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Canada: Trudeau’s war on farmers is moving right along — 44 Comments

1. Let us not forget that Ireland is also imposing output controls on their agricultural sector along the same lines.

   Are we to believe that these nations have simultaneously had the same idea, made the same policy changes, all coincidentally at the same time? Decided in isolation that agricultural emissions are dangerous, and a threat to the climate? Aside from the IPCC assertions, is there any, you know, actual evidence? Pretty much everyone I know thinks that emissions from warm-blooded mammals is a fairly normal condition, and that having a food supply is a good thing.

   This smacks of the same kind of unrealistic and unsupported thinking as the ‘experts’ that were saying we are all done with oil and gas, a few scant months ago. The Internal Combustion Engine is done, by golly, and no more to be manufactured by 2030, and no more allowed on the roads by 2040! (or something) Remember? How’s that forecast working out right about now, with winter coming?

2. Urban ecophiles are going to be the death of us. I live in Florida and a while back they got an amendment on the ballot for a vote regarding pig farming. My first thought was “what the H do I know about pig farming?” However, they pushed weepy stuff about the cruel life of baby pigs and what-not and the nitwit voters approved it. To say it was a mess untangling the problems that caused would be an understatement.

   Urban ecophiles sit in their apartments with no idea how huge chunks of the world work, have no idea how much they don’t know, and have little memory for all the stupid ideas they’ve had that have failed. We pay the price for their ignorant ‘feels’.

3. I’m afraid a critical mass of Canadians are capons. They simply do not react the the abuses of their government.

4. Quickest way to collapse a country, and then take total control is to cut off food.

5. Here is the IPCC chart on the global warming potential (what Trudeau claims is the problem) of different gases. So if this is the issue, then we can see that neither NOx emissions nor ammonia based fertilizers themselves are the problem. The problem is nitrous oxide or N2O.

   Note that N2O is not that big of a problem compared to CO2 or methane. So this is a high cost remedy to a tiny problem.

   Here is more than you want to know about fertilizers and N2O production.

6. We definitely live in a time when a vast majority of the citizenry is scientifically illiterate.

7. We definitely live in a time when a vast majority of the citizenry is scientifically illiterate.

   We’ve always lived in that state. And the vast majority of scientists haven’t a clue how to fix their car or their HVAC system. Knowledge is specialized.

   The problem is not ‘scientific literacy’ or the lack of it. The problem is the administrative state, highly politicized bureaucracies, and decision-makers insulated from the consequences of the decisions they make.

8. Quickest way to collapse a country, and then take total control is to cut off food.

   The erstwhile President of Ceylon is now in exile. Not all of these gambits work out well for their instigators.

9. TommyJay, what they don’t include in that chart is by far-and-away the largest greenhouse gas — water vapor. It accounts for 95% of the greenhouse gases. Those other gases on the list are actually trace gases by comparison.

10. We definitely live in a time when a vast majority of the citizenry is scientifically illiterate.

    And don’t forget politicians who are more ignorant that most citizens. Canada has been an enormous source of wheat for 100 years. What we are seeing is an attack on civilization. Here we see econut George Monbiot.

    Clear-eyed scrutiny and reform of our farming practices “gives us possibly the best chance we have of avoiding environmental catastrophe this century,” said Monbiot. Ending injudicious subsidies for agriculture would trigger this shift, he believes. Every year, around $500-$600bn is spent worldwide on “perverse, destructive” farm subsidies, which buttress “arguably the most destructive industry on Earth”. Cut off these funding streams and meat production would virtually end, Monbiot told me. Farmers could then instead be paid to restore the land by rewilding it – the subject of Monbiot’s 2013 book Feral – planting trees and growing crops and vegetables in ways that encourage wildlife to return.

11. this is where the word moonbat came from,

12. Cut off these funding streams and meat production would virtually end, Monbiot told me.

    Mr. Monbiot is in no danger of being mistaken for being economically literate.

13. Food riots coming soon to you too.

14. One the other thread, we talked about the nonviolent commie overthrows in 1989. The one violent overthrow was Romania and driven by food and electricity rationing and shortages. November 89, he was re-elected as top commie and December 25th executed.

