WE ARE in the midst of an unprecedented and titanic struggle: all the world’s governments versus all the world’s peoples over whom the former have more or less unassailable power.
It’s the green Goliath against David who has no sling to defend himself.
Governments and their media allies are putting maximum frighteners on the public ahead of COP26 in Glasgow next week, the latest in a series of environmental talkfests whose outcome is a foregone conclusion. All is doom, unless we return to the pre-industrial era. (You might wonder whether Glasgow in November is the best place to showcase global warming; delegates should pack extra sweaters.)
Sir David Attenborough has been wheeled in to warn of the umpteenth false ‘last chance’ to ‘save the planet’. The truth is that Ichabod Attenborough knows as much about climatology as does Greta Thunberg, who is the high priestess of the green Delphi when she’s not at school.
I’m not a climatologist using computer models that conveniently provide any version of the future they are set up to predict. Neither is Boris Johnson nor Attenborough nor little Greta. Johnson can say that I’m Luddite to be dubious about his vision of a new Arcadia in which surplus CO2 is as rare as gold but he cannot know that he is right. We’re both guessing.
Sleazy Johnson has resorted to holding children’s press conferences at which ten-year-olds ask questions written for them by adults with an agenda. This is not PR, it’s child abuse.
Why do we go on using nasty plastic, Mr Johnson?
If Johnson could bring himself to tell the truth, the answer would be: Because it is more efficient and cost-effective than any other form of packaging the trillions of things we exchange every day. Unfortunately a minute quantity gets into the sea where some dolphins and turtles eat it but there are better ways to reduce that than banning plastic.
The environmental church is so broad that it contains people who disagree with each other so much they should really be fighting each other.
Some talk about saving the planet but what they mean is saving people from a speculative apocalypse of their dreams. If their predictions are right, some parts of earth may become uninhabitable but even if the last man disappears from its face, the planet will still orbit the sun, trees growing, larks singing and lambs gambolling.
On the other hand there is Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain who doesn’t care about people. At all. If every one of us died tomorrow he wouldn’t be bothered. Saving what doesn’t need to be saved is his priority.
Change is a permanent feature of the climate. There is a cycle of ice ages as well as temperate ages, such as we live in, and that will continue whether there are people on earth or not.
‘Climate change’ is not an environmental project; it is political, with governments using their vast powers to force greenery on people. They don’t know whether it works but they do know that the process, once started, cannot be reversed. We have been trapped by an irresistible juggernaut.
It is true that we have to prepare for the exhaustion of raw materials and fossil fuels on which our economy depends. But this is not imminent. By all means leave coal, gas and oil in the ground but what happens when the lithium, which is also mined, runs out and battery storage with it? We should not be forced to exchange our present economy for one whose technological base is inefficient or does not yet exist.
Because it is fundamentally a political project, it can only be countered politically even if the odds are stacked against us. We have governments which have no effective parliamentary opposition because the transnational political class are all on the same page. They get their way via bans, mandates and taxes.
We need to force the government to tell us what the consequences will be of reducing to zero the 1 per cent of global carbon emissions the UK is responsible for, and why it has to be done in a mad rush as deadline after deadline for doomsday passes.
What rational person would put his faith into something as easily rigged as a computer model? Why not just seek the future in chicken entrails and sacrifice a bull outside Parliament? Because so simple a solution would disrupt the money-making schemes of too many among our elites.
This year’s Nobel prize for physics was awarded to a Japanese computer modeller who devised a program that yields the least accurate of all UN predictions of warming in the real world. What could be more typical of greenery?
What will life be like in the 2030s? From the little we know it will be very different, and not in a good way.
