Dutch farmers on strike: over nitrogen?

Vincent J. Curtis

20 July 22

You’d think they were Canadian truckers, or something.  Dutch farmers have gone on strike, and are using their enormous farm equipment to shut down highways all over Holland.  The cause of their complaint is the Dutch government’s decision to deprive them of chemical fertilizer.

The environmental lemmings have discovered another cliff to stampede you over.  That cliff is called “nitrogen.”  You can pardon poets for not knowing that the earth’s atmosphere is seventy-eight percent nitrogen, and that nitrogen is transparent to infra-red radiation, meaning it isn’t a “greenhouse gas.”  (neglecting that 78 percent of a greenhouse’s atmosphere is nitrogen!)

What they really mean is nitrous oxide, N₂O, or laughing gas.  Nitrous oxide is active in the infra-red.  It is present in the atmosphere at 340 ppb (that’s a ‘b’ as is billion), so its greenhouse effect is minimal.  It has been growing at the rate of 1 ppb per year for the last thirty years.  Nitrous oxide degrades in the atmosphere into nitrogen and oxygen.  One source of anthropogenic nitrous oxide is thought to be chemical fertilizer.

The extent of the insanity of poets is found in Sri Lanka, which banned the importation of chemical fertilizer, and now the country is without food.  Holland is a major exporter of agricultural products, but the poets running Holland are rushing the country headlong over the nitrogen cliff.  Depriving Dutch farmers of chemical fertilizer will strangle their productivity and put many of them out of business.  The farmers think the poets want their land so that they can build housing for all the new immigrants arriving from the Middle East.

Regardless, you’d think the poets would ask themselves about the food supply and Holland’s balance of payments should Dutch agriculture go the way of Sri Lanka.  But you’d be wrong.  The poets may be capable of balancing competing interests, but that’s not at issue here.  What’s at issue is the poets’ conception of themselves as morally righteous people, and what better way to demonstrate one’s moral righteousness than to screw your farmers for the sake of saving the whole world, especially when your personal financial security is not at stake.  Being subject to the ramifications of your own ideology is stupid.

“Nitrogen” is the newest cliff the environmental lemmings want to stampede the world over.  That, and cattle burps and flatulence.  Don’t tell the poets they’re wrong on science grounds because they know the science better than actual scientists do.  Besides, you’re getting in the way of doing the morally righteous thing.  So, shut up!

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The MSM isn’t covering the Dutch farmer’s strike or the causes of the trouble in Sri Lanka because they’re wedded to the environmentalist agenda. They’ve been described as the publicity arm for Greenpeace.