From Tilak´s Substack
By Tilak Doshi
The EU’s environmental policies for agriculture, centered on the European Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy, have sparked ongoing tensions with farmers.
These aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient pollution, pesticide use, and biodiversity loss while promoting organic farming and nature restoration. Farmers argue the rules raise costs, cut yields, add bureaucracy, and undermine competitiveness against imports that face lighter standards.
A post on X on Tuesday by Dutch commentator Armand van Westen that has been circulating revisits the nitrogen debate in Dutch agriculture. Responding to a video by physicist and science journalist Arnout Jaspers – author of De Stikstoffuik (The Nitrogen Trap), the 2023 book that became a number-one bestseller in the Netherlands – van Westen makes a point that’s as simple as it is explosive: there is no real stikstofcrisis.
‘Stikstof‘ has become shorthand for this entire heated debate about nitrogen pollution from farming, EU nature rules and the clash between environmental protection and agricultural and economic interests. The Dutch Government aims to reduce nitrogen deposition on ‘nitrogen-sensitive’ Natura 2000 protected areas (part of the EU-wide network of nature sites) so that it falls below ‘critical loads’, with targets set in national law following EU obligations. The subtitle of Jaspers’ book says it plainly: “Politicians in thrall to the eco-lobby.”
As Jaspers painstakingly documents, stikstof (literally meaning ‘choking substance’) is a crisis of defective regulation and runaway litigation masquerading as an ecological emergency. The former minister Ronald Plasterk – a biologist – endorsed Jaspers’s work as “a sensible book full of sober facts that demonstrates the absurdity of the policy”. The Dutch Government, for its part, was so rattled that the Minister for Nature and Nitrogen, Christianne van der Wal-Zeggelink, was formally pressed by parliament to issue a written rebuttal of another critical work on the same file.
That other work was Niemand in de Cockpit (Nobody in the Cockpit), a stikstof case study by Thierry Baudet, the jurist and Forum for Democracy leader, co-authored with biochemist Lidewij de Vos. Their conclusion – reached via publicly available measurements and verifiable data – is that biodiversity in Dutch Natura 2000 areas is broadly stable: trees are healthy, bird populations are in order, air quality is good, and of 521 species associated with the relevant ecosystems, only seven have declined in the past two decades in ways plausibly linked to nitrogen deposition. Those seven, the authors note, “play no crucial role in the relevant ecosystems and are still found in abundance elsewhere in the Netherlands and Europe”.
The book’s central thesis is that successive Dutch governments – blinded by models and laboratory experiments rather than empirical field measurements and captured by environmental lobbies that substitute litigation for evidence – have driven their country into a wholly self-manufactured catastrophe. Nobody is flying the plane. The cockpit is empty.
Van Westen’s post, amplifying Jaspers’s video, is a small but emblematic moment: a Dutch citizen pointing at two book-length accumulations of documented, peer-reviewed, publicly available evidence and saying, simply, that the emperor has no clothes. What is remarkable is not the observation itself – it has been made by scientists, economists and farmers’ advocates for years. What is remarkable is the institutional machinery that continues to grind against it, undeterred by political revolt, electoral rebuke or the belated admission by the IPCC itself that the catastrophist scenario underpinning two decades of green policy was never scientifically plausible. The inquisition, it seems, does not require a factual basis. It requires only institutional momentum.
‘Follow the Science’
Let us begin with the science, since the Net Zero faithful forever insist on invoking it as their unassailable authority. For the better part of two decades, the most extreme emissions pathway conjured by climate modellers – RCP8.5, and its successor SSP5-8.5 – served as the master blueprint for virtually every restrictive climate and energy policy enacted across the EU and UK. Governments shuttered coal plants, throttled North Sea extraction, mandated ruinously expensive offshore wind arrays and subjected farmers across the continent to nitrogen constraints so punishing as to render viable agriculture impossible.
All of it rested, directly or indirectly, on the apocalyptic projections generated by a scenario that assumed global coal consumption would quintuple by century’s end – a trajectory so divorced from physical reality that, as the Eos journal has recently confirmed, the IPCC’s own modelling community has now formally moved to eliminate SSP5-8.5 from the upcoming AR7 assessment, declaring it “implausible”. It was, as GB News aptly characterised it, an admission by climate scientists themselves that “the doomsday scenario is no longer believable”.
