Yet another farm protest in the EU has farmer’s spraying “merde” on the streets of France. Green energy regulations are at the heart of the protest. 
French Farmers Spray Manure and Dump Vegetables
Reuters reports French Farmers Block Roads, Dump Produce as Protest Edges Closer to Paris.
French farmers blocked highways and dumped crates of imported produce on Thursday, demanding urgent action on low farmgate prices, green regulation and free-trade policies as swelling protests moved closer to Paris.
French intelligence services have warned the government that regional farming unions have called on their members to converge on the capital, Le Parisien newspaper and BFM TV said.
The powerful FNSEA farming union late on Wednesday handed the government a list of their demands, including better enforcement of a law designed to safeguard farmgate prices. The union also called for continued diesel tax-breaks for agricultural vehicles, the immediate payment of EU agricultural subsidies, guarantees on insurance payouts related to health and climate, and immediate aid for winemakers and organic farmers.
Far right leader Marine Le Pen accused the government of complacency and backing European regulations that hurt farmers, such as rules on mandatory fallow land.
“Emmanuel Macron addresses farmers with a hand on the shoulder and then knifes them in the back in Brussels,” Le Pen told reporters. “The farmers’ worst enemies can be found in this government”, she added.Farmers in the southwest who on Wednesday sprayed manure over a local prefecture building in Agen, on Thursday directed their animal waste at a nearby Leclerc superstore, France’s biggest supermarket chain, as police looked on.
For more images, see In pictures: French farmers’ protest edges closer to Paris
Free Trade Green Trade Protest
Tires on Fire
Rise of the Farmer’s Daughter
Yesterday, the Renew party elected French MEP Valérie Hayer yesterday as their new leader.
“I’m a farmer’s daughter, a farmer’s sister, a farmer’s sister-in-law and a farmer’s granddaughter”, Hayer said yesterday after her election by 100 MEPs from 24 countries.
Renew is a liberal, pro-European political group of the European Parliament.
Macron is hoping to halt the rise of Marine le Pen in France and is hoping the European Parliament will help.
A Farmer’s Daughter to Lead Renew
Eurointelligence notes A Farmer’s Daughter to Lead Renew
Farmers are having a moment in France. Spontaneous actions have been erupting nationwide, and a more structured mobilisation is on its way. Their grudge is not only against high costs, but also the avalanche of regulations from the government and Brussels. For example, to raise a hedge around a field, which helps the crop and protects habitats, they would have to consult 10 different pieces of legislation to conform with the law. Over-regulation and shrinking revenues due to high costs and low prices recently brought farmers in several EU countries to the streets.
She will be Emmanuel Macron’s lieutenant in Brussels, while Gabriel Attal is to lead the efforts in Paris in this campaign.
Hayer’s rise to the helm of Renew was only possible after current interim President Malik Azmani, from Mark Rutte’s VVD, failed to gain enough support due to worries about his party’s involvement in coalition talks with the far-right in the Netherlands.
Macron’s En Marche Party
French President Emmanuel Macron’s party is En Marche.
But in the European Parliament, La République En Marche sits in the Renew Europe group with five MEPs.
This coalition is what Eurointelligence meant with its statement Haver will be Emmanuel Macron’s lieutenant in Brussels.
Despite being pro-Europe, Haver will seek green energy relief for farmers.
Animals as Protest Groups
First They Came for the Cars, Then the Cows
The Wall Street Journal reports First They Came for the Cars, Then the Cows
New Green Goals Would Force You to Be Vegan and Eliminate Cows
On December 3, I noted New Green Goals Would Force You to Be Vegan and Eliminate Cows
The climate lobby is now aiming to use taxes and regulation to restrict your meat consumption.
Unfair Competition From Ukraine
On January 15, Reuters reported Romanian Farmers Protest Near Border with Ukraine
Hundreds of Romanian farmers and truck drivers protested near border crossings with Ukraine and near large cities across the country on Monday amid ongoing negotiations with the government over high business costs.
The demonstrations were mainly against the high cost of diesel, expensive insurance rates, European Union measures to protect the environment and pressures on the domestic market from imported Ukrainian agricultural goods.
