A hallmark of western civilization and its extraordinary success over the past five centuries has been its ability to look ahead and think things through to achieve worthy goals. Looking ahead it is hard to see how energy and food are on a path that will advance civilization.
Agriculture is in the activists’ sights; the live export industry is a soft target as it has an enormous disconnect with the voters who will decide its fate.
The southern industry’s path is one of legislated reduction in livestock numbers. This battle will be won by the group who wins the hearts and minds of the general population. Now the so-called elites, university professors, animal rights activists and climate alarmists are well ahead – even though in the wash-up they are advocating for a poorer future.
Farmers have the best story in town, it is just we are not engaging with the masses.
If we want to maintain agriculture we must engage with the voting consumers. The activists are very successfully silencing opposition with guilt laden rhetoric. The four tenets of the west are freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of association and property rights including our intellectual property rights. If we weaken any one of these you weaken them all. These tenets are eroded when we do not stand up for them. We are allowing debate to be stifled in some vain attempt to not offend the other side, they certainly have no issue offending us.
We should be able to question the validity and direction of massive decisions around energy and food security without being labeled climate deniers, fake experts, or climate skeptics. The ones pushing the carbon scare say the ‘science is settled’ which is possibly the most unscientific thing you could say. There appears to be enormous disengagement from the citizens who are disillusioned with the current system and oblivious to the dire consequences a low carbon future will hold.
‘Claiming a cow eating grass is bad for the planet is akin to saying fish are bad for the ocean’
Saying Carbon Dioxide is a problem is a bold-faced lie, as is saying biogenic methane from grazing animals is a problem. Claiming a cow eating grass is bad for the planet is akin to saying fish are bad for the ocean. There are countless examples to expose the lie, can anyone reconcile the following three facts with the current climate propaganda:
- Over the past 140 million years atmospheric Co2 levels have been falling from 2,500ppm to 300ppm and have risen to 420ppm since the beginning of the industrial revolution. (Berner 2001). If Co2 levels fell to 200ppm agriculture would collapse, at 150ppm all plant life would become extinct.
- The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have themselves conceded that the warming effect of each additional molecule of Co2 released into the atmosphere decreases logarithmically. This explains why there was no runaway greenhouse warming when our planet had Co2 concentrations of 20 times today’s 0.04%. (ch 6.1 Monckton 2017).
- Annual greenhouse contributions to the planet are: 6% (Co2) x 3.7% (human activity) x 1.2% (Australia) = 0.0016%. We are told we need to reduce this number by 7% a year. So, if we do this, we may make 0.0015% difference to the world’s atmosphere. For the old school it will make 15/10,000 of a difference.
The utopian renewable economy promising prosperity for everyone is a blatant lie, the countries which have gone down the unreliable’s path have shown every single time they are more expensive, unreliable and will drastically increase the cost of energy and food.
In Germany it has been shown that when wind is 20pc of electricity costs rise by 60pc when wind is 40pc of electricity costs rise by 100pc. (https: //doi.org/10.1039/c7ee03029k). The government is pretending they can solve our cost-of-living pressures with a strategy that will drastically increase the cost of living.
Increasing the cost of energy increases the cost of food, this relationship is inseparable. Why an industry which is trusted by consumers would perpetuate and promote the carbon lie is beyond me. Consumers are the only ones who put money into the supply chain which is distributed downstream to our farm gates, they rely on us to tell them the truth about our environmental, animal welfare and nutritional credentials. Why would we risk our reputation on a lie which will be exposed as soon as 2030 when we must acknowledge CN30 was never achievable. We are at a much greater risk of reputational damage from being dishonest than we are on jeopardizing trade deals, especially when we have a much more tangible and realistic metric in climate neutrality.
To be blunt, we should not fear deeply offending the seriously mis-informed people who are pushing this climate-catastrophe agenda, the policies they stand for are bad for the environment, animals, the atmosphere, and humanity. Until we engage with our consumers in a modern and relevant manner we will be misunderstood, ostracized, and punished through misinformation provided by animal rights and climate activists. Farming is the most noble and essential business on earth, not only do we sustain civilization we provide nourishment to millions of human beings.
