Tweet
Originally posted by Bob Armstrong
View Post
-
I agree, thanks Bob -
I'd like to add to my Post # 1590 (23/8/6) assessing Libertarianism:
3. - Compensation Tax - Addendum - I am unclear whether Libertarians assign this judgment to the Government or the Courts. In any event, it is simply a fancy word for fining illegal action, which all governments of every stripe do routinely.
4. Freedom of the Individual in Society is paramount. All actions can be done that are not "anti-societal" or, I think, against the "Natural Law" (To be clarified).
Response - This overstates the case. Society limits freedom of the individual in many ways in order to protect society generally and to attempt equality for all. Thus one is not free to run a red-light. A company that does demolition cannot start in the morning whenever it wishes........a noise by-law determines the starting time, given the neighbourhood. I am not free to kill something on an endangered species list - bio-diversity is a key to future human survival. I could go on ad nauseam. Libertarianism doing away with this type of regulation, for the benefit of society as a whole, will leave civilization in total chaos.
Bob A (Anthropogenicist)Comment
-
Originally posted by Bob Armstrong View Post
Do you expect us to take you seriously?Originally posted by Bob Armstrong
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05...arming-crisis/
In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong
A nationwide experiment is abandoned after producing only misery.
MARCH 5, 2022, 7:00 AM
By Ted Nordhaus, the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, and Saloni Shah, a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute.Tea pickers remove weeds at an organic tea plantation.Tea pickers remove weeds at an organic tea plantation in the southern district of in Ratnapura, Sri Lanka, on Aug. 3, 2021. ISHARA S. KODIKARA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. The government is also offering $200 million to farmers as direct compensation and an additional $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers who incurred losses. That hardly made up for the damage and suffering the ban produced. Farmers have widely criticized the payments for being massively insufficient and excluding many farmers, most notably tea producers, who offer one of the main sources of employment in rural Sri Lanka. The drop in tea production alone is estimated to result in economic losses of $425 million.
Human costs have been even greater. Prior to the pandemic’s outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflation and a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country’s economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.
The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country’s political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture: the former for seizing on the organic agriculture pledge as a shortsighted measure to slash fertilizer subsidies and imports and the latter for suggesting that such a transformation of the nation’s agricultural sector could ever possibly succeed.
A worker carries leaves at a tea plantation in Ratnapura, Sri Lanka.
A worker carries leaves at a tea plantation in Ratnapura, Sri Lanka, on July 31, 2021. ISHARA S. KODIKARA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Sri Lanka’s journey through the organic looking glass and toward calamity began in 2016, with the formation, at Rajapaksa’s behest, of a new civil society movement called Viyathmaga. On its website, Viyathmaga describes its mission as harnessing the “nascent potential of the professionals, academics and entrepreneurs to effectively influence the moral and material development of Sri Lanka.” Viyathmaga allowed Rajapaksa to rise to prominence as an election candidate and facilitated the creation of his election platform. As he prepared his presidential run, the movement produced the “Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour,” a sprawling agenda for the nation that covered everything from national security to anticorruption to education policy, alongside the promise to transition the nation to fully organic agriculture within a decade.
Despite Viyathmaga’s claims to technocratic expertise, most of Sri Lanka’s leading agricultural experts were kept out of crafting the agricultural section of the platform, which included promises to phase out synthetic fertilizer, develop 2 million organic home gardens to help feed the country’s population, and turn the country’s forests and wetlands over to the production of biofertilizer.
Following his election as president, Rajapaksa appointed a number of Viyathmaga members to his cabinet, including as minister of agriculture. Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Agriculture, in turn, created a series of committees to advise it on the implementation of the policy, again excluding most of the nation’s agronomists and agricultural scientists and instead relying on representatives of the nation’s small organic sector; academic advocates for alternative agriculture; and, notably, the head of a prominent medical association who had long promoted dubious claims about the relationship between agricultural chemicals and chronic kidney disease in the country’s northern agricultural provinces.
