I can lead readers to critical news with meat on the bones besides Donald Trump, though I can’t make them read it. Ignore it at your peril.
Let's give Nicolas Camut a hand. In a world full of media, global warming ignorance, and coverups on the rapidity of the climate crisis, it is a relief to read a well-researched article of truth-telling. Warnings of a climate change emergency are few and far between. The article points out that the rise of fascism in Europe is an opportunity for the far right to link the emerging food and distribution emergency with government incompetence and a "green agenda" to seize power.
The code red lights are blinking across Earth, not just Europe. But Europe has the unfortunate reality of warming faster than three times than any other continent. What we are witnessing in Europe, where flash drought, flooding, the new phenomenon of deadly heat domes, and soil depletion are just a peek into a tiny window of what humanity and the natural world are in for. It looks like dystopia.
The tie-up of far-right parties and furious farmers is supercharging populist parties in the run-up to the EU election in June.Camat, in his Politico piece, How the far right aims to ride farmers' outrage to power in Europe, has gone where few journalists have dared to go — that the climate crisis is not only a food crisis but a climate crisis that is fascist.
As campaigning for the European election in June kicks off, polls suggest the farmer-populist tie-up is helping to supercharge the appeal of far-right parties among the bloc’s nearly nine million farmers. The referendum against governments eschewing local production for cheaper imports from Ukraine and spikes in diesel taxes both coupled with inflation means growing discontent among farmers is spreading across the Continent.
Farmer discontent has historically been a leftist movement. Not anymore. If overthrowing the government in Washington sounds familiar, the radical right in the EU plans to destroy Brussels and crush proposals that attempt to slow the worst impacts of inevitable calamity resulting from increasing temperatures. A European Council on Foreign Relations survey found that authoritarian parties are leading in nine EU nations. They found the far right would "significantly" expand their seats in the European Parliament.
POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, which shows the right-wing Identity and Democracy group gaining seats to become the third largest political group in the European Parliament.Camat noted that fascist pressure on more moderate right-leaning parties such as green energy was a "signature policy of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her erstwhile environment czar, Frans Timmermans." As a result, corporate politicians came close to killing a historic nature restoration bill and have called for "unwinding a 2035 ban on the combustion engine."
At an event hosted by the Viktor Orbán-linked MCC think tank in Brussels, right-wing EU lawmaker Patricia Chagnon openly praised the hardline farmer protest movement “Farmers’ Defense Force,” which she said had played a key role in “overthrowing” the Dutch government.von der Leyen is fighting back, hopefully as intensely as Joe Bien and the Democratic party, to defeat the GQP and their 2025 plan to gut climate and environmental policy for Donald Trump to implement when he becomes dictator on day one—drill, baby, drill.
Such criticism can seem ironic given that European farmers benefit from one of the most generous subsidy policies in the world, the Common Agricultural Policy, which funnels tens of billions of euros into farmers’ pockets each year. At the rally on Wednesday, farmers questioned by POLITICO said they were happy to keep pocketing CAP money.
But several voiced anger at “technocrats” in Brussels whom they accused of drowning them in rules that were too burdensome for small farmers while subjecting them to unfair competition from rivals in other parts of the world.
Marion Maréchal, a French right-wing politician who’s the niece of former presidential contender Marine Le Pen, said it was the European Green Deal and its “tsunami” of rules that was fueling farmers’ outrage at the protest in Brussels. “This is also Europe’s fault,” she said.The warming climate will challenge the readiness of our food and other freight distribution network.
High and bitterly cold temperatures, erosion, landslides, fires, heavy flooding, frost, hail, and snowfall will test our rail, barges, and surface network and the ability of crops to pollinate and grow.
Railroads distribute freight and agricultural products. A California case example:
The 351-mile LOSSAN rail corridor in Southern California, the second busiest in the United States, is under siege.
Running from San Diego to San Luis Obispo, the oceanside tracks sitting atop coastal bluffs face erosion from higher water levels in the Pacific and record rainfall. In addition, increased precipitation has destabilized terrain on the inland side, leading to landslides — like two in San Clemente recently — that have led to rail closures.
While the entire line is not impaired, there are significant hot spots where “the bluffs beneath the tracks are crumbling and the waves are crashing over the tracks because of sea-level rise,” said Catherine Blakespear, a California state senator who has conducted hearings on the rail lines and whose district is among those traversed by the tracks.
“The vulnerabilities are substantial and only getting worse” she said, affecting “riders who take the train, freight that is transported on this section and even our military readiness,” because the corridor is part of Stracnet, the acronym for the Strategic Rail Corridor Network. And if that weren’t enough, a nuclear power plant is near the tracks.
Farmers are angry everywhere.
Euro News Green writes on farmers' panic. They, after all, are on the front lines whether they believe climate change is real or not. They feed us if we don't call the process they are experiencing anything other than climate change, words that the right has demonized for decades, they will agree. Something is wrong.
In Finland, the government learned that 40 per cent of its farmers considered their work mentally burdening, with 13 per cent reporting depression.
The state response is to ensure farmers know where they can get help. Occupational health services and the Farmers’ Social Insurance Institution are both advertised options for farmers struggling with structural changes in agriculture, sharp decline of profitability in farming and extreme weather conditions.
In stark contrast, the UK government has said that flood-hit farmers do not need targeted mental health support, even though farmers throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland have said that increased flooding is taking a huge toll on their mental health.
In France, a recent survey revealed the suicide rate for farmers was 20 per cent higher than the national average.
As a profession under pressure, more research is needed to review and address the scale of the mental health needs of farmers in Europe. That’s according to Alun Jones, a representative of the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies.
“Farmers need to be looked after,” Jones told the European Parliament’s agriculture committee last year. “They’re the ones producing our food and they have multiple stress factors, and part of this picture is not just about the hard risks and accidents, it’s about their psychosocial wellbeing.”
Right-wing zealots are politicizing the food crisis on Social Media. They are, however, sharing a lot of farmer protest videos. You can see these tweets in the comments. We can't entirely defeat the fascists if we do not know what they are doing and who they are using to make their dreams come true.
If this diary scrolls into oblivion, which it appears will happen, it may be my last climate diary on Daily Kos. It's too much work for just a few recs, and I should look elsewhere to blog. The crisis will explode in 2024, but Trump will continue to take up the entirety of the site despite the terrors to come. We will get what we deserve. And I’m not sure I care anymore—best of luck because, boy, will you ever need it.