There is a scenario where our northern live cattle export may be the next industry to go, just as the south west sheep live export has gone recently. One of our closest neighbors and trading partner is Indonesia, with 270 million citizens it is the fourth most populus nation on earth with 100-150 million of their most vulnerable spending 90pc of their income on food. A humanitarian catastrophe will be created to appease inner-city left-wing voters who have no understanding of the consequential damage their disconnected agendas cause to humanity and the environment. While we have the luxury of spending about 11pc of our income on food, we ignore the plight of humans less fortunate than us. As an industry we are constantly working to improve animal welfare standards so we can address the human right to have access to life sustaining sustenance.
As much as we cannot look to our governments to fix our problems we can and should vote them out of office if they implement policies that increase our cost of living and reduce the prosperity of our nation. If your cost of living is running away it is because the government is causing this by implementing the most un-scientific ideological scam ever perpetrated on humanity. If you are feeling pressure, can you imagine what the third world are feeling. There has never been a safer time in the history of humans to be a dissenter, 300 years ago you would have been burnt at the stake for speaking out. We do not live under a communist regime, speak up and stand up, if not for yourself do it for your children and grandchildren.
George King, Carcoar.
George King has contributed this article in his personal capacity as a cattle producer from NSW. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
I couldnt follow this article at all or what exactly George was trying to say. A jumble of undeveloped ideas glued together with rhetoric. My advice to George is stick to cattle and arguments why he thinks live export should be kept without the polemic stuff. People will be more likely to listen. #keepthesheep
I am sure this has nothing to with the process or live shipment of sheep and or cattle. It is simply the current government has a beef with the farmers and this is a way to stick it them. We can only hope that the live export market is still there after this current govt are replaced.
Brilliant George!!!
Finally, some pragmatic, common sense (unfortunately not very common these days!) that we should all get behind, stand up for and advocate!!!
well george the ice is melting. your thinking is a bit short sighted. would hate to be a kid in 100 years time
Yes the ice is melting because we are in an intergalacial period, and at current rates the ice will melt fully in about 700 years from now.
No where in the IPCC reports do they have a single apocalyptic prediction from the effect of climate change. Perhaps we should stop terrifying children into depressive neuroses with delusional apocalyptic stories.
I reside in Sw of West Australia, the effect of Canberra decisions on our way of life is alarming.Many small country towns that rely on sheep exports may close Also this affect mushrooms to truck drivers,farmhands,rural industries attached to this business.City consumers will have added costs to already stretched budgets by this driven ideological decision .
Activists are narrow minded, only hearing one side of any argument. Many people will die in Indonesia if the live cattle export stops as they do not have powering many small islands, therefore no refrigerator or freezers. Completely taking there food away . Keep the live cattle and sheep export going .
You have reinforced many of the points promoted by professor Ian Plimer.
The renewable madness.
Keep up the good work our kids & grand kids will carry the burden.
Have a cartoon on Bowen if your interested.
Regards Terry Fishpool.
0428924029
Live Cattle Exports is similar to a fruit farmer selling fruit crop on the trees
Are not all the people in our wonderful cities breathing the same air as our cattle and polluting the air in the same manner yet we are not reducing their numbers ?
Spot on George. MLA needs to be taken to task for CN30 and their failure to support LE. We need to reinvest in the Aust/Indo red meat partnership.
This is what happens when producers louse oversite of our Levy money.
So heartily agree. MLA took primary producers, particularly cattle producers, down the drain right from the very beginning of this insanity.
Social licence is essential and seeing Australian cattle killed in countries such as Vietnam without effective stunning has rightly eroded this. Look to industry change makers like Provenir to advance your interests.
Excellent and well said. Power to our farmers
George
Your opinion is simply promoting the activists.
Food production will always prevail. How lucky we are in Australia.
Don’t give the activists ‘air’.
Are you personally receiving benefits from advocating this approach?
George, you certainly touched a nerve with at least one commentator. The attempted closing down/cancelling response/s demonstrates who lacks confidence in their own argument when pitted against yours. Needless to say, I will no doubt be pilloried for daring to make the point.
The fact that you are in the business, and can see the reality of the circumstances, gives you a pragmatic advantage over the utopian ideologues and unintelligent activists, who almost certainly do not have comparative capacity.
