Grow your own fruit and veg – and destroy the planet. Allotment produce, much prized by proud food-growing citizens the world over, has six times the ‘carbon’ footprint of conventional agriculture, according to a recent paper published by Nature. “Steps must be taken to ensure that urban agriculture supports, and does not undermine, urban decarbonisation efforts,” demand the authors. What have these people been smoking? Surely not some of the puff circulating at the recent Psychedelic Climate Week in New York. Highlights included a discussion on funding ketamine-assisted therapy and a panel on ‘Balancing Investing and Impact with Climate and Psychedelic Capital’.
The lead authors of the Nature paper are academics working out of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. They suggest using urban farms as sites for “education, leisure and community building”. Perhaps the locals could sit cross-legged and listen to early Pink Floyd music. Maybe clap the setting sun to some Atom Heart Mother. Excuse your correspondent if he cannot take this paper seriously. It is a classic example of greens picking on a human activity – almost any will do – and complaining that it causes the devil-gas carbon dioxide to be released. At the recent New York climate happening, according to the Guardian, revellers were told that using hallucinogens can spark “consciousness shifts” to inspire climate-friendly behaviour. What climate friendly behaviour, one might ask, given that almost anything humans do to improve their lot of Earth is demonised by an increasingly weird millenarian green cult.
The authors of the Nature paper seem to have a particular down on home composting. Poorly-managed composting is said to exacerbate the release of greenhouse gases (GHGs). “The carbon footprint of compost grows tenfold when methane-generated anaerobic conditions persist in compost piles,” it says. This is particularly common during small-scale composting, apparently. With a seeming complete ignorance of how small allotments farming functions, the authors suggest that “cities can offset this risk by centralising compost operations for professional management”.
Wherever these cultists look, there are gases being released that are contributing to their invented existential climate crisis. The high application rates of compost in urban agriculture can also lead to nitrous oxide, we’re told. Needless to say, “strategic management of application scheduling and fertiliser combinations may be required to minimise emissions”.
For allotment holders, few pleasures in life compare with a break from arduous work and a hot cup of tea in the shed. Surrounded by the tools of the trade, it is the labourer’s equivalent of passing around a few liveners at National Climate Week, with the added attraction that it doesn’t turn you into a self-important dope. But such pleasure will come to an end if the climate cops have their way. Infrastructure, we’re told, is the largest driver of carbon emissions at what are termed “low-tech” urban agricultural sites. As well as sheds, this includes beds (for vegetables, not a crash pad for ketamine heads) and compost facilities. A raised bed built and used for five years will have approximately four times the environmental impact as one used for 20. Other infrastructure supplies are said to include fertiliser, gasoline and weed block textile.
Plants need water, but only the right sort of water can help save the planet. In their site samples, the researchers found that most allotment-holders use potable municipal water sources or groundwater wells. Big no, no, of course, since such irrigation emits GHGs from pumping, water treatment and distribution. “Cities should support low-carbon (and drought-conscious) irrigation for urban agriculture via subsidies for rainwater catchment infrastructure, or through established guidelines for greywater use,” it is suggested. Presumably, the subsidies will come from the magic bread tree and the infrastructure will be of the special type that does not produce GHGs.
This crackpot climate paper is just the latest sign that the green movement is riven with disagreements as its climate crisis grift starts to fall apart in the face of reality. There are no realistic back-ups for intermittent wind and solar, while carbon capture is a colossal and potentially dangerous waste of money. Without hydrocarbon use, humankind is doomed. Billions will die and society will be returned to the dark ages. Hydrocarbons are ubiquitous in modern society, and so almost everything that humans do to survive and thrive on a dangerous planet can be demonised. Eventually, you end up with Sir David Attenborough making the appalling observation that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia. Or to read earlier this year the tweet from the United Nations contributing author and UCL professor Bill McGuire that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown was to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic.