15. ambisinistral,

    True. Here is the catch from your link.

    Increasing ghg’s [greenhouse gases] through [causing?] warming will increase water vapor and that is a big positive feedback [meaning: the more greenhouse gases, the more water vapor, the higher the temperature]. But the root cause are ghg’s. So in talking about what is changing the climate, changes in water vapor are not a root cause.”

    According to Roy Spenser, the total direct GH action of theses ghg gases is only an additional 0.5 deg C. But the IPCC pitch is, we must be fearful of another few or several degrees C in increased temperature because of positive feedback (amplifying and exacerbating) effects due primarily to water vapor. They will tell you that they know that is true, but they don’t. Worse, is the reflective effect of cloud cover which they really don’t understand.

    The other thing about water vapor is that its IR absorption spectrum is very similar to that of methane in the important part of the solar spectrum. So methane added or subtracted to an atmosphere that already has substantial water vapor won’t make much difference. My attempts at research on that tells me that there is an atmospheric standard (a map of water vapor perhaps) that is used to calculate the warming potential, but nobody seems to list what’s in that standard.

    I haven’t digested the Michigan State article that I linked yet, but I wonder if this hysteria over N2O is really correctly calculating the incremental increase in N2O with carefully applied synthetic fertilizers compared to organically fertilized crops or even no fertilizer. Because no matter how you grow the crop, that growth will generate some extra N2O.

16. On matters Canadian — and well beyond — I’ve found David Solway unusually cogent. He writes out of PJ Media, and is also a respected poet and essayist, also an avid songwriter. An elegant mind, mirrored in his elegant prose. “Music, Poetry and Politics” is his book, also recommended.

    https://pjmedia.com/columnist/david-solway-2

17. My late father, a retired physicist turned farmer who sold at one of the local farmer’s markets, spoke about a guy coming thru asking if he was “ organic” or something along those lines. My dad told him no, and the guy said something rudely in a huff about it can be done. My dad’s comment to me later was something along the lines , speaking hypothetically to the guy, “ Then why don’t you do it that way? “. That was several years ago. While there is such a thing as “ organic farming”, generally the yields are lower . The other thing is, the organic guys want to use animal manure, except that in order to obtain animal manure on a large industrial scale, beyond small family operations, you would need to concentrate the animals in feed lots. Something some of the same crowd are opposed to ( not all of them). Now my dad did buy composted chicken manure, and he put it in the soil for non root crops like tomatoes. He would not use it for root crops like potatoes. But he also used commercial fertilizers, 13-13-13 for the tomatoes with calcium sources as well.
    That being said, some of that industrial pig farming is cruel , imo, in that the sows are placed in cages so small they can never turn around. And the battery cages for laying hens are cruel also.
    There are extremes both ways in this stuff.

18. Food riots coming soon to you too. — SHIREHOME

    Maybe we should all start learning how to take down transport trucks like they do in Venezuela. (joke)

19. When my dad used composted manure for fertilizer, he would open up a trench, pour the manure in, then cover it back up with dirt. There would be very little at the top of the ground that way to contaminate the crop.
    Composting is needed. Never use fresh manure for fertilizer. E-coli can be bad…

20. TommyJay, thanks much for that paper on N2O that you linked. It scratches the chemist’s itch that immediately made itself felt upon reading Neo’s post to a considerable degree. I note with great satisfaction that the paper comes from MSU work. I’m not familiar with the specifics of how we get from NH3 to N2O – that paper assumes this knowledge already in place – but I imagine I can fill that part in using the references and so on. I disagree with you about it being more than what I wanted to know – it was actually slightly less in my case, but an excellent start. 🙂

    If I had the chance, I would ask a few particular wonky questions of the authors, such as: how it is that the function of N2O excess emissions vs. applied N density is exponential in nature, as that strikes me as a little surprising; what the implications of use of polymer-encapsulated urea would be for microbial growth, etc.; what the 3-D atmospheric distribution of N2O would vary given the different loss-minimizing application methods that they discussed elsewhere in the paper (the latter could mean a lot of work involving atmospheric chemistry and meteorology to answer, though).

