On NRT: Climate Change: Make farmers pay - https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2026/05/climate-change-make-farmers-pay.html
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6
(1/?)
This is all fair comment, but ...
"... in November we can elect a better one which will."
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2026/05/climate-change-make-farmers-pay.html
Not if the 50% or more of the population who live rurally, or depend on farming for their livelihood, or feel a cultural allegiance to farming, feel like the Opposition are demonising farmers and planning a beat up. Messaging like ...
@norightturnnz
> Make farmers pay
... can be easily twisted to look like a call for a beat up, and regularly are.
(2/?)
Environmentalists need to rethink how we talk about regulating farming. We need to focus on;
* how much research is available on how to farm as better long term stewards of the land
* how unfair it is to farmers who are doing the right thing, at their own cost, when others can make more money polluting freely, and never get their comeuppance
(3/?)
Environmentalists need to rethink how we talk about regulating farming (cont.);
* how often it's family farms and other small farmers trying to do the right thing, while farms whose remote owners never leave the city - may never even visit the country - pollute without conscience
* how these Queen St farmers make bank by obliging the managers and workers they hire to do the cheap thing, not the responsible thing, often against their own conscience and better judgment
(4/?)
Environmentalists need to rethink how we talk about regulating farming (cont.);
* how all this increases the chances that small farmers will lose their land, allowing yet more of our rural land to be bought up by big business
* how it all contributes to the epidemic of poor mental health and suicide that plagues our surviving rural communities
Basically we need to focus on how all the stuff west against is *bad for farmers*, and food production, and only good for financial extractors.
(5/?)
There's one more thing I noticed as I tapped out these ideas.
Back in the 1990s, the standard way to pour cold water on environmental policy was to accuse us of being "anti-science". Following the playbook developed to defend tobacco corporations from public health activists.
So lots of us got science PhDs, and started talking as much like academics as we could, using very formal language, referencing peer-reviewed papers, etc. That habit dies hard. But it's absolutely not working now.
(6/?)
In the mid-late 2000s, when An Inconvenient Truth and The Age of Stupid came out, the public realised the science was clearly in our side in most cases. In most cases, the accusations of being "anti-science" stopped working.
So the reputation launderers working for polluters flipped to anti-science messaging. A sign of how stupid and how desperate they are, since they're also salting the earth that produces mining geologists, etc.