Last edited by Sid Belzberg; Sunday, 6th August, 2023, 04:23 PM.Comment
-
Non-Carnivore-Directed/Organic Farming
1. Viable
a. Small rice farming in India
file:///C:/Users/Bob/Downloads/sustainability-10-04424.pdf
b. Organic farming in Nepal: A viable option for food security and agricultural sustainability
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/335017097.pdf
2. Sustainable
Organic farming is widely considered to be a far more sustainable alternative when it comes to food production.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/20...r-environment/
3. More Profitable than non-organic farming
https://www.dal.ca/faculty/agricultu...itability.html
4. Challenges for Organic Farming can be Overcome
"...organic farming presents its own unique set of challenges, from pests and diseases that can damage crops to lack of access to water and other resources. Here we will explore some of the biggest challenges faced by organic farmers and offer some possible solutions."
https://ryansproduce.com/the-challen...overcome-them/
5. Some Negatives to Organic Farming
Organic food is more expensive because farmers do not get as much out of their land as conventional farmers do. Production costs are higher because farmers need more workers. Marketing and distribution is not efficient because organic food is produced in smaller amounts.
https://byjus.com/ias-questions/what...ganic-farming/
6. Organic Food Really Is Better for the Environment
The gradual shift towards organic farming has been mainly because we as consumers have become increasingly concerned about the health impacts of accidentally consuming pesticides and chemical fertilizers. During the 1990s, the USDA first standardized the meaning of the term “organic” — basically, farmers do not use any form of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides to grow their produce.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/20...r-environment/
7. Growing World Population & Food Security - Organic Farming is the Answer
Problem - producing enough food for a population that could reach 10 billion by 2050, without the extensive deforestation and harm to the wider environment.
Solution - Organic agriculture occupies only 1% of global agricultural land, making it a relatively untapped resource for [future food security], one of the greatest challenges facing humanity.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustaina...e-world-hunger
Bob A (Anthropogenicist)Comment
-
Who said oversight is not necessary? Some of us are nasty and crooked, and break the Natural Law, and need to be caught and punished. Only in Libertarianism can this be done effectively. We all know that attempts at oversight have failed in all other systems, especially Marxism, where the lazy or stupid bums get rewarded as much, if not more (as they use their time in buttering the powerful) as the hard-working or smart ones.Originally posted by Bob Armstrong View PostLast edited by Dilip Panjwani; Sunday, 6th August, 2023, 08:32 PM.Comment
-
Again, it seems you think that only Marxism can 'enforce laws'. Marxism is so full of silly and nasty and contradictory laws that nothing sensible can be enforced in courts. Only in Libertarianism, court enforcement of the Natural Law is the focus of the government.Originally posted by Bob Armstrong View PostComment
-
Don't you think that the Carbon tax is a sensible approach? Well, that is a 'compensation tax'. It has already had a deterrent effect on the use of gasoline, and the proceeds can be diverted to the legitimate users of gasoline to ensure that inflation in suppressed. Nobody can evade the carbon tax, right? It takes a Libertarian government to understand that compensation taxes cannot be chump-change... Marxist politicians cannot even understand the concept, let alone ensure that the taxation appropriately compensates the damage caused.Originally posted by Bob Armstrong View PostComment
-
Of course, one has to believe that there can be good in humans, if they are not tortured by government waste and stupidity. And it is not a fairy-tale, because adequate measures would be in place to ensure that the evil amongst us end up paying to their victims appropriately. So in summary, you need to learn that Marxism has always failed, while Libertarianism, which already exists within friends and families is yet to be tried globally... it will happen one day, as people are not so stupid as not to eventually see its potential, despite folks like you and Bob G still being stuck with looking forward to enjoy the torture inherent in Marxism. The reason politicians are petrified at the thought of Libertarianism is that they would be the ones to lose their obnoxious pomp and false glamour.Originally posted by Bob Armstrong View PostComment
-
Carnivore-directed farming exists for one simple reason: there is a market for it... so if you are so much against it, try and convince at least one of the chesstalkers (Neal F or Bob G ?) to become a vegan... I think you are likely to get a simple response from them: NO, unless some appropriate compensation tax gets implemented on it for the pollution it causes...Originally posted by Bob Armstrong View PostComment
-
You need to have an open mind to be able to grasp even simple concepts: running a red light gets fined even when there are is no traffic and you are rushing your wife to the hospital; the red light law is not necessary, because the Natural law is clear that you cannot harm others sharing the road with you. And a company which creates noise does have to compensate those who suffer from it, whatever time of the day someone's sick mom has to rest, even without the noise by-law.Originally posted by Bob Armstrong View Post
'Bio-diversity is the key to future human survival' is a highly exaggerated statement, but again, if and when harm to humans is clear, the Natural Law would apply here too...