The protesters’ demands include a moratorium on loan repayments, faster subsidy payments and separate lines at border crossings and the Black Sea port of Constanta for EU lorries and trucks from outside the bloc, including Ukraine.
Hungary’s agriculture ministry said on Monday eastern EU states Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia had sent a letter to the European Commission requesting the EU impose import duties on Ukraine grains, citing unfair competition.
Behold, the Anti-Greens
I have been writing about this story for a while. On July 24, 2023 I proclaimed Behold, the Rise of the Anti-Greens
A major revolt is underway in the EU. Citizens have finally had enough of Green nonsense. The latest polls provide all the evidence you need.
The German AfD party is now polling 22 percent ahead of every party other than Union (CDU/CSU).
Germany is now approaching the point that even if all the centrist parties united in a super-grand coalition that might not top 50 percent.
A global revolt against green policy is underway. In Europe, there have been huge protests in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Romania.
Also, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia had sent a letter to the EC citing unfair competitions.
What’s This All Really About?
One word: Inflation. And one source of inflation is government policy, especially green energy policy.
And to top off the mess, the US and EU are Quietly Killing Vital Industries in Search of a Green Utopia that does not and never will exist.
The farmers need to embargo as a collective group. Set food pricing standards as leverage over the politicians and green initiates. Hold back food from the market until they get real concessions from the government. They are a political force with no champion. They will vote for LePen and the right against government tyranny and overreach by the Marxist leftists and greenies. Food is the most powerful leverage to attain real political control over socialists with a destructive, self serving agenda. When hungry voters riot they will destroy the entrenched corrupt government. The people want freedom from government tyranny and control.
First, let me state that I am in favor of producing and exporting as much LNG as possible. More nat gas, less coal, wherever possible.
Second, stop the hysteria. The US already has 7 LNG export facilities that can export 13 bcf per day. We are already the world’s largest exporter of LNG. (And we produce more oil than any other country.)
Another 5 LNG export facilities are approved and currently under construction. They are not affected.
There are 17 more facilities looking for approval.
This pause will merely allow some time to update the approval process on 4 facilities that won’t even be built till after 2028.
The approvals may still come, whether from this administration, or the next, or the next.
This is typical of US politics. Lots of sound and fury, but not much actual impact.
Oops. Typed this on the wrong story. I will copy and paste it to the correct story.
I’m also in favor of going back pre-obama to were if you wanted to export US OIL
it 1st had to be processed at least once
LAW STILL ON BOOKS – just not enforced(like immigration law)
—
US loses
1) jobs to process
2) taxes for Value added
3) higher price of processed oil products
“What’s This All Really About?
One word: Inflation. And one source of inflation is government policy, especially green energy policy.”
Inflation is, as even Friedman recognized in one of his more lucid moments, always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. “Energy policy” has no bearing on it at all. Print money, whether directly or by tacitly bailing out credit creators, and you have inflation. Neither Green energy nor Orange clowns matter.
Green energy enters the picture, by reducing efficiency, hence further reducing wealth: No different from attaching weighted collars around the ankles of everyone.
Dragging those weights around may have been surmountable if inflation hadn’t already impoverished Europeans to the point they are hardly any better off than Yemenis. Now that they are Yemenis, the further reduction of real wealth resulting from “green” nonsense, threatens to push them over the cliff into straight up third world starvation poverty. Which they then object to. Strange, that is…….
Inflation stole the buffer Westerners used to have which allowed them to dabble in silly, childish nonsense; like fashionable socialism, progressivism and “greenism;” while still being able to afford a few meals a day. Now that this wealth has been wholesale transferred to the “ownership society” negative-value-add trashy retards which Macron is dumb enough to believe constitute some form of useful beings: No such buffer exists anymore. Hence Europeans are no more financially able to entertain “green” drivel, than any other third world’er barely able to survive from one increasingly impoverished meal to the next.
And it’s not going to get better. Not until the ECB is buried. It makes a cold, hard zero difference whether the childbrains’ latest Dear Leader ends up being Green or Orange: As long as the ECB keeps transferring all wealth; created by farmers and other productives; to sub literate garbage living off pumped up and protected “assets, rent seeking nor other forms of nothing-but-barely-even-disguised-crass-theft: Euros, just like Americans and Argentinians; are simply going to continue to get poorer and poorer. And poorer. With not even a hint of any light at the end of any tunnel. That’s what 100.000000000% complete economic illiteracy will always result in.
