The Left Is Wrong About Farmers Destroying the Environment
Farming destroys the natural world, nay the planet itself!
We hear and read this assertion everywhere in leftist and establishment media sources.
Like nearly everything that originates in such places, we have good reason — many good reasons — not to believe it.
The assertion that agriculture drives so-called “climate change” has appeared in so many sources that it would take decades to catalog them.
For instance, the World Wildlife Fund, which has described itself as “the world’s leading conservation organization,” posits a direct connection between farming and climate change.
“Many farming practice — such as burning fields and using gasoline-powered machinery — are significant contributors to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” according to the WWF.
Likewise, “clearing land for agricultural production is a major contributor to climate change, as the carbon stored in intact forests is released when they are cut or burned.”
Some food company executives agree.
According to The Guardian, a 2022 climate-focused task force consisting of CEOs recommended dramatic action in the agricultural sector.
“We are at a critical tipping point where something must be done,” said taskforce chair and Mars CEO Grant Reid.
Sunny George Verghese, chief executive of the Singapore-based food supplier Olam, echoed Reid’s urgency.
“We cannot continue to produce and consume food and feed and fiber in the way we are doing today unless we don’t mind destroying the planet,” Verghese said.
There you have it. Modern agriculture destroys the planet.
But does it really? Does farming pose a threat by driving climate change? Does human activity in general?
We have many good reasons for suspecting that climate alarmists doth protest too much. They have exaggerated our true situation.
Those of us who lack any special claim to scientific knowledge may nonetheless cite a myriad of reasons for skepticism. Here are six of them:
First, we have a long historical perspective.
The largest volcanic eruption in recorded history occurred in April 1815, when Indonesia’s Mount Tambora spewed 12 cubic miles of ash and rock into the atmosphere.
A prolonged period of global cooling ensued. New Englanders called 1816 the “year without a summer.” They saw snow in August.
Nothing of that kind has occurred in either a cooling or a warming direction since 1815. All the human activity from that day forward has not affected global temperatures in the way a single volcano did.
The “planet” laughs at our pretensions.
Second, we need not look far for credible voices who cast doubt on climate change.
In 2022, for instance, International Climate Science Coalition Executive Director Tom Harris told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that climate change amounts to a “scam.”
“There is no climate crisis,” Harris said plainly.
A former aerospace engineer and one-time climate alarmist, Harris explained that he reversed his opinion after speaking to geologists who corrected him on his own scientific work and alarmist conclusions.
Those geologists “found no consistent correlation between carbon dioxide and Earth’s temperature.”
Third, we have a strong explanation for why climate change appeals to some minds.
On Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year, Canadian psychologist and conservative commentator Jordan Peterson noted that climate change resembles religion.
“There’s a narrative at the base of any belief system,” Peterson said.
“And the climate pseudo-religion is based on characterization of nature as something like a hapless, defenseless, fragile virgin.”
By that reckoning, human activity becomes a “rapacious, power-mad demolisher of natural virginity and beauty.”
Note that in tackling the question of agriculture’s effect on climate change we have not yet mentioned agriculture itself. We have no need. The premise raises questions of its own.
Even if we accept the more moderate and sensible view that human beings, as environmental stewards, have good cause to reduce carbon emissions, this need not lead to alarmism.
Fourth, we have better ways to think about the relationship between farming and the environment.
Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg has written a book called “False Alarm.” He observes that “while climate change is real, it is not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is.”
More importantly, Lomborg offers environmental solutions that defy the “farming drives climate change” narrative.
He notes, for instance, that people in the developing world “face more pressing issues like feeding and educating their people.”
Thus, he calls for helping those people to “become more resilient to climate change through prosperity.”
As he has argued elsewhere, Lomborg regards an investment in early childhood nutrition as the world’s highest priority and its best way forward. Healthy children enjoy prosperity and then begin to care about the environment.
Imagine destroying agriculture in the face of such a priority!
Fifth, we know what happens when governments commandeer farmland.
In the 1950s, China’s Communist regime caused catastrophic famine when Mao Zedong, on a dictator’s whim, decided to prioritize industrialization. Rural hamlets turned into makeshift manufacturing centers. Farming suffered. Tens of millions starved to death thanks to Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”
Modern globalist elites have shown that same Maoist hubris.
Recall, for instance, the Dutch government’s insistence upon destroying its own agricultural sector in the name of fighting climate change — an insistence that sparked massive protests in 2022.
As Saul Zimet of the Foundation for Economic Education put it, “there is no good ending to the story of limiting and reducing the ability of the farming industry, possibly humans’ most important industry, to produce food.”
Finally, even if climate change poses a problem, which we are far from admitting, and even if agriculture contributes to the problem, which we have reason to doubt, we still cannot justify draconian solutions based on apocalyptic fears, for we have plausible projections of diminished farmland usage by mid-century.
Based on the 2013 article, “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing,” by Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, and his colleagues, we have reason to expect that “the amount of land globally devoted to food production may soon begin falling as population growth slows and agricultural productivity increases.”
In fact, Ausubel projected “a vast ecological restoration over the course of this century.”
His most optimistic forecast would involve nearly 1 billion acres “restored to nature by 2060, an area almost twice the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River.”
Ordinary people, educated or otherwise, have many good ways to evaluate sources and evidence.
When we do this, we find that the purported connection between farming and apocalyptic climate change cannot withstand scrutiny.
We further suspect that belief in climate change merely gratifies elite globalists’ pride. It makes them feel good about their place in the world.
But only something demonic would attack our food source and tell us it is for our own good.
Nothing is more demonic than pride.
They tell us that human activity, including agricultural activity, destroys the planet.
We have compelling reasons both to reject their assertion and to question their motives.
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