Climate laws are having a negative knock-on effect on farming as businesses outbid locals for land in hopes of generating carbon credits.
The future existence of family farms in Wales is under threat as a result of Britain’s climate laws, which are seeing big businesses outbid locals for land.
Companies have bought up more and more land in the British Home Nation in hopes of obtaining so-called carbon credits, which can be used to offset company emissions elsewhere. [bold, links added]
According to a report by The Telegraph, a number of companies have reportedly purchased Welsh land formerly used for farming to grow trees — at a time of rising food insecurity — with one investment firm buying up at least six former farms for the apparent purpose of afforestation.
A number of MPs in Britain have now warned that the mass sales to big business could damage local communities and erode the inherited knowledge of Welsh customs and the Welsh language.
“We heard that a significant amount of farming land is being lost to carbon offset projects, which is being sold at such a high price to wealthy companies that farmers, many of whom are already struggling financially, cannot compete,” said Stephen Crabb MP, the Conservative chairman of Parliament’s Welsh Affairs Select Committee.
“While offsets could be a useful tool in meeting net-zero, there must be adequate safeguards to avoid greenwashing by companies,” he added.
One Welsh farmer, 36-year old Ian O’Connor, expressed concern regarding the buying up of land by big businesses, saying he feared his three sons may not get the opportunity to follow him into sheep farming.
“Our communities are only going to get smaller and for every farm that goes, we are losing our heritage, Welsh language, and tradition,” the farmer is reported as saying.
Those looking to preserve Welsh heritage are far from the only ones impacted by climate legislation, with other groups across Europe suffering under the weight of Green agendas.
For example, those struggling to pay to heat their homes in Ireland are imminently set to experience even more financial hardship, with the country’s climate minister, Eamon Ryan, refusing point-blank to postpone a planned carbon tax hike.
Instead, the Green Party politician is set to suggest that Irish people take shorter showers and fewer car rides if they want to save money on their energy bill — despite another government TD (Teachta Dála, i.e., a member of the Irish parliament) emphasizing that people on the island “are not able to afford it.”
Things are reportedly not that much better at the European Union level either, with one Member of the European Parliament (MEP) on Wednesday lambasting the bloc’s elites for their Green New Deal-style energy policy and saying that experts had warned that such policies would only serve to make “poor people poorer”.
“They all said that if this law is implemented the way it is proposed, it will make poor people poorer, and it will undermine the European economy,” Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes said.
“And what do we see [in 2022]?” he demanded. “We see higher energy prices everywhere… that are hitting right now the most vulnerable Europeans, but this was something that was raised since 2019-2020.”
Read more at Breitbart
