Political and economic elites feel free to ignore the countryside, but they may find they do so at their peril.
The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.
I n his drive to conquer China, Mao Zedong and his most famous general, Lin Biao, stoked “a peasant revolution” that eventually overwhelmed the cities. In those days, most Chinese toiled on the land, a vast manpower reservoir for the Communist insurgency. Today, in a world where a majority lives in urban settlements, such a strategy would be doomed to failure.
The small percentage of rural and small-town residents in most advanced countries — generally under 20 percent — lack the numbers to overwhelm the rest of society. Political and economic elites feel free to ignore the countryside, but they may find they do so at their peril. Although now a mere slice of the population, rural areas remain critical suppliers of food, fiber (like cotton), and energy to the rest of the economy.
Residents in agricultural areas have good reason to feel put upon. Their industries are often targeted by regulators and disdained by the metropolitan cognoscenti. They may not be hiding in the caves of Yan’an, but farming communities from the Netherlands to North America are rebelling against extreme government regulations, such as banning or restricting critical fertilizers or the enforced culling of herds. Meat and dairy producers are assaulted in a hysterical article in the New York Times that predicts imminent “mass extinction” caused by humans and suggests that to keep the planet from “frying” we will need to reduce meat and dairy consumption in short order.
This is occurring at a time — following decades of remarkable boosts in agricultural productivity — when food insecurity and high prices are again plaguing even wealthy countries but particularly the poorer countries in Africa. This shortfall has worsened, in part due to the Russia–Ukraine conflict, which has reduced the reliability of food exports from the Ukrainian bread basket, making Western production more critical.
Regardless, the inhabitants of the periphery — the vast area from the metropolitan fringe to the deepest countryside — and the farming that flourishes there will face an extraordinarily well-funded green movement that is now depicting “industrial farming” as one of the principal villains in their ever-expanding climate melodrama. Although greens may support the notion of small farmers using artisanal methods, and the wealthy certainly can afford the much higher food prices, niche farming cannot support most farming communities or provide ordinary consumers with reasonably priced groceries.
The regulatory tsunami reflects attitudes in the media, the academy, and the bureaucracy that generally disparage the periphery, too often regarded as depopulating, depressed places without a future. Rural residents are seen as primitives, driven by “rural rage.” They tend to be more skeptical about climate-change policies and a promised “just transition,” which only makes them even more deplorable.
From a political point of view, these assaults have the virtue of eliminating the economic base for the very communities, in Europe (notably France), North America, and Australia, that lean to the right and sometimes spawn more militant splinter groups. When he first started teaching at Creighton University in Omaha, economist Ernie Goss saw a vibrant two-party system, with North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas regularly electing Democrats and Republicans. Today, U.S. Senate delegations from largely agricultural states tend to be Republican; there are no Democrats, for example, among the senators from Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and the Dakotas, and there are only a handful of Democratic House members. “A lot of this is resistance to green initiatives,” Goss told me. “Biden couldn’t get a cup of coffee in this part of the country. To say he’s unpopular is an understatement.”
Yet in writing off rural and small-town America, progressives are ignoring more recent demographic trends. To be sure, isolated small towns in cold, windy, and featureless vistas continue to lose population. But many of America’s small towns are growing. Since 2015, smaller metros and urban areas have been gaining people at a rate far faster than the largely shrinking urban cores. The fastest growth has been at the urban fringe, where many new communities are being planted in still largely rural areas.
Even before the pandemic there was migration to rural and small-town areas, including both seniors and young families. The post-pandemic rise of online work promises greater expansion of rural economies, possible with a new base of sophisticated residents moving from historic urban job centers to the more livable and affordable hinterlands. This is evident in the periphery of the Bay Area where low-density, rural Yolo County grows while the interior Bay Area loses population. One study from the University of Chicago suggests that 34 percent of American workers could do their jobs remotely, and many seem likely to move to more affordable, and less dense, places. This approach — using dispersed workers — is widely adopted by the new wave of start-ups.
Rural areas must make common cause with the current surge of people settling in the exurbs, many of whom may cherish the pastoral environment even if they work on a computer. Farmers need allies even in agricultural states. In Kansas, for example, where rural and urban populations were roughly equal in 1980, the state’s urban areas are now twice as populous. The largest bloc of House members today comprises those from “mixed” districts of suburban and rural voters.
The rebellion brewing in the rural reaches may just be in its early phases. Residents in the periphery increasingly see themselves in the cross-hairs of urban interests, particularly by the climate-change policies driven by the ultra-rich and their lavishly funded nonprofits and urban activists. In Europe, where green policies, particularly those resulting in high fuel prices, have hit exurbanites and farmers hardest, they fought back in the gilets jaunes movement. Whether farmers or small commercial enterprises, the increase in the fuel price, part of the attempt to curb carbon emissions, was a direct assault on their future. Their slogan: “Les élites parlent de fin du monde, quand nous, on parle de fin du mois.” “The elites speak of the end of the world while we speak about the end of the month.”