    On another note, how have the protests in NL been developing? I’ve not heard anything for a couple of weeks now, not since that clip of the captured jet made the rounds. I assume Lord Justin of the North has been taking notes. He presumably has a Plan(tm) all ready to go to kill any equivalent attempts in the cradle; applying lessons learned from the beta-test last winter along the way, no doubt. I’m getting worried about our friends up north, separated by only the St. Lawrence from here. It makes me a little uncomfortable being that close to all this. I’ve resolved not to pass through Ontario on my next trip northwest, whenever that is, largely due to this kind of craziness.

21. Tommy Jay, Yes. My favorite line from the article I linked was “This is true, water vapor is the major player in the greenhouse effect and is often omitted from reports and reporting about global warming -– mostly because it is more of a symptom than a cause in global climate change, and cannot be easily mitigated.”?

    95% in a mere symptom? Cannot be easily mitigated? Ka-boing.

    That was always a problem with the global warming (nee global cooling) contingent. They needed a human cause rather than say… coming out of an ice age… to hang their theory on, so they settled on carbon because it was a gas people were producing.

    The original man-made global warning worked around the fact that carbon was just a trace gas by cooking up a positive feedback loop that was going to run out of control and turn our atmosphere into another Venus (that was the original scare story they told, and it was originally global cooling because they knew that increased cloud cover cooled rather than heated the atmosphere because of albedo).

    Carbon hysteria is just an artifact of that earlier thinking. It has all wobbled so far off the rails that Earth as the new Venus has devolved into the nebulous, and therefor meaningless ‘climate change’. Still, there is money to be made and society to be purified, so it all still wobbles along to our detriment.

22. If they were trying to diminish human flourishing what would they do differently?

23. “On another note, how have the protests in NL been developing? I’ve not heard anything for a couple of weeks now, not since that clip of the captured jet made the rounds.”

    The jet wasn’t Dutch. You had to look closely to note since the distinctive nose was covered, but the jet in question was a MiG-21, which (for obvious reasons) the Dutch military has never operated. Others have told me that the tail markings indicate that it was Croation, and that the picture was at least a few years old. I don’t know the background on the photo.

    There’s been a little bit of news since then, enough to let me know that the demonstrations were still happening as of a week ago (iirc). But not anything particularly informative. The media, of course, has been ignoring it all.

    “November 89, he was re-elected as top commie and December 25th executed.”

    AKA a Romanian Christmas Present. On the morning of the 25th, he was a secure ruler. On the evening of the 25th, he was a rapidly-cooling, bullet-riddled corpse.

    Unfortunately, his death kicked off a brief bit of open fighting. What I’ve been able to tell from my very brief survey years later from here in the US suggests that everyone involved may very well have been fighting for the same cause, but weren’t sure which other military units they could trust. So local units secured important locations (such as the airport), and then held them against any other units also trying to secure those same location. Not a good situation to find yourself in.

24. Oops… screwed up my timetable in the previous post. The speech that got Ceauscescu in trouble, and doomed his government, was issued on the 21st. That was the trigger point for his overthrow. He wasn’t particularly secure on the morning of the 25th, and had been in a precarious situation for the previous few days.

25. If they were trying to diminish human flourishing what would they do differently? — Rufus

    I had to read that a couple times. When do we stop suspecting nefarious motives and conclude nefarious motives? Or are you saying we should strongly suspect nefarious motives?

26. Philip Sells,
    I’m trying to dig through that MSU article and while it touches on many of the important factors, it doesn’t quite seem to be logically consistent.

    I decided to back up to info. that I thought I had recollected before agriculture got so political. I thought that legumes and nitrogen fixing bacteria lived together synergistically (true) and that said N fixing bacteria also produced the nasty N2O (false, but close).