The light at the end of this tunnel is the headlamp of an onrushing train.
“French Farmers Spray Manure and Dump Vegetables”
Is that what is known in physics as an equal and opposite reaction?
Just what is the ulterior motive of the elitist WEFers? So-called sustainable farming, is for the sustaining of how many people? The elitists aren’t going to starve, but how many of the rest of us are? Last week, Steve Kirsch said Covid was a manufactured pandemic. If it had been handled as was normal, it would have been like a bad flu season. What was the ulterior motive? Remdesivir and ventilators were not about saving lives.
What is our world coming to?
“What is our world coming to?” The End (Mt 24:14). 🔦✝️
“What is our world coming to?”
Peron’s Argentina.
“The world” is following exactly the same road. Hardly surprising they’ll inevitably end up in the same place:
A “new”, this-one-will-fix-it-all Dear Leader every decade or so. Who’s “new” fix is, tah-dah, exactly the same as the old fix: More debasement theft! While blaming all problems on everything else under the sun except, tah-dah squared: Debasement theft!
Over and over. And dumb people keep proving their near infinite reservoirs of utter dumbness, by never, ever catching on.
The Anglo world is already effectively there. Now the continent is following suit. While Peronistan, surprise surprise, keeps doing the same old thing: Being Peronistan. As always leading the western world to what the Western indoctrinati have been indoctrinated tor mindlessly regurgitate is the “enlightened” government they “need.”
The leaders of the West seem to enjoy gaslighting the populous. Not sure what they get out of it. They have their Chicken Littles screaming “the sky is falling!” Then there is the men can be women canard. And then there is Ukraine’s borders are sacrosanct while the US has no borders. It’s almost as if they get a kick out of being aburd.
At 60yo…….honestly I wish everyone would just stfu about the climate. Stop trying to control lives, stop all the nonesense, grab a trashbag and go pick up trash. I remember 50 years ago calling time and temp as a kid for fun and multiple 100degree days in Kansas. No one was crying about climate change then. I dont see any difference where im at now except more idiots are walking around.
This entire tug of war seems to hinge on the pulling forward of an alleged catastrophic earth/humanity problem and the pains a certain group feel will resolve that problem to the detriment of current human existence. When the rubber finally hit the road and the house needed heat or the kids needed food, well, our instinct to survive NOW took precedence. Nearly every liberal I’ve met that wants to pull the human survival equation foward continues to live an outsized current existence that would run counter to the minimalist life their own policies require. Simply we need food, shelther, clothing, health care. Whatcha eating? Been to a hospital, notice everything is plastic made from…. How about the houses made of….
I like to say one shouldn’t borrow trouble. Well, the trouble being touted is perhaps a century or more away if at all but rather than calmly, rationally, gradually and pragmatically moving in a smooth way forward we are guaranteeing the pain by pulling the most drastic measures forward, ones that we cannot afford. Anything we cannot afford in aggregate, we won’t afford. We’ll eventually turn it away or operate on the sly.
Generally I just say, “you first”. You house the illegal immigrants, clothe them, feed them, educate them, heal them. You drive the EV. You pay the high taxes to the Mothership. You keep your house set at 50 all winter north of the 35th parallel or huddle up nearer the equator. You eat sawdust or grass or whatever.
And yes, all these measures being pulled forward are expensive (inflation) and likely unnecessary or ineffective (human haughtiness).
It’s not inflation, it’s price rises due to stupid policy decisions that create synthetic scarcity. Artificial scarcity from ideology.
Price rises are not inflation. Price rises are scarcity.
Money wasn’t scarce from 2020-2023. Debt-based fiat money splashed here there and everywhere. The scarcity of which you speak, whether in-pandemic or post has largely vanished, yet we have the inflation persisting. In your world, once the scarcity was resolved the inflation would be zippity squat. In fact we were awash in nearly every good and service over my entire lifetime, no scarcity to be found other than a dearth of sound money, fiscal policy and governance, and yet have had inflation throughout. Forget semantics, we need to acknowledge not only that we experienced massive inflation but the level of prices in assets, especially houses and the stock market, have been persistently inflated and without actual price deflation the problem will remain unsolved.
