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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

I would replace 'protesting' with 'terrorizing'.

They've been visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings.

What is most aggrieving to me is that the police is pseudo on the side of the farmers. The head of the police said that he 'fully understands the plight of the farmers' and will keep on a policy of de-escalation. Scant few fines too.

Meanwhile a couple of climate protestors that tie themselves to a bridge get their head bashed in and then get fines of €300-5000.

Clown world.

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I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd. They should have started with severe controls on importing goods from countries with high levels of pollution

Do you have a source of the government "placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers"? The Dutch government wanted[0] to curb emissions, and since (high intensity) farms are huge polluters, some of the measurements affected farmers.But I can't remember them placing the blame on the farmers.

[0] Well, they didn't really want it, but had to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/dutch-official...

> placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd

Nobody is doing that, this is blatant misinformation that is being spread by interest groups that profit off Dutch farmers.

Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen. As the OP mentioned, it is causing acidification of nature areas, which is negatively impacting all sorts of wildlife. It's a mostly local problem, often caused by intensive farming and is mostly unrelated to climate change.

> Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen.

Yes, and nitrogen fertilizer yields nitrous oxide which is a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change [1]. This is not just "misinformation", this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer.

[1] https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/fertilizer-and-climate-ch...

> this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer

Sure, that might be true, but it is definitely blatant misinformation that Dutch farmers are being blamed for climate change. It is not part of the discussion that's currently ongoing in The Netherlands and that is purposefully being misrepresented in (mostly American) right-wing media. This needs to be clear, because the violent protests by framers in The Netherlands are being abused by foreign interest groups who frame them as protests against those farmers being blamed for climate change.

This is a real issue, because this is starting to become an actual discussion point for those who are supporting the farmers. They are, for example, asking why farmers are now targeted and airports are not, while farmers cause 88x more nitrogen emissions than flights in the Netherlands. Also, those emissions are less focused on the problem areas.

Misinformation is incredibly harmful in this discussion and therefore it's incredibly important to keep the facts straight. Otherwise all discussions and arguments will mix and there will never actually be anything done.

I admit find this response confusing.

Given that climate change is the primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer, it's implicit that the farmers are contributing to climate change. Are the people claiming that the farmers are being blamed for climate change saying that the farmers are the only or primary driver for climate change? That would obviously be incorrect, but the former claim is absolutely correct.

Maybe it's not part of the conversation in the Netherlands, but I'm not seeing what's factually wrong about it. Are they actually claiming that climate change is part of the discussion in the Netherlands? If this isn't part of the conversation in the Netherlands, what exactly are they talking about?

> Are the people claiming that the farmers are being blamed for climate change saying that the farmers are the only or primary driver for climate change?

All the comments in this thread are replies to someone who seems to do exactly that by defending farmers "visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings." by saying "I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd."

Ok, but one HN comment is not a misinformation trend throughout right wing media, per the parent comment.

Here's an example about the misinformation campaign that's happening in the US about the issues in the Netherlands:

https://youtu.be/IUGwT8irPKc

This video is full of blatant misinformation and misrepresentation. Our current discussion is not about climate change, it's about acidification and that's it. No matter how true your comments may be, it has nothing to do with the situation in the Netherlands and it continues the spread of this misinformation. Please stop, it's harmful.

Good to know, but I don't see why it's harmful. Here in Canada they're also contemplating nitrogen fertilizer bans for reasons of climate change, so it's not like this argument isn't being made.

Given that climate change is the primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer

That's simply not true. The primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer in NL is habitat change (i.e. it has profound effects on the habitats of native species), not climate change.

You might be right here.

They were blamed not for climate change, instead for nitrogen disposition.

This is a uniquely Dutch problem, largely unrelated to CO2. In larger countries, there's clear zoning and distance between protected nature and intensive agriculture. Not in the Netherlands, where these two things are directly bordering each other. Hence, the agriculture very directly destroys its surrounding nature. Not by CO2, by nitrogen.

The highway blockades have lead to accidents too, in one case a fatal one: https://www.rtvutrecht.nl/nieuws/3443753/twee-aanhoudingen-n...

If there were that many of organized climate protesters they would be heard as well, it always comes down to numbers and potential for violence.

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