THE past year has taught us many things. One lesson we have learnt is that being a successful computer programmer in the 1980s gives one the right to rule the world in the 2020s.
I mean, of course, Bill Gates. As has already been superbly demonstrated by Karen Harradine on these pages, the megalomania of Bill Gates (Part I, Part II) is truly something to behold. The man’s areas of expertise apparently know no limit: from taxpayer-funded enviroscams, which promise to return our standard of living to that of a medieval serf, to mastery of virology. These skills somehow render him an oracle-like figure in this dire age.
Whilst swanning around on his private jet and cruising in his emissions-farting superyacht, Mr Gates still finds enough time in his day to remind us that life is unlikely to return to any semblance of normality even by 2022. Still, championing the closure of all bars and restaurants for months on end – otherwise known as destroying businesses and hard-earned livelihoods – must seem a small sacrifice to ask of others when you are on a mission to save the world, cushioned by a net worth of over $113billion.
One of Mr Gates’s many plans to rescue us all – whether we like it or not – is the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment. In brief, this Gates-funded project, in an attempt to stop global warming, proposes to dim the sun’s rays by spreading sun-reflecting particles into the atmosphere. This solar geoengineering research project is being carried out by wonks at Harvard University.
Whilst the project’s progress had been stalled by Covid-19 – one of the pandemic’s few blessings, perhaps – in December last year the group received permission from the Swedish Space Corporation to test some of the programme’s technical aspects in Swedish airspace.
Should these tests prove successful, the goal will be swiftly to release small amounts of non-toxic calcium carbonate dust into the atmosphere. Ultimately, it is proposed that ever larger amounts of dust are to be released, with the aim of rapidly bringing global warming ‘under control’ by effectively placing the earth under one huge cloud. This is similar to what happens when a volcano erupts, with its resultant ash darkening the sky (wait, isn’t that how the dinosaurs went extinct?).
I admit my lack of scientific credentials. Nevertheless, I wonder at this attempt to play God by directly interfering with the world’s climate in such a blatant and direct way. Who, precisely, do these self-appointed gurus believe themselves to be?
I for one have exhausted any confidence in the supposed ‘experts’ who so regularly cock up their most basic responsibilities. How much damage must they wreak? The potential for unknown and dreadful side-effects of the Sun God from Seattle injecting his cosmic funky dust into the atmosphere is surely clear to everyone – at least to those of us not burdened by a messiah complex.
More to the point, can someone remind me when this clique of technocrats were elected by the ordinary folk whose lives their harebrained schemes can make or break? Does having a Windows laptop mean I have to accept Billy Gates’s plan to usher in a new Ice Age? I don’t remember agreeing to that – but then I, like everyone else, never read the Terms & Conditions.
No doubt upon the unleashing of said new Ice Age, the citizens of Europe will be heading south across the Mediterranean in rubber dinghies. We can only hope that there are enough four-star hotels left in Tripoli to accommodate us all – on the Libyan government’s dime, of course.
Nor am I the only sceptic about the wisdom of belching out sun-suffocating particles into the sky. Stephen Gardiner, author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, states that the ‘consequences [of solar geoengineering] might be horrific. They might involve things like mass famine, mass flooding, drought of kinds that will affect very large populations’.
Nothing to worry about, then.
Last year put paid to remaining doubts about the rise of a self-appointed oligarchy who reign over the little people like you and me. Our new overlords – Bill Gates among them – have revealed themselves to be hell-bent on controlling nearly every aspect of our lives. Our elected politicians are either too in thrall or too cowardly to contest any of this. When ‘experts’ speak on the ‘science’ which has been ‘settled’, there is no court of appeal to turn to. They can never be voted out.
Immensely powerful and rich people making momentous decisions based on flimsy pretexts that have the potential to impact adversely every single person living on planet Earth: increasingly this is what the future will look like.
It’s certainly becoming quite the habit for our old friend Mr Gates, at any rate. Having planned to vaccinate the entire world, he now plans on stealing our sunlight. What else does the man have up his sleeve?