Libertarianism will bring order and smooth functioning to society, unlike the chaos we see all around us because of 'laws, laws, laws' (just ask the politicians like Imran Khan or your work colleagues who refuse to lick the boss' a--s, against whom laws get weaponized), and absence of the Natural Law...Comment
-
Hi Dilip:
It seems to me our discussion of Libertarianism has left Climate Change far behind now. We are hijacking the thread. But, of course, Libertarianism does have a position on negative climate change.
In future, I will deal with Libertarianism in the Human Self Governance (NWO/GR) thread. Seem like a good idea? Bob Gillanders?
Bob AComment
-
Proposed Generally Accepted Statement # 7 (On Farming)
If farming has an effect on global negative climate change (Whether it does will be dealt with in another Statement, if possible), then any negative effect will be mitigated to some extent by the farming industry becoming “sustainable”. Sustainable agriculture is the efficient production of safe, high-quality agricultural product, in a way that protects and improves the natural environment, the social and economic conditions of the farmers, their employees and local communities, and safeguards the health and welfare of all farmed species.(Definition by Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food & Rural Affairs: https://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/busdev/facts/15-023.htm").
Processing Protocol
If not Challenged within one week (Deadline: 23/8/14 @ 11:59 PM EDT), the Statement joins the list of generally accepted Statements.
Bob A (Anthropogenicist - As Participant)Last edited by Bob Armstrong; Monday, 7th August, 2023, 08:22 AM.Comment
-
Originally posted by Bob Armstrong View PostHERE IS WHAT HAPPENS IN THE REAL WORLD WHEN BOB'S GENOCIDAL: CCP CONTROLLED WEF UTOPIAN BULLSHIT IS ACTUALLY IMPLEMENTEDOriginally posted by Bob Armstrong View Post
Sri Lanka faces ‘man-made’ food crisis as farmers stop planting
Once self-sufficient nation reels from fall-out of ill-conceived shift to organic agriculture, economic crisis.
By Zaheena Rasheed, Rathindra Kuruwita
May 18, 2022 05:25 AM
6 min. read
View original
Walsapugala, Sri Lanka – Mahinda Samarawickrema, 49, will not be planting paddy this season.
After a government ban on chemical fertilisers cut his rice yield in half during the March harvest, the farmer, who owns eight hectares (20 acres) of paddy and banana, said he no longer has the income to maintain a farm. Especially as his banana crop also looks set to fail.
“It’s a total loss,” the father of five said in mid-April, standing in a field of stunted banana trees in Sri Lanka’s southern Hambantota district. “When I look at this, I know I cannot get the usual yield.”
By this time of the year, most of Samarawickrema’s trees should be twice their height and in bloom, but only a few of the 1,300 trees in the weed-strewn fields have any flowers. The famer says he used to get up to 37,000kg (81,571 pounds) of bananas a year, but this time, he expects only 6,000kg (13,228 pounds).
“Everything has collapsed,” he said. “I don’t know what to do, but to look up at the sky, look down at the ground and just wait.”
Most smallholder farmers in Samarawickrema’s Walsapugala village also say they will not be irrigating their fields in the current growing season, which runs from May to August and is known as the Yala season. They say the fertiliser ban induced crop failures, coming amid nationwide fuel shortages, make farming untenable.
“There’s no point in farming any more,” said KA Sumanadasa, who grows brinjals (aubergine) on a his quarter of a hectare (0.6-acre) field. Taking out a bag of puny vegetables, many streaked with fungus, the 70-year-old says the switch to organic agriculture has brought down his yield from 400kg (882 pounds) per season to 50kg (110 pounds).
With this output, Sumanadasa said he cannot recover the money he has invested in his farm.
“I can’t take the risk of farming now. I will only be growing enough to feed my family.”
Farmers in Walsapugala say they do not plan to irrigate their fields in the current season [Zaheena Rasheed/ Al Jazeera]
The Movement for Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR), a non-government organisation, says most smallholder farmers in the surrounding Hambantota district, and in key agricultural regions in the north, such as Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa districts, are also halting operations this season.
