Europe struggles to balance climate and farming
Farmers blocking a highway near Mollerussa, Spain. Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press
European farmers are angry, and much of their ire is directed at ambitious environmental policies that are part of the European Union’s Green Deal.
Since the beginning of this year, thousands of farmers have protested in dozens of cities across Europe, putting intense pressure on politicians ahead of elections for the European Parliament later this year.
Most farmers are not denying the need to address climate change and biodiversity loss. They are seeking help to cope with higher temperatures and increasingly frequent extreme weather events that have wreaked havoc on olive trees, grape vines and other crops.
But many are also angry about plans to cut subsidies on diesel, implement requirements to restore native ecosystems and block some pesticide use. Farmers are also upset with trade policies that force them to compete with farmers in Ukraine and South America.
Bending to farmers’ demands, the European Commission today scrapped its ambitious bill to reduce the use of chemical pesticides and softened its recommendations on cutting agricultural pollution.
“We want to make sure that in this process, the farmers remain in the driving seat,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the European Union’s top official. “Only if our farmers can live off the land will they invest in the future. And only if we achieve our climate and environmental goals together will farmers be able to continue to make a living.”
According to my colleagues Somini Sengupta and Monika Pronczuk, the protests are a harbinger of a bigger challenge: How to grow food without further wrecking Earth’s climate and biodiversity.
Treating symptoms, not causes
Like agriculture workers across the world, European farmers are burdened by inflation and debt. Many also believe that they have too little control over the prices of their own products, which are influenced by what the big companies that sell or process the products are willing to pay.
It’s often easier to roll back or delay what seem like burdensome environmental policies than to transform the power dynamics of the current food system, according to Sophia Murphy, the executive director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minnesota-based research and advocacy nonprofit.
And remaking the global food system for an era of higher temperatures and net-zero emissions is a daunting problem.
“There is a big challenge in how to address those grievances and design a food production system that will feed people and at the same time not be detrimental to the environment,” my colleague Monika, who covers the E.U., told me.
“What the farmers I have spoken to have told me is that the burden and the cost of fighting climate change should be shared more evenly,” she added.
The far-right threat
Europe’s path forward on climate change is hanging by a delicate political thread.
If policymakers pushed too far on initiatives to protect biodiversity and combat climate change, especially without involving farmers in the decision-making process, it could empower far-right populists who want to reverse such policies.
In France, Germany and the Netherlands, the discontent among farmers is already fueling far-right movements.
Though farmers’ unions in France have varied political views, the far right is eager to capitalize on the recent protests, according to Aurelien Breeden, a Times reporter who covers France.
“The protests play into this idea of a more rural, forgotten France where people feel ignored by bureaucratic elites,” he told me. “That’s a classic far-right populist talking point.”
The Caribbean, seen from the International Space Station. Sponges collected deep below the surface carry chemical imprints that reflect historical water temperatures. NASA
A dire warning from spongy sea creatures
Humans may have warmed the planet by even more than initially thought, scientists learned from an unusual source: six sea sponges that have been living in the Caribbean for centuries.
Networks of satellites and sensors have measured the rising temperatures in recent decades with great precision. But scientists typically combined this data with 19th-century thermometer readings that were often spotty and inexact.
That’s where the sponges come in.
The heroes of a new study published this week are a long-lived type of sponge called sclerosponges. They are small and round, about the size of a grapefruit. They dwell in deep, dimly lit undersea nooks and niches. And they grow extremely slowly in a process that leaves chemical fingerprints of the temperature of the waters that wash around them.
By examining the chemical composition of their skeletons, which the creatures built up steadily over centuries, the study’s authors have pieced together a new history of those earliest decades of warming.
It points to a startling conclusion: Humans have raised global temperatures by a total of about 1.7 degrees Celsius, or 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit, not 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is the most commonly used value. The research adds to other evidence suggesting that societies started warming the planet earlier than 19th-century temperature records indicate.
But the study’s implications aren’t straightforward, said Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who wasn’t involved in the research.
Global targets to curb warming focus on how much worse the effects of global warming will get compared with conditions between 1986 and 2005, Rogelj said. Revised temperature estimates for the 19th century wouldn’t necessarily change our understanding of whether key guardrails had been breached.