Many green extremists seem to take the view that anything humans do, including growing their own veg, is causing existential harm to the planet. What they really hate, some may conclude, are humans themselves. Treble bongs all round.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Greens are just communist pigs in disguise. They want to own you and take total control of your life. They are Cambodian Year Zero people. They are an existential danger to normal people. Fight the bstards wherever you find them
So everyone’s the problem, apart from the greens?
In a word ‘yes.’
The solution would be for them to stop breathing.
Now you’re talking!!
Trigger warning: Eat your Greens!
Soylent?
But may cause vomiting and diarrhea …
James Delingpole’s classic watermelons.
Green on the outside, red on the inside.
CO2 is a gas produced by all human activity from breathing to flying in a Private Jet. So what better way to control every human activity than by controlling the CO2? To get away with this, the Liberal Progressive (Communist) technocrats need a very plausible excuse, and that excuse is Climate Change. —-It appears to most ordinary people plausible that there is dangerous changes to climate going on and ofcourse the Consolidated Media are all over every Flood and Hurricane, so these “ordinary people” remain oblivious to the fact that there is actually no increase in Floods or Hurricanes or any other type of weather event for that matter.
The academics who produced this research paper emitted CO2 in the process. Ban academic research!
No doubt they used personal computers linked to the cloud based computers in giant data centres somewhere. So, yeah, probably quite a heavy carbon footprint, I would think.
Computers manufactured using rare metals in enormous factories. Computers that are designed to become obsolete within a few years.
The reasoning for this anti-gardening argument is so thin and riddled with nonsense that it is crystal clear that it is actually about something else other than the climate. As with EV’s and the electrify everything campaign, it seems to me it is about control, subservience, dependence and surveillance. The last thing any of these eco-green exponents want is people being independent, resilient, self sufficient and free thinking.
With my garden of fruit and veg, my oil tank capable of holding a year’s worth of oil for the boiler, my wood burner and a full log store, I seem to be the nightmare vision for these eco-control freaks.
But hey don’t get caught out Steve. ————Remember to register any chickens mate. Can’t have you eating some non government approved fried eggs on your roll.
One day they will come for your chickens!
Then they came for the chickens. But I was not a chicken so I said nothing
I didn’t realise you made my exact point lol
How can they control the food supply if you keep on growing your own. Just stop doing it and behave.
And if you have more than on Chicken, don’t forget to register it. Though it was funny hearing about people registering their local garden birds etc.
But I have 2 budgerigars … will I be put in prison for years (like Christian people silently praying in the street) for not registering them?
Hear, hear … more power to you!!
Someone posted this example of the earth’s atmosphere quite recently here on the sceptic and well done them!
I’ve kept it on my phone ready for any carbon bleaters who start on about the deadly World ending gas
This image is failing to load on my laptop
Sorry about that varmint, I can’t find another link to it but there are many pye charts on the net showing the painfully small amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
Brilliant! Thank you.
See also:
https://co2coalition.org/media/why-climate-change-is-not-an-emergency/
There wasn’t much danger of overusing potable water in the garden with the amount of rain we had this growing season.
Same here. I hardly used any on my allotment this year! I almost never use any around my house, as there are a couple of water butts that capture rainfall from a garage roof.
I wonder how much funding they receive to produce such crap and from whom
UK100 seems to pop up a lot these days.
WEF one of the main culprits … e.g. ‘Farmer’ Bill Gates
More eco-stupidity. Much is talked about and much money made using forest products for fuelling power stations such as our Drax by wood pellets – renewables – as the CO2 emitted is magically different from that emitted by combustion of oil and gas, because those trees not yet cut down ‘sink’ CO2 in photosynthesis of cellulose.
Less is talked about the role of trees in sinking and emitting methane (CH4). This certainly happens when they fall and anaerobically decompose. It also happens when they are harvested. 20% of the total mass – the commercially unviable branches and foliage or brash – is raked into rows to decay and release nutrients for the next crop rotation. And this process happens in all soils, not just urban compost heaps.