That could leave Sri Lanka, which is already grappling with shortages of imported foodstuffs amid its worst-ever economic crisis, facing widespread shortages of domestically grown and produced food, too.
“There will be a very hard period in the coming few months in terms of the food aspect,” said Gamini Senanayake, president of the Sri Lanka Council for Agricultural Research Policy. “There will be food shortages … We have to be prepared.”
Fertiliser ban
An island nation of 22 million people, Sri Lanka used to be self-sufficient in food.
But President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s drive to make the country the world’s first to fully adopt organic agriculture – by banning all synthetic agrochemicals, including fertilisers and pesticides – has proved disastrous for Sri Lanka’s food security. Sold as a bid to improve soil health and tackle a mysterious kidney disease among farmers that is believed to be linked to excessive nitrate exposure, the ban was imposed overnight in May of last year.
The country’s 2 million farmers, who make up 30 percent of its labour force and who until then were dependent on subsidised chemical fertilisers, suddenly found themselves left to their own devices. They said the government neither increased production of organic fertiliser nor imported sufficient soil nutrients to meet their needs.
The result has been a dramatic fall in agricultural output during the growing season that ended in March, known locally as the Maha season.
Official figures are not yet available for the Maha harvest, but experts estimate a drop of between 20 to 70 percent, depending on the crop.
For rice, a staple of the Sri Lankan diet, output fell by between 40 and 50 percent nationwide during Maha, according to estimates. The drop has resulted in the island nation importing some 300,000 metric tonnes of rice in the first three months of the year – a sharp rise compared with the 14,000 metric tonnes it imported in 2020.
All of this comes as Sri Lanka also reels from a foreign exchange crisis that has left the government unable to pay for essential imports, including fuel and medicines. Shortages have led to sky-high inflation, long queues for diesel, rolling electricity cuts of up to 13 hours and warnings of a “catastrophic number of deaths” from doctors.
Tens of thousands of people have also taken to the streets in protest, blaming government mismanagement for Sri Lanka’s woes and demanding that Rajapaksa and his powerful brothers step down from their government posts. As protests intensified, the president’s brothers, Basil Rajapaksa and Chamal Rajapaksa, as well as his nephew Namal Rajapaksa quit the cabinet in March.
Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, another brother of the president, was also forced to resign earlier this month after a night of deadly riots, during which protesters set fire to properties linked to the Rajapaksa family and other governing party politicians.
The president, however, has continued to reject calls for his resignation.
He previously denied any responsibility for Sri Lanka’s economic crisis, blaming it on the country’s high debt burden and the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit its lucrative tourism sector hard. But as public anger grew, the president admitted on April 18 that he had made “mistakes” that need to be “rectified”.
His government has since turned to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout and promised to reinstate subsidies on fertilisers, although it is yet to provide any details of the policy.
“The president has agreed that the shift to organics was done too hastily. We have understood the errors and we will provide the fertiliser required by the farmers soon,” Janaka Wakkumbura, who was appointed as agriculture minister in April, told Al Jazeera in early May.
Wakkambura, who has since stepped down, also said that “The World Bank has given us money to buy fertiliser and a few other agencies and countries are to help us too”.
He did not provide further details.
‘Man-made disaster’
But with Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves having dwindled to $1.8bn at the end of April and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushing up fertiliser prices in the world market, experts said it is not clear how the government can afford to import enough soil nutrients for its two million farmers, much less subsidise them.
Lionel Weerakoon, former senior scientist at Sri Lanka’s Department of Agriculture, said the government and private parties had spent about $259m on importing fertiliser in 2020. The bill for 2021 could be between $300m-440m and potentially double that this year.
“The situation is even worse now because Russia, Belarus and China have limited fertiliser exports. If we are to purchase a similar quantity of fertiliser as we did in 2020, we might have to spend $600m,” he said. “The overall management of the country under this government has been disastrous.”
Last edited by Sid Belzberg; Monday, 7th August, 2023, 09:52 AM.Comment
-
Experts are now predicting even greater hardship in Sri Lanka.
Food inflation, which is currently hovering at about 30 percent, could rise even further.
