Watch the other hand on global warming
Author, Is It Organic? Mischa Popoff is the author of the critically-acclaimed book, Is it Organic? He earned a B.A. from the University of Saskatchewan where he specialized in the history of nitrogen for fertilizer and warfare. He then worked as an Advanced Organic Farm and Process Inspector, inspecting over 500 organic farms and processing facilities on both sides of the border. He stopped inspecting when he realized there was no appetite in the industry to eliminate fraud and gross negligence, nor to improve the quality of organic food. He now works as a public speaker, political columnist and radio host.
Watch the other hand on global warming
“To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826)
There’s no such thing as magic. And yet we’re amazed when a magician tricks us to believe he made a coin disappear before our very eyes. Always watch the other hand.
With global warming as its flagship, environmentalists would like you to believe they’re completely focused on promoting cap-and-trade, carbon taxation and alternative-energy. But they’re not. In their other hand they hold something they hijacked from farmers: it’s the organic-farming movement.
To expose the global-warming movement in all of its anti-civilizational glory, one must also expose this new-age version of the organic movement. The philosophy of organic farming is perfectly sound. But when it comes to hamstringing conventional agricultural with useless regulations while providing subsidies to the organic industry, I part ways with the movement I once embraced.
As an urban-led Luddite crusade, the organic industry now acts as the self-funded rearguard action of the global-warming movement. Whenever activists sense they’re losing traction on global warming, they switch to advancing their flawed version of organic farming which is 100 percent political and has nothing to do with running an actual farm.
Case in point, under new-age standards for organic production, there’s no testing to ensure organic farms are even genuinely organic. Instead, paperwork is relied upon, leaving the door wide open to foreign brokers from China, Argentina and Mexico to supply the lion’s share of the North-American market for “organic” food, resulting in a cool $36 billion in revenues in North America last year, with only a miniscule fraction accruing to domestic farmers.
This is a unique situation within global environmentalism. While every other “movement” discourages people from doing things – having kids, driving a car, flying in a plane, wearing fur, etc. – the global organic movement provides the guilty consumer not just with a list of things to avoid (i.e. food produced efficiently on an industrial scale) but with an entire alternative product line for which consumers are encouraged to pay double or triple, with no tangible benefit.
And sure, $36 billion might not be a lot in terms of total food sales (it’s about 1%), but it’s a whopping sum when one considers how much of this money is bled off through convoluted internal funding mechanisms to finance the United Nations’ grand anti-capitalist Agenda 21 revolution: at least a couple billion dollars per annum, all tax free. And that’s not including all the direct local, state and federal subsidies! Think about that for a moment… a multibillion-dollar per-annum anti-industrial industry, and you’re forced to subsidize it with your taxes.
The global warming and global organic movements are really two sides of the same coin. They’re run by the same people; people who have never worked a day on a farm; people who actually believe the way forward is to go backwards; people who speak openly about reducing human population levels by half… as a starting point.
Far from being duped by slick tractor salesmen, as these urban environmentalists would have you believe, farmers made the switch from horse-drawn implements to the modern-day tractor because it’s a fraction of the cost to operate. Consider that there’s actually less than 1 horsepower in even the best work horse; now consider the work that even a small 60 horsepower gardening tractor is capable of relieving a farmer, and the environment of.
The move to the internal-combustion engine freed up half of the world’s arable farmland that had been used to grow feed for work horses to instead produce food for human consumption. But the urban leaders of the organic movement don’t care. Diesel is evil, and we should switch back to what urban elite food activist Michael Pollan refers to as a sunshine economy just to avert a theoretical rise in atmospheric temperature of 1 degree over the next century.
Further technological innovation made modern farming even more efficient, resulting in less fuel burned per-acre and per-bushel of food produced. Spraying crops for weeds for instance uses about one-tenth the fuel that tillage does. Genetically engineered (GE) crops in turn allow farmers to use less-fuel still by reducing the need to spray.
Of course, if a farmer is organic, he’s not allowed to use such technologies, and will therefore burn more fuel. But that’s fine. The CO2 emitted is vital to plants which absorb and convert this odorless, invisible gas back into oxygen for mammals to breath. And this is why the overwhelming majority of honest organic farmers do not buy into their urban-leadership’s support for the UN’s global warming agenda. It will put them and their neighbors completely out of business within a generation.
Since organic farming is by its very nature far less efficient than industrial farming (think of it like hand-building a Rolls Royce as opposed to building a Chev on an industrial assembly line) it will not, indeed cannot ever replace modern agriculture. In fact, the achievement of as little as 15 percent of the goals of the new-age, urban-dominated “organic” movement to force agriculture back to outmoded technology will ipso facto achieve of ALL of the goals of the global-warming movement, effectively shutting down the Western industrial economy. And you and your family will suffer from malnutrition like our ancestors did, the difference being that you’ll be subsidizing this madness.
We all have to eat, right? Napoleon famously said “An army marches on its stomach.” And so does the entire economy. No wonder global warming activists find such affinity with organic activists.
Keep your eye on the other hand. When it comes to containing the environmental movement, and helping, instead of impeding the farmers who feed us, the magicians who run the antihumanistic environmental movement must be challenged at every turn.
Mischa Popoff is a former organic farmer and Advanced Organic Farm and Process Inspector. He’s a Policy Advisor for The Heartland Institute and is the author of Is it Organic? which you can preview at www.isitorganic.ca.
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