The Dutch Minister for Nitrogen, Christianne van der Wal, announced that 3,000 farms will be forced to sell their properties to the government for immediate closure after ‘voluntary’ measures failed.

Christianne van der Wal, who incidentally is a member of the Freedom and Democracy party, does not understand that if a person is offered two choices that both end with the government snatching their farm – there’s nothing ‘voluntary’ about the outcome.

Chairman Mao did a similar thing in China during his ‘Great Leap Forward’ and it ended with citizens eating their children. His regime forced collectivised farming across China, promising that it was ‘fairer’ and more ‘community-minded’ than all that self-interested private agriculture.

Learning nothing from the deaths of 45 million Chinese, the Dutch Minister for Nitrogen moved closer to the limelight and allure of giddy, climate-worshipping reporters.

‘For agricultural entrepreneurs, there will be a stopping scheme that will be as attractive as possible.’

This is the villainous conclusion to the Dutch Net Zero scandal that forms part of an approaching global food shortage manufactured entirely by the United Nations and its unsustainable ‘sustainability goals’. Other victims include Net Zero poster child Sri Lanka which collapsed earlier this year and was all-but erased from the Climate Cult hive mind.

In addition to the Dutch government demanding 30 per cent of livestock in the Netherlands to be (literally – not figuratively) burned at the stake of Net Zero, Christianne van der Wal went on to offer ‘peak polluters’ a future involving a torture chamber of tailor-made permits and taxes.

These ‘peak polluters’ are better known as essential manufacturers and suppliers. They include Tata Steel, which announced that it would ‘become a world leader in decarbonization for the third time’ and intends to switch to hydrogen steel production, even though the industry is not expected to become competitive until 2035-50 (maybe) and requires huge amounts of power (which Europe no longer has).

Let’s be fair, ‘green hydrogen’ production, storage, and use is an energy black hole. Fellow battered company Ford has agreed to buy ‘green steel’ from Tata – assuming it manages to make any – for its cars that no one will be able to afford because of ‘15-20 minute cities’ like Oxford which want to trap people in tiny car-free bubbles.

None of these green-agreements with the government saved Tata Steel from a criminal investigation held by Dutch prosecutors into alleged pollution from two of their plants. According to AP News, ‘Prosecutors said that their investigation was into alleged “intentional and unlawful introduction of hazardous substances into the soil, air, or surface water”.’

The problem is not nitrogen or carbon dioxide – but an actual pollutant, lead. Creating steel causes vast quantities of emissions. There’s no irony in steel plants working overtime to create ‘Net Zero’ technology, polluting small villages so that rich celebrities can fly over North Sea wind farms and marvel at the ‘clean’ technology.

Tata Steel’s Port Talbot plant in Wales, for example, created hundreds of tonnes of steel to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm, the Dogger Bank Wind Farm. ‘Huge amounts of steel will be needed to help the UK achieve its Net Zero goals – to build everything from renewable energy and low-CO2 transportation to hydrogen production and distribution.’ Virtuous climate warrior Tata owns coal mines in Jharia and West Bokaro but also managed to buy 75,000 tonnes of Russian coal during the Ukraine-Russia conflict and has large holdings in North America and Australia.

Over a decade ago, Tata purchased a 5 per cent interest in the Queensland Carborough Downs Coal Project for a 14-year initiative involving 58 million tonnes of coal with options to delve into the 100 million tonnes of unexplored coal sitting in deeper seams. Tata now says it is ‘willing to underwrite coal developments in Queensland to spark a resurgence in investment and development it needs for its booming steel industry’.

Tata is frustrated by the Labor government in Queensland demonising coal which has led to a severe lack of investment. Tata managing director TV Narendran said that this soft environment of investment stems from the conflation of thermal coal and coking coal. This is not surprising given the rhetoric of the Left dumbing it down to ‘coal’. Coking coal remains the only industrially viable way to make steel for pesky things like wind turbines, but you won’t hear a Labor premier say they ‘heart’ coal.

‘One thing I hear from industry is that there is a bit of concern about the increase in royalties, which obviously has come up and that it will eat into profits and hence investments. The second concern is the questioning of the future of coal and not distinguishing between thermal coal and coking coal. Given coal is such an important part of the economy in Queensland I think there is an opportunity for industry and government to work together.’

Narendran’s comments don’t bode well for Queensland.

‘We are not looking at investments in Australia, but we are happy to underwrite capacity.’ He added, ‘The company [Tata] bought about $4 billion a year in coal from Australia and there was an expectation that it would double over the next decade. I think it’s not about anything specific that the government has said … if Australia was not seen as a stable reliable supplier, then Indian suppliers would be forced to go to places like Russia.’

Mate, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Didn’t you see the Labor, Greens, and Teals’ election messages? Queensland is completely abandoning coal and instead spending billions on wind farms which require – oh… Coal.

Today’s politicians are some of the most ‘pro-coal’ in decades, the difference is that they hide their love of coal beneath words like ‘wind turbines’ and ‘renewable’ while presiding over the largest mining boom in a century. They’d also rather the coal come from the third-world where no one can see it being mined. Guilt-free ‘out of sight, out of mind’ bird mincing machines delivered in time for the next election…

While there is a lot of money running around in the ‘green’ industry, somehow these places are still crying poor with their paws out for public money. For example, despite the Netherlands Tata site being instrumental in providing steel to high-demand ‘renewables’ projects, Tata steel ‘threatened to shut down the operation unless it received a 1.5 billion pound subsidy to build two electric arc furnaces’.

