fight against nitrogen, how about the farmers?

Some countries under which the Netherlands and Belgium are going to take drastic measures against nitrogen oxygen emissions, also called NOx.

Reason is that local NOx emissions have a bad effect on nearby nature areas.

Taking the Netherlands as a striking example; they are going to spend 25 billion on closing down farmers, as livestock generates a lot of NOx.  So, this is a noble goal in itself.

However, let’s do the math’s on this:

The planet’s food consumption will not go down when a country closes down its farms. So, for each closed farm, a new farm will arise in some other place to satisfy world food demand.

Therefore, closing down a farm will not make the planet any greener, the ecological problem just moves to some other location.

It has been calculated that at a 100-billion-euro investment, the Netherlands could generate enough green energy to become CO2 neutral. This would really make the planet a greener place!

A nice bonus of this scenario is that CO2 neutrality also comes with a substantial decrease in NOx emissions, so win-win.

The question arises: why spending 25 billion of the valuable taxpayers’ money on something that doesn’t make the planet as a whole any greener and only shifts an ecological problem from location A to B, while for 100 billion, one can really make a giant step forward?

Back to the farmers. There is a clear trend from meat to more vegetarian food, a welcome development for the environment.

However, this development comes with ecological problems as in the tropics, jungles the size of a country are torn down in order to grow soya and other vegetarian products.

So, when we want to switch to vegetarian food without destroying tropic forests, we are going to need our European farmers very much!

Instead of buying them out, farming should refocus on a future world, where we guarantee to feed people in an ecologically responsible way. Wouldn’t that would be a more sensible way to spend the taxpayer’s money?

I think that the EU should take the lead in making sure that member states don’t shift ecological problems from one place to another, as this does not serve Europe and the world. We need all-over solutions otherwise we will only spend a lot of money without saving our planet.