By William F. Jasper
Article Source
Is the Biden administration hellbent on destroying America’s food-producing capabilities and making food increasingly unaffordable for the average American family? A reality check of federal policies points directly toward that inescapable conclusion.
First off, the Bidenflation caused by Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar spendathon has driven the creation of new money to pay for the programs and has sent grocery and other prices through the roof. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, from April 2021 to April 2022, U.S. food prices increased 10.8 percent, the largest 12-month increase in 42 years. Even worse have been the price hikes for sources of protein: prices for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs increased 14.3 percent. However, as painful as those prices are already, a raft of Biden administration policies aimed at our agricultural sector is clobbering American farmers and putting food production at risk. While Biden’s fiscal policies and anti-fossil fuel policies are devasting our entire national economy, including agriculture, the administration has specifically singled out farmers and ranchers for heavy-handed treatment from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Energy.
Heavily stacked with former Obama-era hacks, including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Joe Biden’s administration is aggressively pushing forward the extreme environmental agenda he helped launch as vice president to Obama. At the top of that agenda is an obsession with “climate change” — and farmers are being cast as major villains in the alleged heating of our planet. On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the United Nations Paris Climate Agreement; 30 days later we were officially back in.
In 2016, President Obama, fully realizing that he didn’t have Senate support for the pact, sidestepped the U.S. Senate — in clear defiance of Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution — to (illegally) commit America to the onerous document by executive action. In 2017, President Trump made good on his campaign pledge to pull us out of the Paris accord, claiming it would cost the United States $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million jobs, while rewarding the world’s biggest emitters, China and India, with more favorable treatment. However, like the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” the Paris accord was designed to make it impossible to leave. “It is indicative of the agreement’s shortcomings,” notes the Institute for Energy Research, “that it stipulates that no nation can leave for three years after signing, and requires another year after that to actually withdraw, yet allows re-entry just 30 days after notifying the U.N.” So it is that even though President Trump announced the termination of U.S. participation in the agreement on June 1, 2017, he was only able to formally announce withdrawal in November 2019. And, even so, the withdrawal still did not kick in until November 4, 2020 — the day after the election that put the “green” Biden regime in power the following January. In other words, it was a totally rigged deal. In the words of the Eagles’ iconic song, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Despite his regular appeals to the Constitution and “the rule of law,” Biden’s rejoining of the Paris accord has been no more legitimate that Obama’s original constitutional dodge. Nevertheless, he quickly employed the UN program to bludgeon the U.S. energy and farming sectors under the favorite pretext of globalists: saving the planet. In July of 2022, he ratcheted up the rhetoric and the regulatory mayhem by declaring that the “climate crisis” had now become a “climate emergency.” And, like President Obama, he proclaimed that because it is an “emergency” he will not wait for obstructionist Republicans in Congress; he will simply resort to executive orders. Rule by fiat rather than the rule of law — the practice by which republics become dictatorships.
Davos Megalomania
Only the most clueless naif could believe that mumbling, bumbling, stumbling, grumbling Joe Biden is actually calling the shots at the White House, or that he, on his own, has been coming up with the grandiose plans for a “new world order,” to which he has made frequent reference over the years. Even before his descent into full-blown dementia, Biden was, as we have previously noted, merely a globalist sock puppet, regurgitating lines dished out by the Council on Foreign Relations (he referred to CFR President Richard Haass as his boss), the World Economic Forum, and the United Nations. For example, his signature campaign slogan “Build Back Better” was completely a rip-and-read catchphrase handed to him by the World Economic Forum/UN propaganda bureau. Suddenly, “Build Back Better” became a global mantra for political leaders and influencers: Tony Blair, Justin Trudeau, Emanuel Macron, Boris Johnson, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Greta Thunberg, Antony Blinken, Bill Gates, Prince Charles, Barack Obama, and more. The Build Back Better (BBB) scheme was put forward by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) to exploit the fear and turmoil caused by the Covid pandemic and the phony global-warming “crisis” to implement what the WEF refers to as the Great Reset. According to Herr Schwab, humanity must follow him and the WEF masterminds as they “reset” the entire planet politically, economically, socially, biologically, morally, and spiritually. A big part of that reset is centralizing political control over “food systems,” a move that is already stirring farmers’ revolts worldwide (see “No Farmers, No Food”).