‘Green steel’ is many things – economically ‘sustainable’ is not one of them.

It is not only the world’s energy sectors that are stuck in an idiocy feedback loop. The same government order in the Netherlands Parliament that threatened to kill steel production has also made thousands of private farms ‘illegal’ overnight.

The Dutch people are living through a nightmare pseudo ‘nitrogen futures trading scheme’ where farms are killed to allow the government to build ‘900,000 desperately needed homes with wind farms’ without exceeding EU-mandated nitrogen emissions.

Who is going to feed all these people?

That’s a problem for tomorrow. As for closing farms to improve ‘biodiversity’ – how’s that biodiversity look in the middle of the 900,000 new homes? Or is that mostly concrete and steel…? Imagine being a farmer, dragged from green fields and told that the grey, lifeless city is the climate virtuoso.

Our children have been taught by publicly-funded teachers that the farms that feed them are ‘evil’ and the city is ‘sustainable’ – that giving up meat in exchange for bugs and lab-printed food is ‘healthy’ – and that cows are a bigger threat than billionaires counting their money on private islands that (somehow) haven’t been inundated by the same water that Pacific Islands use to blackmail Australian taxpayers.

Ralph Schoellhammer, Webster University assistant professor, spoke to Spectator Australia editor Rowan Dean on Outsiders about the convulsions of madness running through Western governments.

‘The Dutch are doing to their agricultural sector what the Germans did to their energy sector – and we all saw the consequences there. We get the promises that ‘Oh, this is not going to be a problem… we can move to alternative modes of production!’ and in the end they never work,’ he said.

‘In Germany, it is even more insane. They want 30 per cent of their agriculture to go organic, which means that they would turn from a net exporter of agriculture to a net importer of agriculture. During times of global food insecurity, it is complete insanity.

‘The Dutch are doing the same thing. These 3,000 farms are just the beginning – and the Dutch government is saying this.

‘It has to be stressed for your viewers that Nitrogen is a crucial ingredient for synthetic fertiliser and without synthetic fertiliser we could not feed the world. About four billion people simply would have no access to food.

‘This is a war, in many ways I would argue, against humanism – against humanity.

‘The dominant ideology – I am tempted to call it the cult-ish ideology – tells us that if you don’t change now, the world is going to end in ten years. Which, of course, it’s not.

‘This is part of a larger story.

‘Remember Sri Lanka… If you go back two years, everybody was cheering them on. “Ah, Sri Lanka! They show the way forward! Sri Lanka knows how to do it! They proved to the world that in fact, you don’t need fertiliser. You don’t need any kind of synthetic materials to feed your population!” And then it all broke down in a very short order. Because you cannot feed your people. Modern agriculture is an absolute necessity given the population numbers that we have.

‘I think this is overall a larger part of a kind of auto-immune disease that the West is afflicted by where we turn against everything that made our civilisation powerful.’

This is not the first time that socialism, in one form or another, has been described as a disease that attacks weak minds – and our civilisation has certainly grown physically and intellectually lazy after generations of easy-living.

When asked if Climate Change and Net Zero are a breed of Marxism – a common accusation – he replies:

‘For me, it’s less Marxism then it is a kind of secular coming of a new form of reformation. If you listen to how they talk. It’s about, you know, “society needs to be cleansed”. We need to change our ways of life. This sounds more like the Puritans would argue than the Marxists

‘It’s about “we need to eat less meat” and “we need to take fewer showers”. It’s all about society needing a baptism of fire to cleanse ourselves from the sins of the past. It’s a quasi-religious movement.’

Rowan Dean adds, ‘It’s also fascism if you ask me. Fascism is the marriage of authoritarian governments and big business.’

It could be both… Eco-fascism with a state religion.

A generation lacking morality and told to feel guilty about everything – including the colour of their skin – has found salvation in Climate Puritanism. It is the misguided belief that they are saving the world by turning celebrities, politicians, and bureaucrats into a pantheon of gods to which they offer grand sacrifices – such as liberty and prosperity – to appease ‘the greater good’. They want to pass through the needle of social media approval and enter the Utopia of #ClimateJustice where everything is free.

They fail to realise that Climate Change is a death cult, ruled by demons and attended by corruption – of the Earth, of our wallets, and of our civilisation’s future. After all, what ideology could be more evil than a one that denies the basic human rights of the individual and seeks power through ruin?

According to Tombstone, written by Yang Jisheng, Mao’s Great Leap Forward proved that economically irrational policies are deadly. That a system of absolute power micromanaging agriculture, immune to criticism, and ignorant of its practical failings has the potential to inflict the worst suffering imaginable on society – even in nations blessed by natural resources.

‘The insanity and ruthlessness of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Cultural Revolution were the result of that degeneration and the great “achievement” of the totalitarian system. The regime considered no cost or coercion too great in making the realisation of Communist ideals the supreme goal of the entire populace. The peasants bore the chief burden of realising these ideals: they shouldered the cost of industrialisation, of collectivisation, of subsidising the cities, and of the extravagant habits of officials at every level.’

Net Zero is our ‘Green Leap Forward’ and massive collapse backward.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.

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