Three Cheers for Dutch Farmers
If the elite class continues to impose its will on people while ignoring the consequences, they will face defeat at the ballot box.
After provincial elections last week, a three-year-old political party representing farmers became the biggest party in the Dutch Senate. The stunning election victory represents the nation’s working class’s most decisive rejection of their government’s ruinous climate policies, and the rest of Europe will feel its impact.
A small European country with a little more than 17 million people, the Netherlands has played an outsized role in providing global food security. Thanks to its productive farmers, the nation is the second largest exporters of agricultural products in the world, and the farm sector contributed 7% of the Netherlands’ gross domestic product. But European elite class and climate change activists have long targeted the Dutch agriculture industry as the “biggest nitrogen polluter in the EU.”
In the fall of 2019, a woke Dutch court ruled that the government couldn’t issue any construction permit unless it reduces nitrogen emissions. Responding to the court decision and the nation’s commitment to the 2015 Paris Climate agreement (which would limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius or less), the Dutch government proposed a set of climate measures, including imposing punitive carbon taxes on industries and drivers, and phasing out gas-powered vehicles, aiming to cut the nation’s emission of carbon by 50 percent by 2030.
Sensing that these measures would disproportionately affect their industry and livelihood because the agriculture sector accounts for half of the Dutch nitrogen emissions, scores of angry farmers drove their tractors to government buildings in the Hague. Besides protesting, the farmers established their political party, the Farmer-citizen movement (BBB), in October 2019.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Confucius Never Said to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.