As we will demonstrate below, Joe Biden’s agriculture policies are totally intertwined with the WEF/UN climate agenda, and if carried through to fruition will catastrophically impact American farmers and American consumers. Even worse, they will almost certainly lead to mass starvation in the developing world.
On February 8, 2022, Joe Biden’s Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack appeared as a virtual panelist on the WEF’s “Food Systems 2022: Bold Actions for Food” event in Davos, Switzerland. While people all over the world are struggling to get food and are worried about how to feed their families, the pampered, privileged panelists of the WEF billionaires club worried about how to utilize the UN’s upcoming COP27 (Conference of Parties on climate) taking place in November to fasten more greenhouse-gas restrictions on farmers and food processors.
“I couldn’t agree more with the folks who suggested that future COPs simply have got to focus on food and agriculture as a critical component to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and getting our arms around the climate challenge we face,” Vilsack said. “In the U.S. we have very aggressive goals,” he continued. “We want to get to net zero for U.S. agriculture by 2050. We want to meet our NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution) by 2030.” Incidentally, appearing with Vilsack on the WEF virtual dais was Qu Dongyu, director-general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and a member of the Chinese Communist Party leadership. Not surprisingly, comrade Qu Dongyu uses his perch at FAO and his appearances at the WEF to promote CCP-style central planning for agriculture.
Vilsack, who also served as agriculture secretary under President Obama, is a longtime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Together with Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry (former CFR member), he serves as point man for forcing “climate smart” practices on America’s farmers, although Biden and Vilsack insist it will be voluntary. Vilsack told his WEF confreres that the Biden administration is promoting “Climate Smart Commodities” so that when consumers go into a supermarket they will know if the food they’re buying was produced with “climate smart” practices. According to Vilsack, the administration had already committed $1 billion to this program to facilitate “rapid adoption” of, among other things, tracking GHG (greenhouse gas) reductions and carbon sequestration.
The Biden/WEF climate obsession is taking aim not only at the usual GHG target, CO2 — which is the “gas of life,” an essential plant food, not a pollutant — but also at methane and nitrogen oxide. Yes, the WEF “experts” are obsessed with supposed planetary dangers posed by the methane burps and flatulence of beef and dairy cattle. In November 2021, Biden and European Union Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen launched the Global Methane Pledge, an initiative to reduce global methane emissions, at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November of 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. The increasingly restrictive methane mandates will not only impact farmers directly by restricting the number of cattle they can raise, but indirectly as well, due to the methane mandates being placed on natural gas and oil producers. These will continue to drive up the costs of fuel, fertilizer, and feed, all of which are key inputs for food production.
Likewise, the Biden/EU/WEF/UN fixation on nitrogen oxide is another ludicrous example of “climate science” serving a totalitarian agenda swaddled in alleged environmental concerns. As mentioned in our article “No Farmers, No Food,” it is the EU’s nitrogen oxide restrictions that threaten to destroy Europe’s farmers and have brought tens of thousands of them out with their tractors to block roads in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Poland, Scotland, and Ireland.
Kerry has publicly admitted — in a rare moment of candor — that he and Biden realize that even after destroying our economy with multi-trillion-dollar climate boondoggles, we won’t have much impact on global temperatures. “He knows Paris alone is not enough,” Kerry told reporters at a January 2021 White House press briefing, referring to Biden re-entering the United States in the Paris climate agreement in one of his first acts as president. “Not when almost 90 percent of all of the planet’s global emissions come from outside of US borders. We could go to zero tomorrow and the problem isn’t solved,” Kerry acknowledged. So much for the sacred “net zero” totem. China, India, and Russia will continue to pay lip service, while U.S. taxpayers and consumers pay in real cash — and lost freedoms.
