By TILAK DOSHI
Excerpt: 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.
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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.