When there is surplus money the plebes offer more money for the same thing.
They bid up the prices because they want what they want and they want it right now.
Mike, what do you think should be done about the climate?
Let the Free Market fix whatever problem there is.
I suspect EVs will come, perhaps with hybrids first if politicians would get the hell out of the way and stop mandating solutions and picking winners.
I have a more pessimistic viewpoint. The free market is actually a major contributor to the climate problem. And by free market, I mean every individual consumer and every individual business.
Each individual and each business does what is in its best interest. Doing what is in the entire world’s best interest is unlikely, if it is at conflict with the individual’s or business’ best interest. For example, adding a scrubber to a coal plant to reduce emissions may help the world, but it lowers profits for the business. Which is why they won’t do it unless societal pressures or government legislation makes them.
Yes, businesses and individuals can help with global warming and climate change if it benefits them. For example: Inventing and producing energy efficient light bulbs can be profitable for a business. And using energy efficient bulbs can save a consumer money.
There are many free market positive examples like that, but they are outweighed massively by the negatives.
The energy problem:
Energy is the currency of life. Our need for energy is always growing. Our bodies need energy from food. Our economies need energy to grow. Our living standards can only increase with more energy use. Free markets (individuals and businesses) are always wanting more energy. Even when we develop energy efficiencies (like LED light bulbs) whatever energy savings created are soon swallowed by new energy hungry developments (such as more people getting access to electricity, cryptocurrency, AI, etc)
Since over 80% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, and using fossil fuels keeps adding more GHGs to the atmosphere, the problem is going to keep getting worse.
We cannot stop using energy. Energy is life. In fact we cannot stop using MORE energy every year.
Which means to solve the problem, we need to replace our primary energy (fossil fuels), with renewables and nuclear.
It is very unlikely that the free market will be able to do this on its own, based on what is in their best interest.
Even with government incentives, I doubt that the free market will make much of a dent in this problem.
I suspect that, at best, it will take more than a century to accomplish this.
Alternatively, we can also attempt to pull GHGs out of the atmosphere. This is ridiculously difficult and expensive, and certainly something that the free market has very little interest in doing. The few companies that are trying to do this are unlikely to find a profitable way of achieving it, based on free markets.
My Pessimistic Viewpoint: There is no viable solution to the global warming/climate problem from free markets or governments. So the problem is simply going to keep getting worse as the years go by.
The standard of living in the whole world is raising year by year. Climate change is not a real problem. Real problems are: Population increase and decreasing of individual and economic freedom. New kinds of nuclear reactors will be the solution of the energy problem.
Yes. Population and living standards are increasing. However that is not the actual problem. The problem is that those things require more energy, which is still mostly coming from fossil fuels. And we are addicted to their use.
Yes. Nuclear energy is part of the solution. But we are a long way from it being THE solution. And it’s too expensive. Pinning your hopes on NEW kinds of nuclear is no solution at all. It’s merely hope. And hope is not a strategy. It’s a childish dream.
It is also childish to think Climate Change is not a problem.
But then, some people still think the world is flat.
Those people are rarely worth my time.
Hey Mish; any luck with that IGNORE feature?
“Nuclear is too expensive”. I am writing from Germany, where fossil fuels are MUCH more expensive, because they are strained with many taxes and contributions.
Climate change: It`s only a thesis, that it is humancaused, the climate-“scientists” can not say, how to falsify this thesis and therefore it is not really a scientific proposition, its dogmatism. Climate change happens all the time since our planet has an atmosphere.
“ Climate change: It`s only a thesis”
Lol!
It doesn’t matter what you think or what you want to call it. The fact remains that 195 countries have signed on to the climate accords, and have held 28 COPs trying to figure out how to deal with it. Virtually all major corporations have policies to deal with it. Banks, big investors (like pensions), the insurance industry etc all have adjusted their policies to deal with it.
And their decisions matter to my investments. So I will pay attention to them; not to you.
Your opinions mean SFA to me.
Congratuation to your investment decisions. I am invested in the oil industry and ExxonMobil increased at 124 % in the last three years, hope your investments did the same. And you are right: Finance industry shall win, that is the raison d`être of the climate hysteria.
