The War on Carbon is a War on Us
The EPA is regulating against humanity, starting with our food
Humanity is the environmentalists’ new enemy and our food is their newest battleground. New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams, for example, announced this spring that the city would continue cutting meat out of its meals, with a goal of cutting the city food program’s “carbon footprint” by 33 percent over seven years. Ideas like this have been kicked around the hard-left for years, earning Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk laughs and scoffs from the tabloids and public alike, but Adams was elected as a moderate—as a palatable alternative who would maintain liberal fundamentals while resisting the excesses of that agenda. His embrace of the anti-meat agenda represents a mainstaying of an ideology thought outside the bounds just last year, and signals the anti-carbon agenda’s expansion into our daily lives.
Truth be told, Adams is behind the curve for fashionable bans: The Netherlands has spent the past year going straight to the source and shutting down their vibrant Dutch cattlemen on their own farms. But the mayor of the world wasn’t about to be left out of the action, and last month added a crackdown on the traditional wood-fired pizza ovens that have served as an internationally renowned Big Apple staple for decades.
These bans are a stark departure from environmentalist dogma, and stand apart from even recent left-wing moves to ban gas-cooking—an essential in any serious kitchen—in that neither raising cattle nor eating meat nor even cooking pizza emits harmful or artificial chemicals.
We’ve come a long way from an environmental movement concerned with actual deadly chemicals. Long gone are the days of A Civil Action or Erin Brockovich, by and large because the West has largely reformed its actual polluters and cleaned up its air and waterways. The air might still stink in our biggest cities, but you can breathe healthily on a muggy day; and while the water’s far from tropical, you can now swim in the Chesapeake Bay or even Boston’s Charles River.
These newer attacks aren’t on your everyday pollutants, though: they’re on carbon and nitrogen, the gasses emitted by breath and animal waste, respectively. That is to say, they are attacks on the natural outputs of life itself.
In New York City, the vegetarian mayor is eager to put the city’s students, hospital patients and prisoners on his same diet in the name of curbing “carbon emissions.”
“It is easy to talk about emissions that are coming from vehicles and how it impacts our carbon footprint,” he told reporters in April, when announcing a 33 percent cut to New York City cafeterias’ carbon footprint. “It is easy to talk about the emissions that’s coming from buildings and how it impacts our environment. But now we now have to talk about beef, and I don’t know if people are really ready for this conversation.”
“I love my vegan pizza with vegan cheese,” Adams said last week in defense of his demand that city wood-fired-oven pizzerias cut their wood emissions by 75 percent. The emissions from burning wood, he claimed, were apparent in the smog caused along the eastern seaboard this year by Canada’s raging wildfires. (Fun fact: for a thousand years American Indians used controlled burns to prevent forest fires—and used wood to cook their food—technologies both now seemingly lost to modern man.)
“I think pizzas have saved more marriages than any other foods,” the never-married 62-year-old added.
Meanwhile in The Netherlands, the government is cracking down on farmers who make their country Europe’s largest exporter of meat. How’d they find the authority to demand farmers sell their lands and cut their herds by 33 percent? First, activists pushed to give “protected status” to forests and parks throughout the country. Then, government bureaucrats interpreted E.U. environmental regulations to say the nitrogen produced by animal waste was a threat to park and forest animals. The bans, of course, had no basis in either fact or reality.
“What’s strange,” Common Sense Society member and Dutch sociologist Eric Hendriks wrote last year, ”is that the urgent nitrogen problem the government argues warrants this dramatic government intervention doesn’t actually exist. It’s true that high nitrogen concentrations can reduce biodiversity in an area where plant species are adapted to a low-nitrogen environment, but nitrogen emissions have reduced in recent decades. As recently as the 1990s, they were three times higher than today. These reduction rates are the result of new, eco-friendly technologies.”
No matter; Prime Minister Mark Rutte aims to lower his country’s nitrogen oxide levels by 50 percent by 2030, and so the farmers have three options, their government said in a statement: "Becoming more sustainable, relocating or ending their business."
Rutte called their plight at his hands an “unavoidable transition.”
But how did the United States get here, to a place where our bureaucrats and politicians are regulating breath and wood-fire and organic waste like they were toxic chemicals?
Our country’s descent into regulating against humanity kicked into high gear with 2007’s Massachusetts v. EPA, where the Supreme Court decided the Environmental Protection Agency not only had the authority to regulate carbon, but had better explain itself if it intended not to.
In 2022, the court found in West Virginia v. EPA that the EPA had exceeded its authority since the Massachusetts case, but the Biden administration codified the EPA’s authority over “greenhouse gasses” in its 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
No matter the route or the continent, environmentalism has long left the path of improving our lives and our environment, and instead forged forward into a strange combination of self-loathing powered by self-righteousness. How could the products of human life itself be a pollutant unless…?
But therein lies your answer: the people behind these ideas (and driving their implementation) assume every effect we have on our environment is harmful.
Western elites’ march against their own farmers, against their civilization’s eating customs and habits, against traditional and ancient methods of cooking, is a march on humanity itself—and it won’t end here. The stuff of New York Post jeers and Fox News ridicule today is the stuff of White House and Brussels policy tomorrow.
They believe they are tasked with a sacred mission to save our planet from a deeply implausible pollution-driven doomsday. Worse yet: they believe you are the pollutant.
Good collection of food-centered regulatory madness tales.
Seems the only way to show the faults with this kind of regulatory regime is to compare those restricted countries with unfettered countries. Others ways will just be white papers and statistics, stark differences like North v South Korea make the point.
Any countries not doing this?