Climate Bolloxolgy.

Hardly surprising

Honestly the title of the thread grates on me... Its well proven that human activity has a major effect on climate, yes the climate ha always changed but the data on warming etc is very clear humans have had a major impact.. its the rate of change from our activities that's alarming really...

What is bolloxolgy is responses to the problem...

Our target for electric vehicles for 2030, it would mean nearly every car sold between now and 2030 would need to be electric, we know this isn't feasible because we neither have the charging infrastructure nor the power generation to deal with the government goal, its like they cant do basic math.. Yet where there are major public transports available we haven't even introduced a congestion charge to move people out of their cars

Peat belongs in the ground, I've no doubts on that one. BUT, what sort of idiotic fool closes all three peat stations at once without sufficient alternatives coming online and risks power shortages, it was a baffling decision, playing to the green crowd without realising or caring about the implications..

Food sovereignty.. Europe has bowed down to the mega business interests and are actively supporting the importing of food from anywhere, without care for the carbon footprint of its transport nor the damage done locally for its production, thinking if paying to idle lands out of food production in europe to buy from places actively deforesting rainforests or using slave labor to supply us is madness. Just so we can point to our projects and say "look what we're doing", but not acknowledge the damage were supporting or the risk in food supplies.

We have gas fields off shore, but were much too green to be involved in that nasty dirty business of fossil fuel extraction, we will buy our gas instead.... From companies poisoning large tracts of land by fracking it, then shipping it to us to use. Or from dictators like Putin who actively destroys his country to amass his own wealth and now attacks neighboring countries. gas will be needed for decades, to complement wind and solar, possibly longer considering how slow were transitioning

Everyone is delighted to see the likes of Ryanair with €10 flights to European destinations for weekend pissups, yet farmers trying to produce food on our island and hold onto some level of food sovereignty are demonised as destroying the planet..

We jumped straight to big grants for heat pumps, everyone knows they are useless without the proper insulation and airtightness, you'd literally be burning electricity for nothing, yet that's what we did, never mind the old problem of power supply, all the electric cars charging with heat pumps running and no power to supply to either.. the grants for insulation and airtightness should have been prioritised over heatpumps, again we've the cart before the horse, just so we can say we have a plan to reduce fossil fuel usage, yet how is the majority of our power produced ??, fossil fuels !

Climate is a global problem, yet its approached on an isolated national level... We will solve nothing without looking at the connected implications of actions taken in each country.. The effects of supply chains must be taken into account in every decision, not just the localised greenwashing opportunities for politicians. Food and energy sovereignty must have a weighted position, outsourcing food and energy production to others who neither care how they produce it nor can be trusted with such an important supply is foolish and will come back to bite big time.. I lived through fuel shortages before, I expect to see it again along with food shortages considering the way its managed or rather mismanaged.

Close the thread now. Brian has nailed it.

Following flight tracker shows all the aeroplanes polluting the athmosphere at any one time, and we wonder why co2 levels are going up.

https://www.flightradar24.com/

Article in the Sunday Business Post today.

The Dublin office of Stone X, an international trading and brokerage firm that specialises in agricultural commodities, resembled a scene from Wall Street, the 1980s movie, last week.

Phones were constantly ringing as nervous clients called their brokers to lock in prices for key food commodities such as wheat, maize and oilseeds. They were moving urgently because the Russian invasion of Ukraine had sent shockwaves through financial and commodity markets over the last two weeks as investors tried to calculate the potential impact of what was unfolding.

The fallout has been most obvious in European energy markets, but has the potential to significantly affect the global food system as both Russia and Ukraine are two of the world’s largest exporters of food staples such as wheat and maize.

For Rory Deverell, a risk management consultant with Stone X, the challenge is in trying to decipher what impact Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will have on global grain markets, particularly on the supply side.