Yes. As I have frequently stated, I am heavily invested in oil and gas companies for the last 3+ years.
Because of global warming, the world is trying (unsuccessfully) to transition from fossil fuels to renewables. The oil companies have responded by reducing capex. Better to focus on profits from existing reserves, rather than on growing future reserves, which may become stranded assets. The companies I have invested in have increased cash flow and reduced or paid off their debts (since the big investors and finance companies won’t lend to them or invest in them anymore). They are focused on maintaining reserves, maximizing cash flow and investor returns.
I am up over 300% in three years.
There is always a climate problem somewhere. It is too cold in Alaska, Greenland and Antarctica. The Russian winter stopped Napoleon and Hitler. I prefer the climate of Los Angeles, to that of upstate New York, where i grew up. To me, climate was a problem there.
The question is absurd. Here’s an equally absurd question. What should be done about the planets? There is nothing to be done.
“And to top off the mess, the US and EU are Quietly Killing Vital Industries in Search of a Green Utopia that does not and never will exist.”
Mish, you are consistent in telling things truthfully and forthrightly. I’m surprised you haven’t been censored for ‘disinformation!’
Paris streets are washed with water hoses. French farmers protests pale in comparison to Antifa and BLS.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics? Those nerds couldn’t harm a fly.
Ah France. Farmer revolts are common and they hate the Greens even those who raise bio animals and plants and they absolutely hate McDonalds as the symbol of the “Mal Bouffe” or junk food in English. The Prefecture buildings are favored places to trash so never buy or rent next door to one.
Nevertheless they are friendly if you can speak decent French because that means you are civilized and they grow and raise pretty good stuff that I love to eat.
If u bathe in high glycemic rice/ potatoes u might turn on the survival switch and become fat, obeses, like a cow. American cows feast on corn in a cage loaded with pharma. They are shipped to the slaughter houses after 7/8 months to become Merde steaks served in most restaurants. French and the Italian cows are healthier bc they eat in pasture for a year and a half.
We eat free-range everything.
Venison! Totally organic and vegan too — at least the animals are. Vegans are delicious!
We try to eat as much grass fed meat as possible that we get from the Amish. You can taste the difference.
Unfortunately at least here in the US, free range doesn’t meant what most think it does.
Most would think it means the animal lives outside like you’d expect on traditional farms. Instead it just means the animal has access to the outdoors for 51% of it’s life. So it can still be penned up (and fattened up) for 49% and more importantly, outside doesn’t mean ranging in a field, it can just mean access to a pen that has sunlight and fresh air even if the animal is still crammed into a mass herd and force fed food.
EU has tighter regulation policies. An Italian woman I go to the health club with advises that NONE of the yogurt sold in the US is allowed to be sold in Italy. She said the quality of their products is because of their regulations.
Ah, the Peasants’ Wars are back. I presume Greta, playing a modern Martin Luther in drag, will be posting her 96 climate science demands with the Google Bible, Bunga Bunga Macron, and supported by the Vatican and its expanded Nato Swiss Guard doing neo Calvinist good works to offset the tragedy of the commons.
“Yet another farm protest in the EU has farmer’s spraying “merde” on the streets of France.”
Those protestors are bush league when compared to the amount of merde the American MSM and the elected US office holders spread.
There has to be a more civil way for farmers to protest. Their tactics are just as bad as those by environmentalists. Blocking traffic angers the majority.
haha, like what exactly? Roaming down a street with a sign does nothing.
Better if they sprayed the shite on the EU buildings, or the WEF buildings, or on the media buildings. Or on the houses of the politicians who push this shite.
Moronic public policy overreach has finally got the public motivated. This is good news.
How could a society with so many useless intellectuals and unaccredited “experts” produce anything else?
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
The last time Europeans lived without fossil fuels they lived in unheated one room thatch huts and ate peas porridge trenchers. I wish them more of the same.
Only in France.
No, wrong. It happened in the Netherlands as well. Did you not hear about? NO? That would not surprise me because this news is NOT on CBS/NBC, etc.
What should have happened J6.
No, in Germany and in the Netherlands too.
And actually in Italy.