Mass Protest in the Netherlands by Farmers.

Ramming vehicles with tractors is peaceful apparently.

seventeen year old driving a tractor “at” or “away” from police ?

The video I saw would definitely support the latter and makes the police officer who shot at the kid a kinda Elmer Fud not fit for duty.

If you want to see the end result of EU policies like these, just look at Sri Lanka, which is teetering on the verge of becoming a failed state as it runs out of fuel and food has become scarce, partially because of the policies promoted by former Prime-Minister Wickremesinghe (a bit of a green loon) who banned imports of chemical fertiliser in 2019 and told farmers to use locally sourced organic fertilisers instead.

The result was both obvious and predictable, banning chemical fertiliser resulted in a massive yield drop in both cash crops like tea which provided the struggling economy with much needed export revenue and in general foodstuffs that caused Sri Lanka to go from a net exporter of food to a net importer. All this at a time of rampant food price inflation.

Green policies it seems, are hell bent on turning counties into pre-industrial societies and creating mass starvation.

That is a problem of a lack of enforcement of existing environmental legislations - trying to cull 1/3rd of national herd or forcefully convert all Ag to organics will not solve these kinds of issues. Only properly enforced legal ramifications for polluting events to hold certain people responsible.

These kinds of policies are thought up by people with no experience in farming, and have no idea what damage to yields or unintended damage to biodiversity their plans will do.

The 'let them eat cake' attitudes of Ursula Von der Leyen and her 'detatched and heavily insulated from reality' ilk, really is kind of worrying. It very much alligns with the urban Green elites who are all about ideology but have very little interest in, or idea about, the consequences of their ideologically driven policies.

I'm reminded of Trofim Lysenko, there's a good Atlantic article on him here:

Highlights:

"Having grown up desperately poor at the turn of the 20th century, Lysenko believed wholeheartedly in the promise of the communist revolution. So when the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end. It never did.

Officials eventually put Lysenko in charge of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s. The only problem was, he had batty scientific ideas. In particular, he loathed genetics. Lysenko promoted the Marxist idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. Put them in the proper setting and expose them to the right stimuli, he declared, and you can remake them to an almost infinite degree.To this end, Lysenko began to “educate” Soviet crops to sprout at different times of year by soaking them in freezing water, among other practices. He then claimed that future generations of crops would remember these environmental cues.

Such claims were exactly what Soviet leaders wanted to hear. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Joseph Stalin—with Lysenko’s backing—had instituted a catastrophic scheme to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, forcing millions of people to join collective, state-run farms. Widespread crop failure and famine resulted."

You see the same kind thinking from the modern greens with their pastoral images of windmills and organic farms that will substitute for modern farming practices, it's fantastical thinking. There's a whole lot of self-deception to it, as has been pointed out earlier, the notion that you will fix the environment by reducing the national heard, fed organically, sustainably and locally on grass, and replace that beef with Brazilian meat that has been raised on land obtained by cutting down the rainforest and then flying that beef half way around the word ….is just mentally ill.

No where else in the world will produce food as safely or with as little fertilizer or as environmentally friendly as Western Europe can.

Climate and especially soil matter in farming.

From Nigeria to the far East it is mostly poor soil that drives production through incredible abuse of Fertilizer.

That makes for mad reading!

Well, just to be awkward, I might be responsible for 14 times the CO2 emmissions of a Bangladeshi citizen but there's a lot more than 14 times them than us (+164 million) so technically they are polluting the planet more than we are.

I do?

Regardless of all these things, the environment was in far better shape in the 50s and 60s. Everything from water quality, fish in our rivers and seas, birds, insects, all are in a far worse state now. We didn't produce as much in the past so the land wasn't under as much pressure as it is now.

The OPW and county councils are still dredging and making a mess of many of our rivers for flood relief schemes unfortunately.

Having less children is great but governments are not going to enforce that any time soon so we need to look at other ways of reducing our impacts on the environment. I find people always blame overpopulation because they are unwilling to change any aspect of their lives or be inconvenienced for the sake of the environment, but even if we halved the world population and carried on living as we are, the planet would be f*cked anyway, we simply consume too much.

It is said that in the middle ages people always drank fermented drinks (and therefore somewhat slightly perma-pissed) as the water was unsafe to drink

I don't think that's true, regardless of population, rich countries are by far the biggest polluters. Apparently the richest 1% pollute more than the poorest 50% combined. You can't point the finger at poor countries.