This is not a minor housekeeping exercise. RCP8.5 was cited more than 45,000 times in academic literature and deployed routinely by the World Economic Forum, the European Commission and every European climate minister from Stockholm to Madrid. The scenario was never designed as a ‘business as usual’ projection – it was always an extreme outlier, representing outcomes that more than 90% of baseline scenario literature considered impossible even absent climate policy. Yet, as Carbon Brief concedes, it “came to be widely referred to as the ‘business as usual’ outcome in hundreds of different papers”. The policies that dismembered European industry, immiserated pensioners through energy poverty and drove farmers from their land were all enacted under the shadow of a phantom apocalypse.
The beleaguered Dutch farmer
Into this context of admitted scientific revision comes the fate of the Dutch farmer. The Netherlands – the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, a country that transformed a modest land area into an astonishing engine of food production through ingenuity, capital and generations of expertise – is being systematically dismantled. The culprit is nitrogen policy, or more precisely, the EU’s Habitats Directive as interpreted by Dutch courts, which determined in 2019 that ammonia and nitrogen oxide emissions from the livestock sector were incompatible with obligations to protect designated nature reserves.
The government’s response was to demand cuts of up to 70% in nitrogen emissions from agriculture – a sector that produces 46% of the country’s nitrogen output, but which was to bear a disproportionate share of the burden while industry and aviation were treated with considerably more indulgence.
Up to 3,000 farms faced forced buyout. The Dutch dairy cattle population faced a reduction of between 167,000 and 450,000 head – up to 30% of the total – by 2030. As Jaspers notes, the threshold for triggering these existential consequences is so sensitive that a single bird’s droppings per hectare per year can formally breach the permitted limit. The absurdity is not rhetorical. It is regulatory.
The political consequence was the explosive rise of the BoerBurgerBeweging – BBB, the Farmer-Citizen Movement – founded in 2019 by agricultural journalist Caroline van der Plas in direct response to the protests by Dutch farmers against onerous regulatory burdens. In March 2023, in one of the most seismic upsets in modern Dutch political history, BBB swept the provincial elections, winning the largest vote share of any party across all 12 provinces. Van der Plas described the nitrogen regulations bluntly as “dogma dictated from The Hague”.
By 2024, BBB had entered government as a coalition partner, securing a shift from mandatory to voluntary farm buyouts and delaying the 2030 nitrogen target to 2035 – minor concessions wrested from a machine that would not otherwise have yielded an inch. When the Schoof cabinet collapsed in June 2025 after the PVV withdrew over asylum policy, BBB was reduced to caretaker status. Greenpeace then moved in January 2025 for the judicial kill, with the District Court of The Hague ordering the Dutch state to meet nitrogen reduction targets by 2030 under threat of a €10 million fine. The ratchet never loosens.
The great European farmer revolt
The parallel trajectory across the European continent has been equally instructive. In Germany, the once-dominant Green Party – whose jeans-and-sneakers figurehead Joschka Fischer had turned environmental politics into a quasi-religious movement since the 1980s, and whose Robert Habeck nursed fantasies of the chancellorship as recently as 2024 – has been routed at the polls by an electorate that has had enough of punitive green policies. Alternative für Deutschland has become the second-largest party in the Bundestag, energised in no small part by the economic carnage wrought by Habeck’s energy policy.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National won the 2024 European elections on a platform that included explicit opposition to the EU’s Net Zero agenda. In Britain, Reform UK under Nigel Farage has brought scepticism of Net Zero into the mainstream of political debate with an electoral force that the Conservative Party spent four years failing to summon.
The peasants, in short, are revolting – as I noted in my Forbes article of February 2024, which surveyed the opening salvoes of the great European farmer unrest. Across France, Germany, Belgium, Poland and the Netherlands, tractors blockaded motorways, Brussels was blanketed in manure and the political class was at last forced to acknowledge that real people, growing real food, cannot be treated as impediments to a bureaucratic green utopia without consequence.
