demands extraordinary evidence, not a raft of “computer models,” all of which have already proven wildly inaccurate over the decades.
It’s an effort that may take tens of millions of us joining our farmers and ranchers in the streets.
