Dutch Farmers’ Uprising Is Latest Signal Europeans Are Getting Fed Up With Environmental Overreach

Dutch farmers are angry – so much so that hundreds of them have mobilized their tractors and are blocking highways and creating havoc across the Netherlands.

The German language agraraheute.de (Agriculture Today) reports here: “Farmers in the Netherlands are fed up always being the whipping boy of the nation.”

Shutting down modern agriculture

According to agrarheute journalist, Eva Eckinger, all this was triggered by “radical demands made by the leftist liberal D66 government party.” The party is demanding the elimination of half of the country’s livestock!

D66 parliamentarian Tjeerd de Groot said: “There’s no future for intensive animal farming in the Netherlands.”

With their tractors, the angry farmers have wreaked havoc on traffic throughout the Netherlands. According to Germany’s Spiegel, the protesting farmers in the Netherlands have “caused hundreds of kilometers of traffic jams.”

“They blocked the access roads to The Hague with tractors.”

Fox News here reported that the farmers clogged “700 miles of highway” during the protest over emissions rules.

Demanding farmers make extraordinary sacrifices

According to De Groot, nitrogen emissions by agriculture is causing great damage, and a large proportion of Dutch nitrogen emissions comes from intensive livestock farming and so need to be curbed quickly.

De Groot is calling on farmers farmers to practice “closed-loop farming”, where there is a significant reduction in the number of animals and that its implementation should start quickly.

Spreading discontent

Dutch agricultural associations reacted angrily to De Groot’s proposal and said “the agricultural sector had already done a lot to improve sustainability” and so “the sector deserves a compliment – not a halving.”

The Dutch protests come at the heels of the French yellow vest protests, which are aimed at the high fuel taxes imposed on French citizens and businesses, and are the latest, clear signals that citizens are not going to take draconian environmental regulation and harsh climate protection policies quietly.

Growing chasm between ecological and economic interests

The Dutch protests highlight the economic difficulty governments have when they try to pass eco-friendly laws and reducing emissions. Despite the dubious claims that the two can go hand in hand, it is not the case as recent protests are showing. Across Europe there is a rapidly growing chasm between economic interests and radical environmental aims.

“A lot at stake”

As the New York Times reports: “There is a lot at stake: According to the Dutch farmers’ organization, LTO, exports from the Netherlands’ nearly 54,000 farms and agriculture businesses were worth 90.3 billion euros ($98.3 billion) last year.”

That’s just one sector in a small European country. Imagine the things to come should major continentwide industries like petroleum, tourism and airlines, etc. be hit – or the German auto industry.

The radical environmentalists are keeping their social-economic powder kegs awfully dry.

13 responses to “Dutch Farmers’ Uprising Is Latest Signal Europeans Are Getting Fed Up With Environmental Overreach”

  1. John F. Hultquist

    D66 and Tjeerd de Groot must be vegetarians.

    Or perhaps they do not know what a Demand Curve implies.

    Further, all that protein would have to be replaced from other sources. Vitamin B12 deficiency:
    https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-b12-deficiency-symptoms#section1

  2. Martin

    What nitrogen emissions are somewhat bad for the environment?
    Its almost 80% of the atmosphere and inert…
    A new scam or what?

    1. David Appell

      Nitrogen affects the fertilization of plants and crops.

      1. Martin

        What this have to do with nitrogen EMISSIONS?

    2. Edim

      Yes, another scam (Orwellian doublespeak). Just like carbon emissions are not realy carbon but carbon dioxide, so are nitrogen emissions not realy nitrogen gas (N2) but nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2 or NOx). Nitrogen oxides are actually air pollutants though, as opposed to CO2. In areas of high motor vehicle traffic, such as in large cities, the nitrogen oxides emitted can be a significant source of air pollution. NOx gases are also produced naturally by lightning.

      1. Martin

        Thx, they pulled a ‘Trudeau government move’ (they put a price on carbon pollution) they love this way to frame it.
        lt should be easy for journalists or the opposition to point out that the human body is made of almost 20& of carbon pollution (almost 2/3 of our body that isn’t water…)
        Proteins, fats and sugars are made from carbon pollution.

        *I do not believe their is such thing as carbon pollution.

  3. Curious George

    There is a growing chasm between fake ecological and real economic interests.

    1. David Appell

      How so, exactly?

  4. Georg Thomas

    The problem is: you can make any pseudo-ecological alarmist claim and it will be accepted by the ökoverblödete majority as long as it squares with the fundamental religious tenet of most people in Germany (probably Holland, too): man is an eco-sinner by nature. Ökoverblödung means: people no longer reflect, study, and probe ecological issues (which are complex and full of trade-offs) but automatically support statements that play on the foregone conclusion that yet another man-induced catastrophe is happening. They are trapped in this creed. Politicians can play with them to their heart’s content.

    German reactions to the CO2-hype (“Energiewende”) resemble the attack on the Soviet Union (“Unternehmen Barbarossa) in terms of popular credulity, complicity and amateurishness of execution (and long-term negative impact). However, I am afraid “Stalingrad” will not happen for many more years.

    People are insensitive to the most egregious contradictions of the alarmist paradigm (recently, the greens discovered that battery-based e-moblity isn’t the good thing they told us it was, yet EUR 100 billion are being invested in it (filling certain pockets), even though this technology is now understood by the greens to worsen the purported climate problem, and all of a sudden, hydrogen is the solution, and a perfect one at that, a technology that has been available and considered inadequate for decades). People in this country are eager to believe and follow their leaders and indulge in the simple stories of their religion.

    And as a person very close to Merkel told me last Saturday: if I didn’t like her climate policy, too bad, “unfortunately” EU regulations/laws force us to go that way, any way. That’s what the EU is for, get around the national demos and enforce/hedge the policies politicians and their buddies/clients have decided on in the unaccounted-for backroom dealings of Brussel.

  5. bonbon

    The DNB, Dutch National Bank, is a founding member of NGFS, Network for Greening the Financial System, overlapping London’s Green Finance Initiative, GFI.

    Farmers have their work cut out dealing with this massive over reaching global green lurch.

    The intent, as BofE Carney promises, to unleash a tsunami of synthetic credit for strictly green investment has politicians drooling at the trough across all parties. It makes farm animals look civilized!

    Holland may well sink under such a financial tidal wave.

  6. drumphish

    The Dutch farmers can get as mad as they want. They must have some time on their hands, not much to do. Snarling traffic for 700 miles is a lot of work, something to do anyways. Before you know it, it’s beer time, going to go back home with my tractor. lol

    Things could be worse.

    Was getting warm fall weather in the 70s, then the rain began to fall and it is now at more than six inches of rain in the past month.

    It has made some work a real chore, there is no rest for the wicked, for the stupid, for that matter.

    The record high was set in 1938 at 89 degrees F. Another high of 92 was set in 1992 two days ago.

    It was 43 F yesterday and 46 F the day before. Not warm at all and it is somewhat of a repeat of last year at this time of year.

    Not ideal weather, it will get better.

    It is supposed to be warm not snow on the ground and 36 F. This is an outrage, snow on October 2nd is not right.

    A full twenty degrees below normal for daytime highs for this time of year.

    Crying in my beer helps, that’s the way it goes moving west.

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