Dutch farmer protest
© KEES VAN DE VEEN / ANP / AFP via Getty ImagesFarmers block the arrival and departure halls at Groningen Airport Eelde in Eelde, the Netherlands, to protest the Dutch government's far-reaching plans to cut nitrogen and ammonia emissions, on July 6, 2022.
There is something happening in the Netherlands that has been happening for weeks, which if anything even closely resembling it were happening in Canada, especially in Ottawa, it would surely be called an "insurrection." It might even have cabinet ministers and the prime minister calling those participating an intolerable "fringe minority." Come to think of it, it would probably have driven the government to invoke the civil-rights-denying Emergencies Act, and arrest any of its leaders, especially any of those from the rebellion hot spot of darkest and most menacing Medicine Hat.


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I am referring to the huge and continuous protest against the Dutch government. For some weeks now upwards of 40,000 farmers have been on their tractors and in their trucks crowding highways and snarling traffic in a mass protest against a green edict that would force them to halve emissions of nitrogen oxide and ammonia by 2030. Among the minor (sarcasm here) consequences of this wand-wave from on high is that the Dutch would lose about 30 per cent of their livestock numbers. Only 30 per cent — a mere rounding error. Who needs livestock? Food suppliers?

It's quite an amazing story for a couple of reasons, not least of which is the extremely limited, diluted coverage it is receiving worldwide. From our perspective, amazing, too, in that some of the protesters have noted the truckers protest here in Canada as something of their inspiration. So where are the nightly reports, breathless with the "Canadian connection" of a major ongoing European protest?

The reason for the void is because a story of a massive clash between the edicts of green governments and the people — farmers in this case — who keep society functioning, supply the basics of life, doesn't follow the script. A grim Greta Thunberg can get a front page any time, meet with prime ministers, chastise Congress. Forty thousand actual farmers, supplying food to the world, making a stand for their livelihood and traditional life, well that's back page or not at all.

I am far from alone in noting the deliberate underplay of this story. I cite and endorse the entirety of this quote from Brendan O'Neill of Spiked:
"There has been some reportage outside of the Netherlands, of course. But it has been strikingly muted. And it isn't hard to see why. This is a people's revolt against eco-tyranny, against the modern elite's determination to slash 'harmful' emissions with little regard for the consequences such action will have for working people and poor people. To the formers of elite consensus opinion, for whom environmentalism is tantamount to a religion, the sight of pesky little people rebelling against green diktats is too much to bear. So they either demonize these dissenters, as is happening in the Netherlands, or they ignore them in the hope they will go away, as is happening outside the Netherlands."
The whole piece is worth a bookmark.

Most of the big western news outlets have for so long been one-sided cheerleaders for the "green revolution" that they must find it awkward to give space to stories that demonstrate quite clearly that some green policies, in some very particular circumstances, are actually quite mad. That they can and do lead to considerable social unrest, economic damage and extreme upset to normal patterns of work and living. Let me put it in a nutshell: those who pass these laws do not till the soil.

Disabuse yourselves of the idea that Green is painless. Europe these days is one big anxious map proving the contrary.

Take the Netherlands. The Netherlands owns a very precious distinction. It is, after the United States of America, the second largest agricultural exporter in the world. In the world! Now there's a success to trumpet. But in the green world every success is a failure in disguise. Or something to be maimed or hobbled. So the Netherlands' livestock productivity has to be, by government decree, by environmental edict, cut by one-third to satisfy the world savers. And the farmers responsible for this miracle of production, who have for generations worked the land more efficiently than perhaps anywhere else on the globe, are supposed to ... take it.

Something like Canada's strangulated oil and gas industry — it could be a splendour of our economy but has been stymied for years by protest, regulation, green mania and Justin Trudeau's insensate fixation with net zero.

And what, it may be asked, is the orientation of the Dutch government? It has bought a full subscription to the Green bible and, according to Wikipedia, "climate activism and animal rights activism have become more commonplace in the Dutch House of Representatives ... especially with the emergence of the Party for the Animals as a political force." I will let that last phrase stand for itself. Maybe there's some famous painting they have yet to glue themselves to.

Green alarmism is a wasteful and potentially destructive threat to standards of living unexcelled in all of history, to levels of comfort and security no other generations have even hoped for. It is more a mania than a real cause. One of the finest prayers I know is: Lord save us, from those who would save us.