Similarly, the famously efficient Dutch farmers are protesting the government’s attempt to impose emission reductions on agriculture and ban chemical fertilizers. Recently, they have been joined by their Spanish, Polish, and Italian counterparts. Although hardly the peasants of Mao’s era, theirs is largely a class protest against the well-to-do and connected who claim environmental piety by paying “green” indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices, while imposing “enlightened” policies that devastate the less well-off.
Environmentally focused governments are concentrating on reducing agricultural production. There’s a certain irony in the fact that this will hit farmers in the Netherlands, a model of efficiency, both agriculturally and in terms of emissions reduction. Up to 3,000 farms will be closed. In the next few decades, the total of closures could reach 11,000, while another 17,000 might have to cut back their livestock. And there are plenty more examples of cutbacks planned for elsewhere in the EU.
Efforts to reduce agricultural output, also in the United States and Canada, could have particularly serious consequences for billions in the developing world. African presidents and energy ministers in Senegal, Nigeria, and South Africa have spoken out against environmental policies that will hamstring the continent’s development. Africa’s population is projected by the U.N. to be as large as Asia’s by the year 2100. It’s doubtful its leaders will be eager to follow the ultra-green course adopted in Sri Lanka, including curbs on fertilizers, that led to economic meltdown and the overthrow of the government (to be fair, this was due to a growing currency crisis as well).
Arguably the biggest assault on the periphery involves the very issue behind rural rebellions for millennia: control of the land. Climate scientist Judith Curry (a controversial if well-credentialed expert), suggests that reliance on wind and solar energy will consume an ever-growing fraction of the planet’s surface, particularly in rural or wilderness areas. These sprawling land impacts are caused by extremely low energy density and unreliability of “renewable” power, including biofuels, compared to fossil fuels or nuclear generation. Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act includes a $220 billion package of tax breaks, subsidies, and other incentives for the electric-utility sector to invest in solar power, battery-storage systems, and other carbon-free technologies.
Despite the fact that already massive investment in solar and wind energy has undermined, not enhanced, energy reliability, the conventional wisdom among the media, academia, and most bureaucracies has been to spend even more on solar and wind. Over the past 20 years, notes energy entrepreneur and investor Brian Gitt, the percentage of power generated by fossil fuels has remained essentially the same, well over 80 percent. Nor has this proven to be cheaper, as is often claimed. In reality, the need for backup power to compensate for intermittent, unreliable wind and solar has resulted in extraordinarily high energy costs in California, Germany, and Denmark, where the green agenda has been most avidly followed.
Given its dependence on the elements and low energy density, solar and wind would need to expand in a way requiring millions of acres of rural and small-town land. Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University, recently suggested that the amount of land required to accommodate the roughly 800 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity to achieve a “net zero” America would require “roughly the area of Tennessee, so no joke, or 15 percent of the area of Texas.” In his “most cost effective” full net-zero scenario, Jenkins suggested that wind power covers an “area that is equal to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee put together” and “solar farms are an area the size of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.”
Particularly vulnerable will be the more rural states and locations, generally conservative areas that account for the vast majority of proposed new solar and wind projects. Essentially rural people are being asked to sacrifice their landscape, livelihoods, and environment to appease often very affluent zealots in New York, San Francisco, and other urban centers. In December 2022, Interior secretary Deb Haaland announced that her department would expedite plans to build solar-energy farms across tens of thousands of acres of untouched public land, the nation’s most intact and cherished conservation areas, in eleven Western states.
Implementing the administration’s green agenda, notes a Department of Agriculture study, could add 30 percent or more to the amount of land used for something other than open space, husbandry, and farming. In California, the Nature Conservancy estimates that to fulfill the state’s “net zero” targets would require 1.6 to 3.1 million acres, up to one-tenth of the farming acreage likely to be around in coming decades. “Silicon Valley and Hollywood demand the state green up,” notes Walter Duflock, a fifth-generation grower from Monterey. “They want to do this by kicking the teeth in of two industries they hate, energy and agriculture.”
Even the eco-focused Grist magazine wonders how many Americans would agree to live near windmills. Analyst Robert Bryce has tracked rejections of projects across the United States, which have grown from 50 in 2015 to over 500 last year. This has occurred even in generally pro-development Ohio, and has been propelled not just by farmers but others who have been flocking to some rural areas and small towns. In Illinois, opposition is so intense that the state is seeking to take away counties’ right to veto such projects (as a practical matter, rural counties would be the most affected). In the EU, opposition to new projects is widespread, particularly in rural areas, tourist spots, and among farmers. With more limited open land, those living in the EU may be less than thrilled to see windmills and solar installations in their beloved hinterlands. The largest county in fanatically green California banned any new large-scale wind and solar development.