    So N fixing bacteria convert N2 from the atmosphere into ammonia and ammonium. The latter and the nitrate created by nitrifying bacteria are then taken up by the plants. But there is also denitrifying bacteria. All shown in the next figure,

    https://ds055uzetaobb.cloudfront.net/image_optimizer/a4d90b84bc153d5916be4fafd6cae36d7a068eac.jpg

    Where does the N2O come in? Those nasty denitrifying bacteria are creating it. (I think.)

    https://open.oregonstate.education/app/uploads/sites/54/2019/08/Nitrogen-Cycle-1024x1009_mod.png

    This all existed before homo sapiens existed, but I’m sure over-fertilization produces much more N2O. Solution? Don’t over-fertilize so much.

    Philip, Let us know if you find anything interesting.

27. The middle of the MSU article is much better. Always be suspicious and careful with the introductions and conclusions of potentially political technical articles.

    From the conclusion:
    As previously mentioned, even small amounts of N2O in
    the atmosphere can greatly affect the climate [we don’t know that]. Because
    of this, there is great interest in reducing emissions of
    N2O from various economic sectors, including field crop
    agriculture. By using the N management practices
    described in this bulletin, farmers can reduce N2O
    emissions from their fields without reducing crop yield
    or economic return. [Bravo.]

28. junior, thanks for clearing that up about the jet. I guess I got taken in! Fortunately, the matter was of no significance, just a piece of amusement. I remember the end of Ceausescu well; it played a role in a letter I wrote to a girl I liked at the time. (Her reaction to my commentary, alas, she never disclosed.)

    Anyway, back to farming… I still don’t get why this sudden fuss over nitrous oxide. Is it that carbon is just old hat now? Are TPTB just trying to find or invent as many workable angles as possible? I don’t find it fully convincing to think of these authorities as genuinely evil; I hate them for some of what they do and say, sure, but at root, I think many of them are just so solidly convinced that the planet is in crisis that they’re afraid and panicking, and so they have these absurd reactions to what they believe they’re seeing.

    It’s kind of how I evaluated much of Prince Andrew Cuomo’s stance on the pandemic in retrospect – I looked at him, or look in the rear-view mirror, and felt that I was seeing… not exactly a tyrant, though he certainly has something of that in his makeup and he gave that side of himself plenty of leash over the last year-and-change of his tenure… but also somewhere in there was just an ordinary fellow (more ordinary than he thought himself, to be sure) who was getting a bit up there in years, heard scary things about this new disease, and essentially panicked. If these politicians would just get out more, it seems to me that that by itself would do somewhat to put them on more of an even keel. Get outside the Beltway and the Acela corridor, look around, see that the world is not ending, and you can relax a little. Not a sufficient condition to change hearts and minds where it counts, of course, but a necessary one.

    Why I mention this train of thought here: it certainly seems to be the case that, as Rufus et al. point out, a lot of the authorities have a real intention to reduce human prosperity generally, Western prosperity in particular. I think they think they’re doing it for sustainability reasons, essentially – they seem to have concluded that what we think of as material prosperity can’t be sustained very much longer and have convinced themselves that the catastrophe has to be headed off at the pass.

    What I think animates them in this regard is a feeling that this prosperity rests upon a level of exploitation of the rest of the world’s resources, starting with but by no means limited to fossil fuels, that is fundamentally unbalanced and indeed unfair, maybe they might even describe it as ‘undeserved’, i.e., the modern West doesn’t deserve to enjoy all these nice goodies. In any event, I believe this may be how they think about the matter, in which case they feel they have to get their people to make sacrifices now so that worse doesn’t happen later.

    Now of course, throughout, the elites want to save their own bacon if possible – that I take for granted. But I think not all of them are quite that selfish, at least not in their own minds. “Oh, I have to have only one mansion instead of three, or my state pension is only five million euro, not ten or twenty; well, so be it, but at least the planet doesn’t burn.” Maybe that, to some subset of them, constitutes a sacrifice. I don’t know, I know no such people, the thought processes of the very wealthy are frankly alien to me. But there is a level of thoroughgoing cynicism that it is possible to assume in the view from ‘down below’ of such people that, even when I’m at my angriest, I just can’t bring myself to embrace.