It Keeps Coming
In June, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency released its “green” Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) requirements, mandating the largest-ever amount of ethanol and biodiesel the nation’s refiners must blend into the American fuel supply.
The EPA announced it will require refiners to blend 20.77 billion gallons of ethanol, biodiesel, and other renewable fuel this year. The agency said the decision on the standard reflects “the Biden administration’s commitment to reset and strengthen the RFS, bolster our nation’s energy security, and support homegrown biofuel alternatives to oil for transportation fuel.” In addition, the EPA denied exemptions for nearly 70 small refineries, a move that could force many of them out of business, further harming America’s crucial refinery capacity and making us more vulnerable to Communist China, which has surpassed us as the world’s leading petroleum refiner.
Still another Biden attack on American agriculture was unleashed in May of 2021. The Washington Post (of course!) was the vehicle used to announce it in dramatic fashion. “Air pollution from farms leads to 17,900 U.S. deaths per year, study finds,” screamed the headline, followed by this subtitle: “The first-of-its-kind report pinpoints meat production as the leading source of deadly pollution.”
Even if the death toll claim were true (it’s not) and the study were not plagued by dodgy science (it was), why the media hyperventilation over “farm dust” while ignoring Biden’s open-border policy that’s swamping our nation with fentanyl and other opioids from China that are killing more than 100,000 Americans per year?
Steve Milloy points out in his junkscience.com blog that “The study is funded by a $10 million grant awarded by the Obama administration’s EPA, and pretends to examine fine dust and soot emissions (called ‘PM2.5’) from all farm operations — including machinery, tilling, fertilizer use, field burning, livestock movement, waste management and more.”
As Milloy notes, the EPA used the same bogus computer modeling and PM2.5 statistical charade to destroy America’s coal industry, which largely supported Trump and the Republican Party. Now Biden and the Democrats are using all the same tools in their basket to destroy American farmers, who overwhelmingly vote Republican, support Trump, and detest the liberal leftism of the “progressive” coastal elites.
WOTUS, POTUS, SCOTUS
Of grave concern to farmers, ranchers, and rural communities across the nation is the announcement by the Biden EPA of plans to reopen the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States (WOTUS) regulations. The 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA) grants the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers power to regulate “navigable waters of the United States.” This was understood to mean coastal waters, bays, lakes, and rivers. However, never underestimate government bureaucrats’ capacities for overreach. The EPA invented a definition of WOTUS that included streams, wetlands, ponds, and drainage ditches — none of which are “navigable,” and which, in many cases, are miles (sometimes many miles) from navigable waters. To the great relief of rural folks everywhere, POTUS Trump rolled back POTUS Obama’s WOTUS rule and replaced it with the “Navigable Waters Protection Rule” (NWPR). Now POTUS Biden is moving to reimpose WOTUS, which will bring the controversy before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).
Recent SCOTUS decisions, particularly the Court’s June 30 ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, give reason for hope that efforts to reinstall WOTUS would be smacked down. In the June 30 decision, a 6-3 majority limited the EPA’s ability to limit carbon emissions from electric power plants. The ruling upheld a fundamental constitutional principle that federal agencies must have clear authorization from Congress before exercising regulatory powers. And in the case of West Virginia v. EPA, the Court ruled that the EPA did not have that authorization.
While the conservative majority on the Supreme Court offers some hope of staying the heavy hand of government under POTUS Biden, it can not substitute for a constitutionalist-oriented Congress. Our fast-approaching midterm elections may be the most important in our nation’s history, and we should be doing all within our powers to see that the Pelosi-Schumer forces are swept from the halls of power. Need some encouragement that such an outcome is possible? Consider a recent story from The New York Times lamenting that voters have almost zero interest in climate change.
“Still, just 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named climate change as the most important issue facing the country, far behind worries about inflation and the economy,” the Times reported on July 17, 2022. “Even among voters under 30, the group thought to be most energized by the issue, that figure was 3 percent.”
The Times poll merely confirmed what multiple establishment surveys have been showing for years: After three decades of saturation propaganda, the American public is still not ready to drink the global-warming Kool-Aid.
