Concern over agricultural emissions plants a seed of degrowth

OPINION:

Farms have always existed primarily to grow food — the stuff of human sustenance — but modernity threatens to turn thumbs-down on the farm. In the European Union, some “progressive” officials have declared that atmospheric emissions must be reduced to fight global warming and, consequently, farming’s footprint must shrink. The choice to retreat rather than revamp plants the toxic seed of degrowth, the antithesis of progress.

A campaign to restrict agriculture, ironically, is blooming in the Netherlands, the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products despite its diminutive size. As many as 3,000 farms are slated to be bought up and closed down by government fiat, with farmers slated to receive offers they literally cannot refuse: Prime Minister Mark Rutte says he is prepared to use force against property owners that resist.

Dutch officials assert that closing farms is its only option for meeting EU obligations to cut nitrogen emissions in half by 2030. Scaling back agriculture, though, means cutting food production, which threatens to further accelerate the rise in food costs and increase the likelihood of global famine. “It is difficult to overstate the recklessness of undermining farmers during the greatest global food crisis in decades,” Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild told the Daily Caller. “This will likely exacerbate the food price inflation we are already experiencing.”

How could the farm, humanity’s source of life-sustaining nutrition, fall from its essential role to be regarded as an existential threat to civilization?

It is the work of climate doomsayers, who charge that nitrogen, a common element of the environment, is escaping from farm fertilizers into the atmosphere and contributing to greenhouse gases that warm the planet. EU nations have subsequently passed extremist laws requiring the imposition of strict limits on atmospheric emissions. The effect is de facto degrowth, the intentional orchestration of economic contraction.

With the planet now home to 8 billion, degrowth policies chart a course toward depopulation. The New York Times recently published a complimentary profile of one Les Knight, founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, which embraces a motto with ominous overtones: “May we live long and die out.” Historically, welcoming the end of humanity has been viewed as shamefully nihilistic. For degrowthers, though, annihilation of the human race is precisely the point.

Events suggesting the drive for relentless economic expansion has reached its natural limit all add kindling to the degrowth movement’s incendiary campaign to halt human progress. In addition to ill-advised EU regulations that preserve nature at the expense of humanity, they include uncontrollable government spending that triggers recession, and unprotected borders that flood communities with illegal immigrants and drugs.

To the contrary, human ingenuity has always mounted its many daunting obstacles through innovation. The EU has already cut its greenhouse gases by 34% since 1990, including a 21% decrease in its agricultural sector through smart farming.

If it turns thumbs-down on farms in the name of battling climate change — thereby worsening global food shortages — the Netherlands will take a first step along a dangerous path that ends with a depopulated planet. Degrowth won’t produce progress.