    I was going to lay down here a summary of some of my own nascent philosophical doubts of late about the sustainability question, but suffice it to say that on a certain level and to a certain degree, I can sympathize with the doubts that the more sincere elite people have been having about this whole issue in the macro context.

    (quick P. S. to TommyJay: I just took that article as a brief review, not the last word on the subject. One sees a good many such review articles in the scientific literature, and they can be quite handy, like Wikipedia but better. As to the matter of the N2O-generating bacteria, I figure it has to do with changes in the soil microbial population as a consequence of agriculture generally – I assume there must have been such shifts as human society evolved to become sedentary and all that, and probably the production of the crop species themselves has some role in this. Big processes to consider!)

29. And then there’s Italy….
    From the “Mama Mia” Files:
    “How Mario Draghi Broke Italy”—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/how-mario-draghi-broke-italy

    If Trudeau and “Biden” really want to “do” this thing “right”, then they should look up to Draghi for inspiration…

30. Related:
    —Slow Joe’s conniving climate compulsion”—
    https://jewishworldreview.com/0722/lowry072522.php
    Opening grafs:
    ‘Word has come down from on high that it is now mandatory to refer to climate change as an “emergency.”
    ‘Democrats and climate activists are urging President Joe Biden to declare a literal emergency to unlock powers allowing him to enact new measures without congressional approval.
    ‘Congressional action to address the climate crisis appears to have stalled,” Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and other Democratic senators wrote Biden. “As a result, we urge you to put us on an emergency footing and aggressively use your executive powers to address the climate crisis.”…’

    And so…a “climate emergency” that oh-so-conveniently requires “Biden” to put the country on what is essentially on open-ended war footing(!).

    It is the “Biden” strategy in a nutshell: with the country on an open-ended war footing, “he” will be able to do whatever “he” wants…FOREVER!!

    (But you will be pleased to note that that “boot stamping on [your] face” will be made entirely from non-animal products…)

    File under: Totalitarianism for Dummies

31. Someone seems to have caught on to the “Biden” betray-o-rama game…

    “The behavior of the Obama and Biden administrations regarding Iran and Afghanistan served as a wake-up call for the countries of the region.”

    (A “wake-up call”, indeed….)

    From:
    “Arabs: ‘US President Decided to Tamper with [Middle East] Security for No Reason…’ “—
    https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18753/arabs-us-tamper-middle-east

    “No Reason”??
    Oh, there’s a reason all right…

32. }}} Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

    Why in the fuck is this asshole still in office?

    I mean, I grasp why Biden is — there is no “recall” option for America, and the replacement is deemed probably even worse, so he’s not getting removed by the processes that would certainly remove him by now as incapable of fulfilling his duties due to mental deterioration. But Canada can recall his ass, and already did and somehow let him continue.

    Why has Trudeau not joined Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Sri Lanka), Mario Draghi (Italy) in being rejected by their people for the idiots they all have been. Mark Rutte (Netherlands) should join them, as should fucking Trudeau.

33. Trudeau isn’t Castro’s bastard son, he’s Pol Pot’s.

34. But Canada can recall his ass, and already did and somehow let him continue.

    It’s bizarre that he was ever in office to begin with. Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, and Andrew Scheer are a trio of deeply unimpressive men, but that’s what the Canadian public will tolerate. We’ve had Obama and Biden.

35. TommyJay @ 9:37pm,

    I suppose I’m saying if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc.

    Motives and reasons are not very important and often lead to getting dragged into spiraling discussions and debates over definitions. See the recent discussion between Professor Khiara Bridges and Senator Josh Hawley as an example.

    I do believe some folks are pushing harmful policies and laws in the West in an attempt to diminish the West. It’s certainly in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea’s interests to do this, and they do. And there are plenty of folks living in the West who also want the West diminished or destroyed.

    I also believe some folks are pushing harmful policies and laws in the West because they are true believers. They believe the best thing for 21st century humans is to revert to a medieval lifestyle. Or they are too ignorant to understand the technological hurdles we currently face achieving carbon neutral energy while maintaining our current lifestyle.