There are papers on this subject such as https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.15624 They pontificate about processes or rather limited application ‘models’ run in the comfort of their offices. These academic professtitutes have no concept of proportionality. Their conclusion is predictable “Until additional integrative empirical studies are conducted, and process-based models are developed and tested, the contribution of forests to global CH4 dynamics will remain poorly resolved.” a call for more money for papers, please.
It was also used as a track for when the Harvester comes and collects the wood piles collected by a machine, or one man bands with a Saw. I remember helping someone do that in the valleys. Speaking of keeping you fit! You have your Saw, Petrol etc and you can’t always park near the trees that you are to fell, so you’d hike with all that kit before you even started. It would help if you had a stacker while you were working. Either way, very physical but paid well.
You are absolutely right about it being very physical. Keeps one fit without needing a gym subs! There is a move towards chipping the brash mats that have been travelled over by the forwarder ( collects bars, rods and poles ), on site. The profit is small and the use for fuel wood biomass ensures the CO2 is released quicker than waiting for it to decompose.
Is it not the case that coal is just dead trees that have been there a long time?
Hey, why don’t we dig a bit of coal out of the ground and burn it? Novel idea, I know but we have to be innovative and at the cutting edge to tackle this ‘crisis’
First they came for the chickens..
We should stop eating ‘Greens’ and save the planet.
Or start eating the greens?!
Indigestible. I remember a menu that said Vegetarian Soup and when there were screams coming from the kitchen, just assumed they were throwing another vegetarian into the pot. Long slow cooking might render them into a good stock but I expect the meat is a bit stringy
The key sentence is:
“cities can offset this risk by centralising compost operations for professional management”.
The entire green agenda is one giant rent-seeking scam, designed to continue the massive transfer of wealth to the already rich.
The muesli knitters are the expendable dupes who form the public face of the project.
Scratch the surface and you will always find land speculation underneath.
Think of all those allotments that can be built on once the composting operation gets centralised and the allotmenteers have to pay someone to take away their organic wastes.
… and then have to buy it back in plastic sacks …
“Sending food aid to famine-stricken countries avoids the more fundamental problem of population growth, Sir David Attenborough has said, as he called for more debate about population control.
The renowned broadcaster told the Daily Telegraph the world was “heading for disaster”, and without action the “natural world will do something”.
“What are all these famines in Ethiopia? What are they about?” he said. “They’re about too many people for too little land. That’s what it’s about. And we are blinding ourselves. We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.”
He admitted the issues had huge sensitivities, but insisted it was important to “just keep on about it”.
From the link provided by Chris to The Guardian article above.
Nice bloke this Attenbore.
It is rather perplexing that all these people who say there are too many people on the planet, never seem to volunteer to leave. Perhaps Sir David as he is well beyond average life expectancy should be a little more public spirited, shuffle off and take his CO2 with him.
As it happens, the perma-famines in East Africa, have more to do with political instability than anything else. Look into what happened to the aid that came from ‘Live Aid’. We have the technology and the resources to irrigate Ethiopia and turn it into a wonderous land of green and bounty, but we’d rather have the World Bank play games with them to stop them developing.
I was rather hoping that the green community would become a death cult and they would commit suicide en masse. This would have tremendous benefits for us normies: the population of the planet would be substantially reduced and we wouldn’t have to listen to lectures from idiots about climate change. We could just get on with enjoying our lives in peace
“Population Control” ———-By who and how? ——Population growth is highest in the poorest countries. Once poor people come out of poverty, they get better educated, they live organised lives, and population growth falls to levels seen in the wealthy west. –But absurd climate policies that coerce poor people into not using the fuels (fossil fuels) that would bring them out of this eternal poverty are preventing poor countries developing their economies so their people can prosper.——-Climate policies like Sustainable Development and Net Zero are wholly supported by people like David Attenborough. Instead of letting people develop and prosper he prefers some method of “population control”. —-The best method is Prosperity and that can only come by using the same fuels as we in the wealthy wet did. —-Coal Oil and Gas.
Heard some of Starmer’s speech on the radio, he mentioned Carbon Capture twice!
Yep they know that if they are going to try and use more and more wind that they will need gas as the 100% backup so they have had to add carbon capture into the mix. Energy Policy just gets more and more absurd as each day goes by. It is layers and layers of clutter with more layers added to the clutter to ty and fix the clutter below
Oh, he just reads a script written for him by the BBC, according to the man himself. Didn’t you know? Doesn’t even take responsibility for his what he says. Begs the question, why the gong?
As a longterm lover of making my own compost and feeling personal responsibility for my precious worms, I feel shocked at my wanton disregard for the greater good of humanity. It makes much more sense getting rid of all that garden waste to my friendly central composting operations. Do I drive, or will my waste greenery be collected in special bins by big lorries? Once the compost is centrally made, will it be nicely packed in (compostable) plastic bags and delivered back, or will I have to take public transport to buy back my own garden waste? I’m sure they will be careful to monitor what other people add to my compost – I am very particular.
As we used to say in school,I may be Irish but I’m not green.
I make my own compost too, Ardanearg, every day, sometimes twice a day, usually in the bathroom
and it is magically transported through the sewage system to our local ‘processing plant’ ie Mogden Lane Sewage Farm
I thought organic, local (saves carbon miles), non-industrial food production was what would save the planet. Now it’s the opposite.
Activists are never happy. If their main issue is addressed and resolved, they must immediately extend the parameters, find a new anxiety to fill their otherwise empty, dull lives.
I don’t know much about allotments, but I didn’t realise so many were plumbed in or had wells. In my limited experience rainwater was collected in barrels.
Groundwater wells replenish from rainfall and also of course the water from them the allotment keepers use to irrigate will soak back into the water table.
We need to build lunatic asylums.
So much for dig for victory!
It’s tempting to see this as the opening salvo in a war against self-sufficiency, but I suspect it’s just the usual ‘underwater dressage emits more/less carbon than whistling the Marseillaise backwards with a paper bag over your head’ story. Easy for an academic team to churn out meaningless figures – just get a research assistant to make some stuff up, no-one is ever going to check your assumptions – and watch the grant money roll in. Even better, press coverage is guaranteed upon publication.
It just gets more and more desperate.
It’s time to end this fiasco – either at the ballot box or without.
It is a very necessary part of creating food shortages and starvation. Closing farms and destroying crops livestock will not do it by itself. Bill Gates will also be able to sell his lab grown meat and GMO products which will justify his investments.
Mmmm, every autumn trees and shrubs shed their leaves to produce a naturally occurring compost to fertilise the ground beneath their canopy. Perhaps all trees should be cut down to prevent them shedding their leaves and producing ‘greenhouse’ gasses.
Don’t give them any ideas!
Gates et al don’t want us eating fresh, healthy food just his manufactured pap…
There’s de-humanising, and there’s dehumanising. Not trying to be a smart arse but that’s what’s going on. That’s what we’re up against. These people are doing everything they can to wipe us out.
I sometimes like to tease organic gardeners who adopt a position of moral superiority that decomposition of organic matter in soil is one of the largest natural sources of CO2 in the atmosphere
Interestingly the worst composted material available is in the bags labelled “peat free compost”. All of my recent purchased bags, except one which was composted horse manure (straw and whatever), contained much not composted at all twigs, sticks, and general debris from “green” alleged recycling. To compost properly the material needs large quantities of water, turning very regularly and sufficient nitrogen. I have experience of this as I used to have an organic farm and made many, many tons of properly composted material every year (which is the point of organic agriculture). This took a lot of work, a great deal of collected rainwater, and heavy machinery. The results were excellent, unlike this “stuff” sold as compost!