Extremely well researched and comprehensively prosecuted argument George. The problem is the brainwashing starts in kindergarten and the population is hammered with a lot of this woke politically correct rubbish all the way through the education system hence the socialist have politicised the education system along with all the rest of the public institutions. They bang on about solutions whilst being the main offenders of the problem!
e.g. don’t consume gas domestically export it so someone else can.
Well written George King. All the truths which we are bowing to with so little fightback.
Of his four western tenets i believe it is already too late to try and save these. Thanks to Political Correctness our freedom of speech has been taken from us. Our freedom of belief is removed from us by allowing any criticism of beliefs like muslim to be libelous with litigation to follow. Our property rights are being handed out daily in this country by the very people we vote in to run the country, and this to those who got here 60,000 years ago and relinquished their rights when white man came to develop this great land. but they want the profits not the land.
One has to wonder whether the pro renewables and CO2 activists, are not using their emissions war on progress to actually close down agriculture, by getting that 150 ppm goal?
As for those 270 million Indonesians just a canoe paddle across from our Great North, who by the way are most likely multiplying at a 10% rate per annum and there is not that much spare room for them in all their little islands, so it does not take much imagination which way they will spread once completely overpopulating their land.
Oh yes, look at all that great land to the south, we are already referred to as Southern Indonesia to some of them, and all those whities (they can say that as they have not accepted our stupidity known as Political Correctness) have been preserving it for us for centuries now. They won’t give our first arrivers their rights nor listen to any greenies nor the latte supping SMH readers who have made it so easy for them to come and enjoy what we are not allowed to develop.
I agree George, we don’t live under a communist regime, but I can assure you we as well as most of the West is currently under an extremely socialist era. Governed by the wishes of institutions like the UN, which should have been dismantled sometime in the sixties, instead of giving it the power to try and socialize the world.
Look forward to a few replies to Mr. Plumb’s comments which I just now notice below. Must be another SMH fanatic.
I, could not finish reading, the case against Live Cattle Exports has nothing to do with emissions
My apologies Don, I didn’t articulate enough what I meant when I said “Increasing the cost of energy increases the cost of food, this relationship is inseparable”.
There is no way we can discuss food supply, price and certainty without discussing the cost of energy. If you are a subsistence farmer in sub Saharan Africa farming with animal and human labour food will be scarce and therefore expensive compared to local incomes because it will be unreliable and inefficient. It is estimated yields in the 3rd world would lift by 70% with access to energy (“Closing the yield gap through nutrition and water management” Mueller, Gerber, Johnson et al)
If you were a farmer in the mid west of USA with open access to energy and the price of energy goes up the cost of production goes up too, the tractor is more expensive, diesel, fertiliser, chemicals and freight all add to the cost. These costs are either passed on or the farmer doesn’t grow the crop reducing the available produce increasing the price.
The carbon agenda is to decrease the use of fossil fuel emissions which increases the cost of energy and will correspondingly increase the cost of food. My point is this policy will drastically hurt the earth’s most venerable humans whilst causing more environmental damage. If we were serious about fixing the global environment we would be working to lift the poorest humans out of poverty. Once humans in third worlds get an annual income over USD$5k they start to care about the environment. Organised agriculture stops native animals from being used as a food source, the Congo still eats 2.2 million tonnes of wild animals per year.
Many of the humans which rely on our live exports do not have electricity and cold storage, they don’t have the luxury disposable income or alternative food options.
Seriously?
Full on denialism, scientific nonsense.
George may have visions of a great future as a politician but it would certainly only be as a screeching fringe lunatic.
Beef Central needs to decide if it is going to be a serious forum for educated discussions or a site for Make Agriculture Great Again misfits.
David, you obviously have responded to this article apparently without having any background in the details and experience concerned with the situation.
Your response reminds one of the screeching and giddy whirling of the local Corellas: no meaning nor commonsense to the general population and only understood by those who are of the same feather.
I hope that you come to see the reality of this matter and how you and people like you, depend on farmers and farms and their products to be allowed to be productive.
I thought George’s article came under the title of ‘Opinion’, or is yours the only one acceptable
Straight to the fact-free, virtuous outrage and indignant personal insults from on high David eh? A fine use of your freedom of speech.
The MAGAMs has a bit of a ring to it. Thanks for that. I’m sure George will be able to work with it.
David Plumb just identified himself with the last word he wrote.
Great article George King!