The European Commission (EC), the executive arm of the Brussels government, has made a strategic 180-degree turn regarding the significance of climate change or "atmospheric warming" as the primary challenge of our era.
The European Union (EU) has just acknowledged that the new global climate conditions afflicting the world were created by the technology used in the Second Industrial Revolution — the era of the internal combustion engine and fossil fuels, embodied by the automotive industry.
It follows that under the conditions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — the current one — and its decisive technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the fight against climate change requires increasing production rather than reducing it, and doing so in a sustainable manner, that is, with superior productivity and a new kind of relationship with nature.
This is why the European Commission, which has always held a highly negative view of livestock farming — considering its ruminants the largest emitters of methane gas, which in this view would be the most lethal component of carbon dioxide (CO2), and therefore the primary driver of "atmospheric warming" or climate change — has now shifted its position.
This outlook led European courts to compel the government of The Hague, the capital of the Netherlands, to shut down — halt, restrict, and prohibit — livestock production as the only way to meet the climate targets set by the Brussels government.
Even in Ireland, Europe's great livestock country, it was deemed necessary to eliminate more than 200,000 head of cattle in order to meet those same climate targets.
These anti-productive atrocities have now been definitively left behind. The reality of the facts shows that the most technologically advanced countries, and the United States above all, are the ones that emit the least carbon dioxide per unit of output, with the added observation that the pioneers in the deployment of Artificial Intelligence are those best combating "atmospheric warming."
In short, the crises provoked by the technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution have their solution in the categories and instruments created by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
For this reason, the challenge of livestock farming and methane gas is now being met with advanced technological responses drawn from biotechnology — responses that respect the "laws of life" and embrace their internal logic, which is, above all and before all else, one of endurance and adaptation to new conditions.
The EU has noted that there is currently a genuine protein revolution underway in the world, and that meat consumption tends to increase in a spiraling fashion, which gives livestock farming a strategic rather than merely economic significance.
Europe also appears to be recognizing now that livestock farming is a business that generates more than $450 billion per year worldwide and stands at the forefront of international exports.
In brief, the Brussels government seems to have understood that it is necessary to promote the livestock sector rather than restrict it, as the only way to participate in the new and formidable global protein revolution.
It is for this reason that it is now proposed to double the number of head of cattle over the next 15 years, using all the instruments of advanced biotechnology to do so in a sustained and sustainable manner.
Also, and very significantly, the European Commission has now adopted a policy of prevention and adaptation to climate change and its consequences, which implies a gradualist and non-catastrophist vision, clearly less ideologically driven than the one that has prevailed until now.
In short: productivity / adaptation to the conditions of the era / prevention / gradualism / confidence that the responses to the crises of our time lie in technology and not outside it.
All of this is undoubtedly part of a new global order and a fully integrated world-order society based on innovation and the concept and practice of creativity.
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