Monday, July 07, 2008
Environmental Cost
Why is it that environmentalism now comes before our well-being at all costs? Petrol prices are soaring, yet the fuel duty must rise to force people off the road. Harvests across the world fail, yet more land must be sacrificed to bio-fuels. And on that same theme, despite Gordon Brown ensuring us he is the only party leader capable of leading us through the "global food shortage", his Cabinet Office then produces this abomination:The price of meat, milk and other British farm products will have to rise to reflect the environmental cost of producing them, a Government study has concluded.
Cabinet Office review of food policies suggested that farmers and their customers will have to pay a "green price" on farm goods that generate large amounts of greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide.
What are the "farm goods" that produce methane? Livestock. What produces nitrous oxide? It's released from farm fertilisers, which is completely necessary.
The purpose of "green taxation" is to force people to change their lifestyles. How is a farmer supposed to change the digestive system of cattle? How is a farmer supposed to grow his crops without fertiliser? The only lifestyle change the farmer could make would be to give up.
We always joked about cows being the real cause of global warming. Here we find a Government report that took it to heart.
As if farmers haven't had a tough enough time. As if the blue tongue and food and mouth epidemics hadn't harmed the industry enough. As if the protectionism of other nations, partly a retaliatory consequence of the European Union's own high tariffs and massive subsidisation, hadn't limited the markets enough. As if all the existing regulations and red tape weren't strangling the farmers whilst the media and the administration whips them furiously from behind to toil the land to feed the "starving" world.
A Government report is actually proposing penalising farmers for producing food. Think about that. Out of all the insane policies of this administration, did you ever think you would actually see them punish the people who put the food on our plates? I very much doubt they think too much about it, though, as they gleefully stuff their faces, nose-deep in the trough.
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