Does anybody know what’s happening in the Netherlands? Why are people protesting? What’s going on?
One thing that’s worth mentioning is that there have been a lot of working class protests around the world recently. This is unusual because working people don’t have as much free time and energy to protest as the leisure classes. It’s got to be something big to get workers to come out to protest.
My understanding: the EU has some rules governing nitrogen use by farmers, a set of ill-defined measures arbitrarily applied by bureaucrats, under which they have unilaterally decided to prevent certain Dutch famers from planting. This has been going on for a while; the Dutch farmers have had enough, and are forming tractor parades, dumping tons of manure on government building, and otherwise expressing their displeasure.
This in the face of growing global food shortages caused by the Covid lockdown insanity.
\ The EU has degenerated into something really disgusting.
May be, Russian threat will bring some much needed normalcy to EU, or won’t it?
People have been talking about the threat of world hunger if Ukrainian grain is blocked by Russia, about the threat of instability in the Middle East and Africa which would lead to more immigration waves to Europe.
I supposed this will lead to America and Europe to increase their agricultural production, not the opposite.
Real threats have a tendency to force people keep their legs on the ground.
LikeLike
Here is some information in English, go to the second part of the article: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/police-open-fire-on-dutch-tractor-driver-protesting-radical-environmental-policies/?utm_source=top_news&utm_campaign=usa
There are new laws that aim to regulate nitrogen emissions. Fertilizers are nitrogen-based, so you can see the problem.
Dutch govt., at the behest of WEF, has promised to reduce “nitrogen emissions” and reduce livestock nationally by one third. Farmers rightly see this as a threat to their livelihood. And it’s completely insane in a net-export-agriculture country during a time when everybody’s been promised food shortages.
Look up the “nitrogen cycle”. Nitrates and nitrites are the new CO2. The argument being that agricultural activities are harming the natural nitrogen cycle. Of course, there is truth in it, algae blooms in Potomac or Gulf of Mexico are real enough. However, only a crazy person would come up with a solution to this problem that involves stopping the food production.
I’ve been gardening my whole life, and this is completely nuts. You cannot grow plants without nitrogen. Nitrogen is a frigging TREASURE, and we flush most of our freely available nitrogen resources down the toilet because we live in the post-green-revolution age where it’s cheaper to buy soil fertility than reclaim it.
If we have a problem with nitrogen plumes, the answer is to use more of it in agriculture. Close the loop. Taking farms out of production to lower nitrogen “emissions” is… none of this makes any sense, except as a tyranny of experts who’ve never put a shovel in the ground.
The Dutch government has decided to slash emissions of pollutants like nitrogen oxide and ammonia by 50% by 2030. This will involve massive cuts in livestock numbers, land buyouts and even expropriations of many farms whose animals produce large amounts of ammonia.
A leaked document from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency jointly commissioned by the Dutch ministries of agriculture and finance revealed several scenarios drawn up to buy out farmers. In one, buyouts were no longer optional if required, but compulsory.
The Dutch minister pushing the nitrogen law that grants the government the power to expropriate the farmers’ land was quite explicit in stating that not all farmers will be able to continue with their work (about a third of them will have to go, eventually). In a sick twist, this is the same minister whose brother owns online supermarket @picnic. And guess who invested $600 million in that company? Bill ‘fake meat’ Gates. [Check Eva Vlaardingerbroek at @EvaVlaar]
I’m seeing an interesting (although frightening) analogy with the Soviet authorities and their profound hatred of the farming class. Solzhenitsyn explained it as follows: people who work on the land retain a connection to nature, to natural cycles of life. They know simple facts of biology. As a result, it’s harder to dupe them. The Soviet regime hated peasants because they were never fully open to being indoctrinated.
There’s a clear connection to how the woke crowd detests nature and everything that arises from it.
” the woke crowd detests nature and everything that arises from it”
all the while blubbering crocodile tears about it and dramatizing how much they care!!!!
what they want to do with nature is the same thing they want to do with people – micro-manage it, but nature…. doesn’t like that and usually ends up shitting all over those who try to take liberties with it….
They don’t care about nature. They’re disgusted by it.
LikeLike
They detest everything they don’t control. Nature is the archenemy. Look at the other projects that fascinate these creeps: they want to control the climate, the weather, the oceans… and they have a serious vendetta against large herbivores. Have these people never heard of the bison herds that once roamed the American prairie? Their tiny control-obsessed brains could not possibly comprehend the carbon sequestration involved in the 10-20 feet of topsoil those bison built. But their big solution now is… genetically engineered plants with plastic roots that won’t decompose. What are the soil bacteria, and fungi, and millipedes and snails and slime molds and macrophages and arthropods supposed to eat?
Their biophobia would make a plastic desert out of the whole world. If they can’t control it and commodify it, they don’t think it should exist, and they’re willing to lay waste to millions of acres of good pastureland for that cause. Because they are deeply, horribly, sick people.
And this is all so, so Soviet. For people who don’t know, I recommend looking up the Aral Sea, which was one of many examples of the Soviets going to war against nature. There’s a video called “The Toxic Soviet Sea” that’s very good.
It’s fascinating how the USSR and its attitudes refuse to die, no matter how much time passes
…or the brilliant plan to reverse northern Siberian rivers to irrigate Central Asia. Nihil novum sub sole.
LikeLike
If Ukraine joins EU, will it have to follow those rules too? Agriculture is a central part of its economy.
You mentioned Dutch, yet green energy is a central part of EU and it seems their green standards are likely only to rise.
EU has already started pushing green policies on Ukraine, btw. It is one of central parts they mention in ‘rebuild Ukraine’ plan. Saw it on Israeli news.
LikeLike
If Ukraine joins the EU it will slide into the same kind of s#it we, the other EU member states, are already in… You’re welcome.
LikeLike
Is green “Marshall Plan for Ukraine” possible? Is this a good thing on the whole?
// The plan to rebuild a green Ukraine
Ukraine could become the manufacturing engine for the EU Green Deal, says MP Lesia Vasylenko.
…
Vasylenko wants to reverse Ukraine’s polluting legacy as the U.S.S.R.’s manufacturing base. In doing so, the country could become the engine for Europe’s ambitions to reach net zero emissions by 2050, she said.
…
The most obvious possibility is to create a carbon-free economy.”
The homes Ukrainians return to should be repaired or rebuilt with the most energy-efficient materials and technologies, said Vasylenko. That alone could spur a huge new domestic industry and skills base that could be exported to an EU that is short of trained installers of heat pumps and insulation. “So again, this is an opportunity for Ukraine, but also for the world,” she said.
Ukraine could service growing demand for parts for electric cars, or heat pumps, or greener agriculture — the latter, she said, was a huge opportunity to reform farming in one of the world’s breadbasket nations.
…
The price tag of a green reconstruction will initially be higher than a quick and dirty rush job, Vasylenko said, but donors and Ukraine should agree a green constraint — similar to the earmark of 37 percent for climate projects that the EU placed on its pandemic recovery funding.
“There must be a precondition to all of the money that is going to be given to Ukraine … that there is an environmental and climate change element to it,” she said. “That we’re giving you all of this money, but you can only buy the green technology.”
Vasylenko will be in Berlin next week and she plans to “definitely” raise the plan with the German government. For her, it’s a way to cajole a government she said is “reluctant to help Ukraine in any way … But Germany is very keen on climate change, on greening the economy … So the way that the war could be sold to them and that they needed to do something was actually through climate change.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/the-plan-to-rebuild-a-green-ukraine/
LikeLike
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment