Having made an excellent start in trying to make British citizens both colder and poorer, the Net Zero fanatics in the new Labour Government are turning their attention to making them hungrier. New taxes on agricultural fertiliser could add £150 million to the costs of local farmers faced with a choice of producing less food or raising prices. Such bravery in the governing Ship of Fools can only be admired. When President Gotabaya Rajapaka of Sri Lanka imposed a ban on similar fertiliser, the local harvest failed and he was forced to hightail it out of the country in a military jet ahead of an angry delegation of concerned citizens. One protester, G. P. Nimal, told the BBC that they wanted to put the Rajapakas in an open prison, “where they can do farm work”.
The U.K. Finance Minister has confirmed plans to levy a ‘carbon’ import duty on a number of vital supplies including fertiliser, cement and aluminium. The Daily Telegraph reports that the tax could be around £50 to £75 a tonne. It is not clear how much extra the farmers will have to pay since the tax applies to imports from countries that don’t load so-called carbon penalties on fertiliser production. Lord Fuller, Chairman of the liquid fertiliser firm Brineflow, suggests that farmers will have to bear an extra annual burden of £150 million.
The blow comes just weeks after the Government imposed an inheritance tax on farms starting at values of just £1 million. Many small family holdings may need to be sold in future, although they could find willing buyers with subsidy-loaded operations looking to blanket the countryside with unreliable giant wind turbines and solar panels. Wind farm operator Dale ‘how many bats have you killed today’ Vince might look to increase his land-based wind fleet in the wake of giving £5 million to the Labour party.
The world is rapidly moving towards some restoration of sanity and a realisation that it is impossible to live in any degree of comfort and security without hydrocarbons. Unfortunately, Britain finds itself under the control of one of the most extreme gangs of Net Zero fanatics on the planet. It says it all that the increasingly weird Sir Keir Starmer, U.K. Prime Minister, complete with his sidekick, the unhinged MilliVolt, is the only world leader from a major economy to turn up at the Trump-wrecked COP29. The rupture of the Right at the last General Election, caused by past leaders such as Boris Johnson embracing or accepting extreme Net Zero, open borders and virulent woke policies, led to a new Labour Government. It collected a huge loveless Parliamentary landslide on a vote total less than that achieved by its defeated Marxist leader in 2019.
At the Daily Sceptic we frequently make the point that if you want to understand what the extremists are planning, look at what they write. U.K. FIRES is a group of green academic activists and is funded with a £5m grant from the previous Conservative Government. It takes an “absolute” view of Net Zero, as do many fanatics, and the table below shows what it means. By 2050 there will be no hydrocarbons in use. This means no flying or shipping. Heating will consume only 60% of current use, while energy for cooking and transporting food will be reduced by 60%. Materials for building will be almost non-existent.
The war on food and farmers fits nicely into this planned scenario. The widespread use of nitrogen fertilisers has led to soaring crops yields around the world and has helped alleviate famine in many developing countries. This has been helped by a recent 14% increase in plant growth caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide. Such is the crucial importance of these fertilisers, there are fears of billions of people dying if their availability is restricted. But natural gas and nitrogen are used in the process of making these essential farming aids, and nitrous oxide is created as a byproduct. This seems to be enough for a generation of maniacs to push back on their use and risk mass death and starvation on a global scale. Add in the virtue-signalling about ‘rewilding’, a plan to further curtail food production, and the introduction of bug diets and widespread ‘organic’ farming, and it is difficult to see how these people will feed the world, let alone half of it. One of the original founders of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore is in little doubt about what will happen if hydrocarbons are removed from food production. He recently told Fox News: “If we ban fossil fuels, agricultural production would collapse. People will begin to starve, and half the population will die in a very short period of time.”
Of course the fear about nitrous oxide is overdone for the usual political purposes. The gas is one of the so-called ‘greenhouse’ gases with atmospheric warming properties, but there is very little of it in the atmosphere and amounts have varied greatly over time. A group of four scientists recently noted that N2O is growing at only 0.00085 parts per million per year, and might contribute an almost unmeasurable 0.064°C of warming over 100 years.
For this the death cultists plan for mass starvation and population extinction, a process unfortunately alive and kicking in the United Kingdom.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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