Dutch Farmers Confront E.U. Over Climate Lunacy

BUCK: I think this story is fascinating, and Clay and I have been talking about it a little bit. It’s starting to percolate around more in the conservative media ecosystem. The Netherlands, Holland, is in the midst of a showdown between those who produce the food that the people of the Netherlands and actually all over the world eat. The Netherlands… This was stunning. I almost… This is one of those stats that I read and I think, “That can’t be true.”

The Netherlands apparently one of the biggest agricultural exporters in the world. I was not aware of that. You think such a small country, how could they? Apparently, they are a major food exporter, and this is all over the place, and that’s a stat that was stunning to me. Here’s what’s going on, and it’s been happening now for over a week. The Dutch government — there’s Holland, the Netherlands, the Dutch, right? We gotta keep it all in the…

I’m trying to avoid doing a Swedish chef impression. That’s a different country. It’s different. I know. The Dutch are not the Swedes. So, the Netherlands right now is in this showdown between the government that decided that they would essentially shut down a lot of farmers, just say, “Sorry, you’re done,” because they have set under some E.U. emissions standards for I believe it’s nitrogen oxide and another basically the pollutants that come — they call them “pollutants,” but the by-product gases that come — from farming.

Now, farming is pretty important ’cause, you know, food, which we all like and eat. So what’s going on is the Dutch government has just said to the farmers in the Netherlands, Clay, they’ve said, you have to hit these emissions standards by 2030. We’re gonna be in this totally new place because the E.U. has set these standards and we’re gonna meet them. And for a lot of you it’s gonna mean your farming business changes radically. For a lot of you it’s gonna mean your farm is actually gonna be shut down.

There’s even talk of some appropriation of some of this land that may be happening. The government maybe just start taking people’s land if they don’t adhere to this. So, there have been tractor protests very similar to the trucker protests we’ve seen and we saw in Canada over the vaccine mandate. They shut down with tractors on the highways the border between the Netherlands and Germany. And there’s been some gunfire. Police have shot at some of these protesters already.

And this is really concerning, folks, ’cause this is ultimately about climate change, CO2 emissions, other emissions that go into the environment. This is environmentalist tyranny through the lens of the bureaucracy of the E.U. And we’re coming at a time when we’re told (unintelligible) the media, “Bugs are good! You should learn to eat bugs because meat is too carbon intensive,” and here we have agriculture being too intensive when it comes to the nitrogen oxide production. This is madness. I mean, this is crazy town stuff being pushed by bureaucrats, and they want to do it here too.

CLAY: It’s significant also because we’re already starting to see, Buck — I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to some of these stories internationally of food riots that are starting to occur as global food shortages are becoming more paramount. Now, we’re fortunate so far in the United States where most of our shortages in product, notwithstanding baby formula, which has been an unmitigated disaster for the Biden administration, but a lot of our products, if you want to go buy a particular product, there is another product that’s similar that you could make a choice on instead.

Much of the developing world doesn’t have that luxury. And so, I talked about it a little earlier in this show and I think I mentioned it yesterday, too. This is also a triumph of the Green New Deal, “climate change is going to destroy the world” people, much like what is happening in the United States. Let me connect these two. Over the weekend on Friday headed into a holiday weekend the Biden administration effectively announced that they were not going to allow substantial amounts of offshore drilling to increase.

So, our overall production of oil and gas is being voluntarily curtailed in an effort to try to decrease our carbon footprint. Now, the great fallacy here — and this is where media that was really doing its job would say, “Well, wait a minute. You’re also simultaneously, Joe Biden, going to travel to Saudi Arabia and on bended knee request the Saudis to produce more oil so that we can help to make up for the shortage that exists right now because of the Russia boycott in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.”

But most in the media aren’t pointing that out because they implicitly agree with many of the climate change aspects that are being embraced by the Democrats, but it leads to a total lie in policy, which is producing oil and gas here is not making it safer for the globe to ask more oil and gas to be produced elsewhere. It just allows Democrats to tell their idiot base, “Oh, we’re reducing our carbon footprint here.” And instead of making billions of dollars on oil and gas, we are pushing billions of dollars to these petro-dictatorship states.

Buck, this is what’s going on it feels like in Europe as well where there is a designed policy in place to destroy people’s ability to make a living producing goods based on what their carbon footprint is, even if that has a much longer deleterious effect and larger deleterious effect on the larger world. And that’s what’s going on right now. And I think they’re connected. And we need to have intelligent people push back against this.

