No, he does:

Animal farming ranks alongside fossil fuel production as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth. It’s not just the vast greenhouse gas emissions and the water and air pollution it causes. Even more important is the amount of land it requires. Land use is a crucial environmental metric, because every hectare we occupy is a hectare that cannot support wild ecosystems.

All of which holds for organic as opposed to industrial or chemical farming as well. Organic farming simply is more land hungry - the chemicals are substitutes for land, d’ye see? We require more land per tonne of wheat/corn/oats/peas/whatever under an organic system than we do an industrial. So, organic farming is Bad, M’Kay?

The rest of the column is a complaint about how the meat and dairy industry (definitely overtones of Tom Holt in this) are trying to ban manufactured meat. Which is indeed bad, we agree. But the point here is that if you’ve allowed government to be interventionist enough that it gets to ban things on political (or protection of economic power) grounds then sometimes the bans will be of things you approve of. The only answer to this is to have a government that is not powerful enough, interventionist enough, to go around banning things upon political or economic power grounds.

At which point the joint answer is obvious - minarchy and industrial agriculture. We do think it a tad odd that it’s George Monbiot bringing us this news but then we suppose that sometimes facts just will out, even the most dedicated activist and propagandist does have to face reality sometimes.

Tim Worstall