Sadly, we hear little of these protests in the progressive media, whose coverage of climate-related issues has become compromised. In some cases, as in NPR and the AP, green-dominated nonprofits now help finance their climate “coverage.” Well-financed nonprofits also steer malleable reporters toward the latest approved narrative. One wonders what would happen if, say, a nonprofit funded by Occidental Petroleum helped finance newspapers’ environmental coverage. Characterizing the opposition to any aspect of the current green agenda as “misinformation” from nefarious corporate interests, the big media outlets have chosen to ignore it, as Robert Bryce demonstrated recently in Quillette.
The universities, another traditional source of information, are, as Rodney Dangerfield would put it, no bargain either. Very large sums have been invested in university climate programs by ultra-wealthy zealots. To take some examples: There was venture capitalist John Doerr’s billion-dollar gift to Stanford, the $36 million Duke family gift to the field at their namesake university, and the $200 million donated to Harvard for climate and sustainability from Melanie and Jean Salata, a Chilean billionaire couple. It would be naïve not to think that this largesse is why credentialed experts such as Steve Koonin, Roger Pielke, Judith Curry, or Bjørn Lomborg find it difficult to get a hearing by academics.
To combat the assault of the cities, those living in rural areas will need to recruit the growing numbers of professionals who have moved to small towns and rural communities and do not want to see their views obstructed, and local wildlife threatened, by massive solar or wind projects. They will have to struggle against “energy colonialism” when largely urban legislators impose draconian energy rules that require a region’s hinterland to sacrifice its landscapes and, in fossil-fuel-producing states, an important part of the local economy.
They will be told that blue-collar jobs in retrofitting homes or building renewable plants connected to the climate “transition” can replace jobs lost in energy or on the farm. But these jobs, notes a recent Building Trades Union study, pay far worse, and are less likely to last long or be unionized, than those already existing. “It’s pie-in-the-sky bullsh** about these green jobs being good middle-class jobs, because they’re not,” said Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, in conversation with Politico. “I’m concerned about union members and union families being left behind . . . and I think they’ve already been left behind.”
Yet given their relatively small numbers and genuine environmental concerns, rural and small-town residents will have to learn how to frame the issue that considers both environment and their own survival as communities. Rather than confrontation, a better approach would seem to be working with regulators. But this could prove frustrating when dealing with zealots, as predominate in places such as California, for whom enough is never enough. Farmers in the Netherlands now grow twice as much food with the same amount of fertilizer, but the ax is still going to fall.
It will be up to the existing farmers and small-town residents to influence opinion and change policies nationally, particularly in heavily urbanized polities, such as the Netherlands and California, where agriculture is under assault. Caroline van der Plas, the founder and sole member of parliament for the Dutch Farmer-Citizen Movement party, points the way to how such arguments can be framed when she suggests, “Why would you buy out farmers or reduce livestock when you have the possibility to invest in innovation?”
Ultimately, in their own seemingly insatiable drive to tell people how to live, the regulatory class and its allies will need to adopt a realistic, ameliorative approach that allows farmers to produce affordable food and preserves the attractiveness of the periphery. Some notable efforts to reduce methane emissions from cows are already under way in France through techniques such as changing the animals’ diet, using digestive aids, and adopting better herd management. This is better than trying to reduce production at a time when world hunger has begun to grow after decades of remarkable improvement. After all, the demand for farmland has grown, and food prices are high, including in the U.S., so seeking to shut down farms makes little economic sense.
Nor is it necessarily a “win” for the environment to torment agricultural producers. Although drought has played a role in reducing water supplies, the cost of regulatory compliance has grown in both wet and dry years, with costs per acre growing over 260 percent just last decade. State methane regulations have also sparked a mass exodus of dairies, once one of the largest California food-producing sectors. Cropland in California, the country’s richest agricultural economy has declined steadily, due to the now ended drought, but also to labor and climate regulations, falling by a half million acres in the past two years, with at least another 500,000 slated to go by 2040, taking away 10 percent of all existing farmland. When farmers and dairies are displaced, they don’t move to some imagined land of organic small-scale farmers. They go to places where environmental controls are weaker or to less temperate states that require more water and power. “If we can’t do it in California,” one grower explained to me, “we do it Arizona or Mexico.” That’s not what environmentalists should want to hear.
Rather than seek to cut back on domestic agriculture, governments should take heed of how technology can be harnessed to take agriculture forward. Potential solutions to water-runoff and fertilizer-related problems are already being developed by farmers, notes A. G. Kawamura, former secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Desalination, Kawamura told me, as well as placing cisterns could be part of the long-term solution, as well as the development of new fertilizers that do not reduce productivity. “There’s a toolbox of options we don’t even consider. People raise ideas, but everything gets shot down by the enviros. It is good to talk about energy but how about food? You have to find ways to put food on people’s tables at a reasonable price.”
Ultimately, a truce between urban and rural interests, Kawamura suggests, will require establishing a balance between the two. Attempts by urban policy-makers to “colonize” and constrain the periphery can only generate further rural resentment, while causing devastating drops in agricultural and natural-resource production. This may be fine for the governing class and its allies, but it spells disaster not only for rural residents but for billions of people who lack basic necessities and justifiably seek a better life.