BUCK: But when you see the collision here between… I mean, you’re seeing this over and over again. You’re bringing up the energy industry. Without oil and natural gas, our way of life not only comes to a halt but we crash and burn. I mean, you have people… You would have mass starvation; you would have widespread civil disorder from all the deprivation that would occur.

CLAY: Exactly right.

BUCK: You would see… It’s zombie apocalypse stuff. Now, I know. They’re not saying, “Oh, we’re gonna turn all the stuff off tomorrow.” Okay. But they keep pushing us and pushing us beyond where the technology is and based on something that I don’t even think is a problem, right? It’d be one thing if I…

CLAY: You and I don’t believe — or have zero concern about climate destroying our lives.

BUCK: Not one moment.

CLAY: Zero.

BUCK: You know? And I like to think that I care about humanity, too, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I know the libs walk around, “I want to save it for future generations.” I don’t know. Democrats not really big on future generations when you look at a lot of other things. But here we are now looking at a showdown. And, yeah, it… I keep Googling this. I said, is this really possible? There’s $90 billion. That can’t… I look at these numbers and I think, that can’t be right. But enormous. Yeah, 82 billion — 82 billion euros — of agricultural sports in the Netherlands. So, this place has become an agricultural powerhouse on a global scale, which I was not aware of.

Really interesting, and you compare it to Germany, 20 billion, okay, United Kingdom, 8 billion, Italy 3 billion. I mean, I think Italy, aren’t they making all kinds of great stuff there, sending it to the rest of the world? Where do I get my prosciutto from, right? Turns out the Netherlands and their bureaucrats are coming in and they’re telling people, because of this imaginary destruction of the planet that we’re worried about, you no longer can continue to provide food for people.

CLAY: You can’t make a living. That’s what’s going on.

BUCK: Yeah. You’re done.

CLAY: Your job doesn’t exist in the same way.

BUCK: As, you know, Hillary Clinton saying that we need the oil, the coal companies need to go… You know, the coal miners need to find new jobs, right? Learn to code. This is the same attitude from these people. But when it comes to your food, though, you know, every single one of us who goes to bed at night with a reasonably full belly, in my case a little too full sometimes, unfortunately, we owe a debt of gratitude to the farmers.

We talk about it on this show. We learned over covid, we owe a debt of gratitude to the truckers, to the people that actually bring the goods and bring the food. And you have these managerial elites with their soft little hands and their soft little brains who are saying, “Yeah, whatever. Just, you know, we’re gonna shut down the farmers. Eat some bugs.” This is really happening in places.

CLAY: While they’re all flying around on their private jets.

BUCK: Private jets. Of course. Yeah.

CLAY: It’s way larger of a carbon footprint than any of these farming devices. Look. It feels intentional. It feels like an intentional policy shift that is going on around the world. And there are a lot of countries that just don’t care. Is China sitting around worried about the Green New Deal? Buck, do they have some massive —

BUCK: They’re building a new coal-fired plant every week. And we’re gonna talk about China, by the way, how America, the intelligence community and the military are waking up to, we got a big problem with China, folks, a big problem.

CLAY: We’ll probably talk about that tomorrow ’cause you and I were talking about it off air as we’ve had a meeting between MI5, the top British sort of intelligence agency, and our FBI. They had a joint release talking about what’s going on in China right now. But had you heard anything about this Dutch farmer rebellion? Is it being covered anywhere in the United States? Not that I’ve seen.

BUCK: Very minimally. Very minimally — and there’s video that. It’s only on social media this is making the rounds. Dutch farmers in tractors, they’ve opened fire on them.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Cops have actually started shooting at them.

CLAY: Which, if you had to say which is… Other than, you know, Switzerland, which obviously doesn’t really ever take a side on anything, if you had to pitch a European country where you would least expect for forces to open up fire on citizens, the Dutch would be pretty high up on that list, I would think.

BUCK: Yeah. And just one more thing is, we see with covid that a lot of these people who take these very virtue signaling, oh, you know, we are one world global government perspectives on things and they’re always, “Oh, you know, we don’t want police to be too violent with criminals.” They take all these attitudes. When it comes to setting the climate change police on you, or the covid police on you, they will send men with guns and batons into your church to bludgeon your pastor so that you can’t breathe in their direction. These libs love to use the force of the state when it suits their crazy ideological purposes in the Netherlands and here at home in America. So that’s what’s going on.