— Tess Summers 🏴🇮🇪 (@tesssummers98) May 8, 2024
Climate change hysteria is a magic force in the hands of an elite that has been preaching deindustrialization and mass culling of human beings since the early 1960s.
What was once a fringe movement led by the truly insane Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich has gone mainstream, at least among the Leftists who are at the top of the social pyramid these days. The UN, WEF, IPCC, MSM, and of course the EU and the current President of the United States.
The result? European countries culling herds of livestock, closing down farms, and discouraging the use of fertilizer.
Talk to anybody in the food and farming industry these days and it won’t be long before someone brings up regenerative agriculture. Farming in a more nature-friendly way, reminiscent of pre-war practices, for a long time “regen” has been bracketed as a niche, hippy pursuit.
Globally, agriculture is responsible for around 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss. We all need to eat, but with climate change undermining our ability to produce food, is there a better way?
James Bailey, the affable executive director of Waitrose, thinks so. “I don’t think it’s widely understood the impact that the food system has on climate,” he tells me. “On a big, philosophical level, it affects everyone.”
Affable. I suppose you can be as you set in motion the mass starvation of billions when you yourself are a wealthy and comfortable man. Just as Paul Ehrlich sat in his ivory tower preaching the extermination of billions, the mass sterilization of millions, and the immiseration of everybody, it is pretty comfortable when you can look down from above at the devastation you are wreaking.
While other supermarkets have made commitments on net zero, and Tesco offers financing to its suppliers wanting to switch to greener energy sources, Waitrose is the first to make such a clear commitment across its aisles, including meat and dairy products.
Unlike organic, which has a strict set of standards that includes no genetically modified ingredients and limits on pesticide and antibiotic use, regenerative agriculture is more of a philosophy of farming, centred around protecting the soil to improve its biodiversity and ability to store carbon. Ways this can be achieved include avoiding ploughing, reducing fertiliser use, and using cover crops during the winter months to protect the soil.
Bailey will unveil the ‘Farming for Nature’ scheme at Leckford, the Waitrose farm in Hampshire CREDIT: Paul Grover for the Telegraph
Bailey says the farmers he has spoken to about the shift liken it to a return to farming “how their dad used to farm 50 years ago. There’s almost no fertilisers or inputs, we don’t till the soil, the cows are left out to their own devices,” he says.
I am pretty sure that the billions who have faced mass starvation through famine before industrial agriculture are not quite so nostalgic for the “good ol’ times.” It’s a joke now, but when I was growing up parents used to chide us for not cleaning our plate by referring to the starving children in India and China.
It wasn’t funny back then. There really were starving children in China and India. And, of course, in Africa.
Cheap food is one of the great modern miracles, and that is not an exaggeration. As much as anything else, the invention of methods to produce inexpensive food has extended lifespans and healthspans, slashed poverty, saved children, and relieved parents of the horrors of watching their children starve to death.
Climate cultists think we should go back to the good times when people starved.
Sure, they don’t put it that way, but that is what they mean. It is the inevitable consequence of their policies.
The Netherlands, for instance, is the most productive agricultural nation in the world. So they are closing down farms, of course. That policy is being duplicated across Europe to satisfy the Climate gods.
No doubt wine producers will still be in business–the elites love wine, after all. But food for the plebs must be reduced.
I think we’re seeing the end of the era of cheap food, because of the impact of that cheap food – not just on people’s health but the external impact, the environmental impact, the societal impact of that cheap food. We need to witness the end of cheap food and a reversal of the value of the food people are eating.”
‘If food production becomes much less stable, you’re going to see prices going up anyway, but for the wrong reasons,’ says Bailey
Waitrose is hoping to appeal to its existing shoppers, who have both the time and money to choose a more expensive product that has a lower climate impact. In surveys conducted by the supermarket, it has found that nearly half of customers proactively say they care about the impact of food on the environment and nature.
There it is, in black and white: the rich won’t suffer—just the plebs.