    And some just enjoy braying at the moon.

    Does Trudeau believe his approach is harmless; it reduces pollution while maintaining or increasing crop yields? Or does he know many will be hurt, but he believes the pain will be “transitory,” leading to a new, better future for Canada’s citizens? Or is he simply parroting words placed in front of him because he loves power and the spotlight?

    Ultimately it doesn’t matter. If a group is trying to harm you, your family, your spouse, your kids… take away your livelihood, your land, your possessions, your freedom… The reasons are secondary.

36. “Why in the…?”
    Simple.
    Having lost ground in the latest Federal election, Trudeau’s own Liberal party does NOT itself have a majority; but as long as he has the loyal support of the NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY(LOL!), Trudeau DOES have a supermajority…and with it the ability to destroy his country…which he is proceeding to do under WTF guidelines and strategies.
    (Anyone reminded of 1933?…)
    Moreover, he can’t waste any time because how long will he able to count on NDP support…?

37. I fear it is only a matter of time before the Democrat fascisti declare Neo’s site and those who hold similar truth-telling functions as being unacceptable, and will therefore be shut down by Executive Order by representing them as chronic truth falsifiers. Our Dodo fellow citizens will agree.
    That we see a wave of delusional, power-hungry, oppressive, and simply stupid/demented leaders of nations does not bode well for the future of Western civilization.
    Demographic truth-tellers all indicate that human population of the earth is already in an irreversible decline. Ye. Irreversible. And we are to worry about nitrogen metabolism by food source plants? Crazy.

38. It is long past time to reign in our monarchal Presidency.

39. Cicero,

    The fact that they all ignore demographic trends in their dystopian predictions is the biggest tell that their stated reasons are not their actual reasons.

    Demographic trends should be the most important input in their models, yet that variable is ignored, or, a value based on the 20th century is plugged in.

40. They are courting a horror show of vast proportions. It will the union of “The Men Who Wanted to Be Left Alone” and “The Wrath of the Awaken Saxon”.

    The Men Who Wanted to Be Left Alone
    Author unknown

    The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. TRUE TERROR will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone.

    THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON
    by Rudyard Kipling

    It was not part of their blood,
    It came to them very late,
    With long arrears to make good,
    When the Saxon began to hate.

    They were not easily moved,
    They were icy — willing to wait
    Till every count should be proved,
    Ere the Saxon began to hate.

    Their voices were even and low.
    Their eyes were level and straight.
    There was neither sign nor show
    When the Saxon began to hate.

    It was not preached to the crowd.
    It was not taught by the state.
    No man spoke it aloud
    When the Saxon began to hate.

    It was not suddently bred.
    It will not swiftly abate.
    Through the chilled years ahead,
    When Time shall count from the date
    That the Saxon began to hate.”

41. Someone with more than a bit of experience offers this warning:
    “Attacking Freedom’: Venezuelan Immigrant Sees Warning Signs Of ‘Socialism’ In US”—
    https://newrightnetwork.com/2022/07/attacking-freedom-venezuelan-immigrant-sees-warning-signs-of-socialism-in-us.html
    H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
    Key grafs:
    ‘Venezuelan immigrant who fled the country’s socialist regime [said]…there are indications that the U.S. is heading down the path of socialism.
    ‘Andrés Guilarte, a political activist who has been living as an asylum seeker in the United States for three years, said that price and currency controls that have contributed to “rising inflation and rampant crime,” as well as government attacks on freedom of speech, are warning signs of an embrace of socialism….
    ‘…“In a socialist regime, leaders always have to deflect blame for the country’s struggles to something else; they do not claim responsibility,” Guilarte [said]….
    ‘ “Inflation is a huge issue. Not trusting the government or not being able to speak freely is insane, but if you have money, you can still breathe, eat and live. Uncontrolled crime is also a huge issue in Venezuela. My biggest fears were always was I going to eat that day and was I going to get robbed or killed,” Guilarte said….’

42. Let them eat at Our pleasure.

43. CO2 is food not a pollutant.

44. Canada is a major food producer.

    Boy are we screwed.

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