“The Black Sea region accounts for about one third of the world’s wheat. But if you’re living in a country like Egypt, Morocco or anywhere in the Middle East, right now you’re wondering where you’re going to get your wheat from,” Deverell told the Business Post.

“There will not be one ton of wheat, maize or oilseed shipped out of Ukraine for the foreseeable future. I’m still in touch with people in the agri sector in Ukraine and they’ve said the Russian army has bombed all the port infrastructure in the country.

“Aside from the structural damage, no grain merchant is going to get insurance to send a vessel down to Ukraine even if they could get their hands on some. We’re slightly lucky that Ukraine exports most of its grain between August and January. But the recent events are definitely negative for crop yields in 2022. Some people in the industry are very pessimistic about the current situation.”

European wheat prices have hit record highs in recent days on the back of intensifying fears of a global supply shortage in staple grains. European wheat prices are now trading above €400/ton, having been priced at less than €230/ton this time last year.

Similarly, European spot prices for maize corn have also increased to fresh highs of about €400/ton. The knock-on impact of this shortage in grain markets is likely to result in tighter supplies of meat, dairy and other food staples later this year.

While the focus is rightly on the immediate humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and taking action against Russia, the wider impact of the invasion is also being assessed.

Sadly growing cereals will be a struggle for allot of farmers and farm, especially here.

Seeing how Irish grain growers were treated this could be a time to get the government to stipulate that anyone using grain must give priority to Irish grown over imported. If we respect our primary producers we’ll not have shortages

it is definitely time for farm organisations to push for rollback on the suppression of agriculture policy in this country as a long term tradeoff for doing this.concentrate on the real culprits such as air travel and co2 emissions.

Or even just insist on it being calculated correctly and no sacred cows, every industry takes its fair share and carbon credits etc are the property of the farmers at an individual/farm level etc etc...look at the processors/supply chain and the squeeze on primary producers, the poor advice focussing on nothing but maximising production as the only route to profit, the destructiveness of govt policy/food harvest bolox to date ..take a look at the retardedness of calendar farming too etc

I could come up with a nice shopping list

Bit of PR emphasising all that's wanted is fair play

I don't get this talk of more tillage. Do we not produce enough already to keep us going? Say we reduced exports or something, how would that leave us?

The thing is that if we do more tillage, it will be prioritised for humans. Fair enough. That would reduce feed for animals. That would lead to reduced numbers I guess. Same applies to reduced fertiliser due to availability/price. Luckily we'd be still self sufficient in a lot of animal products even with a reduced number

We need all farming orgs to come together and agree before going into discussion with the dept. Sadly that’s not likely to happen

I think I read before that the quality of the majority of grains produced here are not good enough for human consumption. Any increase is likely to displace imported grain of similar quality.

Ireland imports 60%+ of its animal feed. Thats not just cows. Sheep, horses, donkeys, poultry and also your cats & dogs food is heavily reliant on imported grain. All that is going to go up in price.

Politicians calling on all farmers to plant more crops today, some even saying to swap from dairy/beef to tillage. The level of ignorance and lack of education about farming in Ireland is unbelievable. Hang on. I'll just go out and buy two 200 horse power tractors, plough, sower, roller, fertiliser spreader, sprayer, combine harvester, grain trailers and a lad to drive one of the tractors. Then you've got to take out a second mortgage for the seed, spray, fuel and fertiliser needed to grow the crop. Unless grain prices go way up and farmers get all sorts of grants and incentives I can't even see existing tillage farmers taking on more work. We'd also need to build bigger grain stores and merchants to handle it all. And on top of that again you'd have farmers storing their own grain because of the price of imported feed. Never mind the kind of land that is required to grow a crop.

I'll go see if the local bank will give me a loan......

And a bad month of September would ruin most

There is also the issue of neglect of the tillage sector by relevant state bodies in the area of breeding and maintaining varieties better suited to the Irish climate. If one looks back in history Ireland was actually a major producer of quality wheat etc. back in the 19th centaury