Farmers fed up with climate policies that threaten to destroy their livelihoods have dealt a major setback to ambitious green schemes by politicians whose entire careers involve strikingly little involvement with actual wealth generation. But now Reuters “Sustainable Switch” assures us that these yokels don’t know what’s good for them. They emailed “There’s been plenty of ‘green’ love lost this Valentine’s Day as farmers protest against climate rules across European Union nations” then added “At the same time, agriculture is one of the sectors worst-affected by climate change.” What a bunch of hicks.

Let us say it again: change the sentence by adding “policy” at the end and it becomes correct. Farmers are threatened by climate policies not climate change itself, which is not a threat, has not stopped worldwide increases in food production over the past 50 years, and which wouldn’t be stopped by the policies in question even if it were a problem. It is far from clear how firmly most journalists grasp these realities or indeed any connected with modern agriculture and the relative menace of “climate change” as opposed to deliberately expensive fuel, restrictions on fertilizer and so forth. The farmers seem pretty certain:

“The French government on Wednesday sent armoured vehicles to protect a wholesale food market in Paris in a sign of escalating tensions as farmers blocked highways in France and Belgium and protests spread elsewhere in Europe. Spanish and Italian farmers said they were joining the protest movement that has also hit Germany, aiming to press governments to ease environmental rules and shield them from rising costs and cheap imports.”

And while we repeat that we are not fans of disruptive protests under all but the most extreme circumstances, and suspect that the typical protest including by farmers contains a strong element of special pleading (for instance “Farmers say they are not paid enough, are choked by taxes and green rules and face unfair competition from abroad”) we also think that those who appoint themselves spokespersons for the populace really should spend less time in the echo chamber and more out there with, well, the populace.

Something has them fed up. And the protests do not seem to be focused on the need for more carbon taxes to stop floods even if the reporter is persuaded that:

“Europe's farmers are already suffering under increasing heat, drought and flooding – the same impacts some green policies are attempting to prevent.”

Ungrateful dolts.

The piece of course asserts that whatever happened, whether it was drought or rain, was due to “climate change”, a term that only means the weather today was different than yesterday. Thus:

“Spain’s core crops, among them wheat, barley and rice, are having their lowest production levels for over a decade.”

You then have to wade through a multiple-paragraph sermon on climate change before unearthing that:

“some farmers say policies are imposed top-down with little understanding of the impact on the ground. Paella rice farmers in Spain say their yields have been slashed by a fungus, after the EU banned the pesticide used to prevent it.”

Which would be hard to blame on climate change. So the piece attributed poor Spanish rice yields to that cause pre-emptively.