Speaking of Sweden, Thunberg ...

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Right or Wrong, My Countryman Miss Thunberg is Not an Idiot · New blog on the kid: Speaking of Sweden, Thunberg ...

Possibly more famous by now, certainly more Swedish than Zlatan. No offense, Ibrahimovic, I'm sure you make excellent cevapcici. Or keep track of someone who does.

Jeremy Clarkson has come out basically saying Greta is currently an idiot, though not an incurable one.

I have stated she's not an idiot, whether she's right or wrong. The big four list of countries which Jeremy Clarkson thinks she should target is basically 57.43 % of global emissions. A basically much more at least potentially Thunberg friendly list is 32.15 %, less, but not less than half. So, the kind of impact she's working for is not a completely useless one ... supposing she is right.

That's the next question. Is she right? Is she wrong, even catastrophically wrong? Or somewhere in between.

I would argue, she is wrong about the reasons, but not catastrophically, since her measures would do good on other accounts. I was going to see if using horses instead of petrol driven tractors would reduce CO₂ emissions. If so, I thought, this would benefit small farms, which are a good thing in and of itself. Farmers are happier, less indebted, less likely to be lonely and commit suicide, less burdened, since constituting themselves a larger part of the consumers and giving off less to the non-producing consumers (non-producing as in agricultural produce).

Local networks of farmers and consumers certainly encourage small farms as well as reducing carbon emissions, because transports take up part of the carbon thing.

But back to the ploughing. What I found was neither what I had expected, nor the opposite (tractors using less carbon). It was a different angle.

Farming Online: 20 per cent of world’s CO₂ from ploughing – soil scientist
15 Jan 2014 | [someone interviewed] Dr John Baker
https://farming.co.uk/news/20-per-cent-of-world%E2%80%99s-co2-from-ploughing-%E2%80%93-soil-scientist

“When a farmer ploughs and cultivates a paddock it releases CO2 into the atmosphere. The vast majority (95 percent) is released from soil with the other five percent coming from tractor exhausts,” Dr Baker says

... “When you look at it from a global level, you realise that 15-20 per cent of the CO2 in the world’s atmosphere comes from ploughing.”

His solution is not giving up farming so no one can eat, but:

... good no-tillage causes minimal disturbance to the soil, traps the humidity, preserves micro-organisms and soil life, largely prevents carbon from escaping into the atmosphere and significantly improves crop yields. But poor no-tillage and minimum tillage achieve few of these things.

Now, the other thing is, why is China using all the carbon emissions? To a large part, it's because they produce things cheaply for export. Protectionism against Chinese imports could be a thing. And perhaps this shouldn't be just for China, but a more general protection for small indigenous producers in our Western countries. We are all consumers. The cheaper goods are, the more we can consume. But we are all only consuming in our relation to producers:

• being ourselves producers or their family members,
• being transport companies for transport between producers and consumers,
• being salaried with producers or transporters,
• or in each case again family members of such
• or being in precarious situations economically, as well as family members of such, and therefore often more or less depending on state or municipal welfare or on alms.

The more independent producers are needed for the consumption, the fewer are salaried and the fewer are precarious. The more local producers are, the less are involved in transport, hence reduction of CO₂, but also the more producers the locality will have, reducing the number of precarious people. And the risk of getting into that situation.

The problem is partly, how likely would the Thunberg friendly West be to win in something like a trade war situation?

But even if Miss Thunberg were wrong, that doesn't make Jeremy Clarkson right. He speaks of her going back to school, and if Thunberg is wrong, it's precisely from Swedish school teachers she has it.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Lupus of Lyons
25.IX.2024

Lugduni, in Gallia, depositio sancti Lupi, qui ex Anachoreta factus est Episcopus.

PS, here is some on ploughing with a horse, and it seems the French binage is less to the dislike of Dr John Baker than labourage would be (especially as viticulture is anyway not a majority of the hectares), here:

The Burgundy Briefing : Ploughing
Sarah Marsh Ltd, London. | 2019
https://theburgundybriefing.com/briefings/ploughing/