The Net Zero juggernaut unfazed
None of this has, however, produced even a flicker of self-examination among the ideology’s keepers. The Net Zero establishment has responded to political reversal not with recalibration but with escalation – and with the increasingly undisguised weaponisation of every available institutional lever against those who point out inconvenient empirical realities.
The Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who brought the farmers’ cause to international attention through appearances on Fox News and her own formidable social media presence, found her X account abruptly and without explanation permanently suspended in March 2023 – only to be restored after a public outcry. In January 2026, the British Home Office revoked her Electronic Travel Authorisation, barring her from the UK on the grounds that her presence was not “conducive to the public good” – a determination that arrived, with suspicious convenience, three days after she published criticism of Prime Minister Keir Starmer on X.
A peer-reviewed article in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research – a journal of criminology, note – classified scepticism of nitrogen reduction policy as a species of “disinformation” exhibiting “themes from climate change denial”. That is the official academic verdict: to question whether forcing the closure of Dutch farms is scientifically necessary or proportionate is to engage in something akin to crime.
This is the Orwellian intellectual climate in which Europeans now operate. A scenario formally disowned by the IPCC’s own modelling community underpinned two decades of civilisation-scale economic disruption. The scientists who built that scenario have now acknowledged it is not plausible. But the policies it generated – the closed farms, the throttled industries, the unaffordable energy bills, the banned voices – remain firmly in place, enforced by an alliance of activist courts, captured regulators and a political class whose entire identity has been invested in the Net Zero project, alongside gender and ethnic identity politics and the acceptance of mass immigration. The Net Zero ideologues keep doubling down even as the economic dysfunction spirals around them.
The IEA – that erstwhile temple of green ambition, whose 2021 ‘Net Zero by 2050’ report declared that no new oil and gas fields should ever be developed – has, under the pressure of altered political realities, quietly reinstated its ‘Current Policies Scenario’ that it had abandoned in 2019 at the behest of Brussels. Its ‘World Energy Outlook 2025’ now concedes that global oil demand does not peak before 2050. Even this modest return to realism has been driven not by any new scientific revelation but by the brute geopolitical fact of Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the threat of US defunding. The pretence of energy realism has returned to the IEA not because the facts have changed, but because power and funding have.
Meanwhile, Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission – the institution whose European Green Deal provided the Brussels-level scaffolding for the nitrogen apocalypse visited on Dutch farming – shows no corresponding sign of wakening. Greenpeace litigates. Courts order. Fines loom. Farms close. Baudet and De Vos demonstrated with meticulous data that the Dutch natural world is not in crisis. Jaspers demonstrated with equal rigour that the regulations are a self-constructed trap with no basis in EU law or observed ecology. And any Dutch commentator who amplifies these findings on social media understands is labelled ‘misinfluencer’, a branding bestowed by activist researchers funded to audit the “misinformation landscape” of farmer protests.
The Dutch farmer as the canary in the coal mine
What we are witnessing is the last-ditch defence of a politico-scientific paradigm that has no empirical grounding but retains its institutional grip. The Right-of-centre parties that have proliferated across Europe – BBB, AfD, RN, Reform – did not create the conditions for their own rise. They are symptoms, not causes, of a policy regime so detached from the lived realities of ordinary Europeans that the latter had no alternative but to organise politically against it. The Establishment’s response has been to treat this democratic revolt not as a signal for policy correction but as evidence of disinformation requiring suppression.
The Netherlands built its agricultural prowess not through subsidy and bureaucratic licence, but through centuries of disciplined ingenuity in a country barely above sea level – a quarter of it is below sea-level. It became the world’s second-largest food exporter. And now, by administrative decree backed by activist jurisprudence and a supposed “scientific consensus“, Dutch agriculture is being systematically throttled.
Those who object, whether in a bestselling book, a parliamentary speech or a post on X, find themselves on the wrong end of criminal-law journals, Home Office border decisions, and ministerial rebuttals drafted by officials who have little time for data and rigorous analysis. The plight of the Dutch farmer today stands as a symbol not merely of the ideological intransigence of the political class, but of a broader civilisational decline.
This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic
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