Two years ago, the Netherlands government was spending millions of euros to subsidize farmers and others hurt by pandemic policies.
Now it seeks to destroy many Dutch farmers by compelling them to drastically slash livestock herds to reduce nitrogen oxide and ammonia, thereby supposedly benefiting the environment. The government has also thwarted construction projects on save-the-planet grounds.
Farmers are protesting throughout the country. At one site, police opened fire. No one was hurt.
The prime minister objects to “intimidating” officials by, say, clogging highways with tractors — which protesting farmers have done.
Understandable, but shoe the other foot: Is using governmental coercion to destroy farmers a form of peaceful suasion?
Such irrational policies conform to ideologies that sure seem bent on the progressive destruction of civilization for the alleged sake of fine-tuning the weather. Yet nothing the Dutch could do — not even mass seppuku — would appreciably affect our far-more-massive-than-the-Netherlands global climate. But the government may succeed in making life harder for everyone in the habit of eating.
Just some overseas craziness that could never happen here?
It already is. Federal assaults on the oil industry have fueled skyrocketing fuel prices. Our current president says the burden is an acceptable part of “an incredible transition” to a world that will be “stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.”
Will the U.S. government next decide that too many cows are emitting gases such as methane and mandate culling of herds here?
Who knows? It depends on the politics of the moment, how eager officials are to appease enemies of mankind, and other factors having nothing to do with respecting the requirements of human survival.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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