“Food availability is at a crossroads and food accessibility is at a crossroads,” said Jeewika Weerahewa, professor of agriculture at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka.
Describing Sri Lanka’s food crisis as “a man-made disaster,” she said the country will have “serious problems with respect to childhood malnourishment and malnutrition among pregnant women and lactating mothers”.
She added, “In the next four to six months, I think we will be facing more hardship than what we face right now.”
Back in Walsapugala, farmers said they are worried about the future.
Despite the government reversing its ban on agrochemicals, they said they are unable to find adequate fertiliser supplies or afford the market-rate prices.
“Our lifestyle has been destroyed,” said Ajith Kumar, who like Samarawickrema, grows bananas.
“We are relatively small-scale farmers,” he said. “We don’t have any savings. We sustain ourselves from this land. But because we are unable to afford farming, we now have no way to pay back our loans and no way to pay for our children’s education.
“There’s no hope for us.”
Comment
-
Do you read much?????Originally posted by Bob Armstrong
Methane and Climate
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Methane-and-Climate.pdf
Abstract
Atmospheric methane (CH4 ) contributes to the radiative forcing of Earth’s atmosphere. Radiative forcing is the difference in the net upward thermal radiation from the Earth through a transparent atmosphere and radiation through an otherwise identical atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Radiative forcing, normally specified in Watts per square meter (W m−2), depends on latitude, longitude and altitude, but it is often quoted for a representative temperate latitude and for the altitude of the tropopause, or for the top of the atmosphere. For current concentrations of greenhouse gases, the radiative forcing at the tropopause, per added CH4 molecule, is about 30 times larger than the forcing per added carbon-dioxide (CO2 ) molecule. This is due to the heavy saturation of the absorption band of the abundant greenhouse gas, CO2 . But the rate of increase of CO2 molecules, about 2.3 ppm/year (ppm = part per million), is about 300 times larger than the rate of increase of CH4 molecules, which has been around 0.0076 ppm/year since the year 2008.
So the contribution of methane to the annual increase in forcing is one tenth (30/300) that of carbon dioxide. The net forcing from CH4 and CO2 increases is about 0.05 W m−2 year−1. Other things being equal, this will cause a temperature increase of about 0.012 C year−1. Proposals to place harsh restrictions on methane emissions because of warming fears are not justified by facts
Nitrous Oxide and Climate
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/...rous-Oxide.pdf
C. A. de Lange1, J. D. Ferguson2, W. Happer3, and W. A. van Wijngaarden4
1Atomic, Molecular and Laser Physics, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, USA 3Department of Physics, Princeton University, USA
4Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Canada
November 10, 2022
Abstract
Higher concentrations of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O) are expected to slightly warm Earth’s surface because of increases in radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is the difference in the net upward thermal radiation flux from the Earth through a transparent atmosphere and radiation through an otherwise identical atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Radiative forcing, normally measured in W m−2, depends on lati- tude, longitude and altitude, but it is often quoted for the tropopause, about 11 km of altitude for temperate latitudes, or for the top of the atmosphere at around 90 km. For current concentrations of greenhouse gases, the radiative forcing per added N2O molecule is about 230 times larger than the forcing per added carbon dioxide (CO2) molecule. This is due to the heavy saturation of the absorption band of the relatively abundant greenhouse gas, CO2, compared to the much smaller saturation of the absorption bands of the trace greenhouse gas N2O. But the rate of increase of CO2 molecules, about 2.5 ppm/year (ppm = part per million by mole), is about 3000 times larger than the rate of increase of N2O molecules, which has held steady at around 0.00085 ppm/year since the year 1985. So, the contribution of nitrous oxide to the annual increase in forcing is 230/3000 or about 1/13 that of CO2. If the main greenhouse gases, CO2, CH4 and N2O have contributed about 0.1 C/decade of the warming observed over the past few decades, this would correspond to about 0.00064 K per year or 0.064 K per century of warming from N2O.
Proposals to place harsh restrictions on nitrous oxide emissions because of warming fears are not justified by these facts. Restrictions would cause serious harm; for example, by jeopardizing world food supplies.
Last edited by Sid Belzberg; Monday, 7th August, 2023, 10:07 AM.Comment
Comment