THE creed of Extinction Rebellion is akin to what could be termed ‘gap-year’ ideology: an amalgam of the over-idealistic ethics a student brings home from a poverty-safari in Asia, which if he or she fails to grow out of can become increasingly deranged, destructive and dictatorial.
What exactly do this puritanical Peter Pan troupe want?
They certainly don’t lack hubris. Their goal is for global Net Zero, not by the UN’s and Johnson’s target date of 2050, but by 2025, less than three years away. According to their creed ‘only the common sense of ordinary people will help us navigate the challenging decisions ahead’.
In light of the universal dim-witted capitulation to the official global pandemic narrative – remember, the one in which you could be fined for inviting seven instead of six people over for Christmas – to what shared pool of common sense are they referring?
If their aim is to depopulate the planet, abruptly ‘just stopping oil’ would certainly achieve that, precipitating mass-scale social unrest, violence and a sharply rising death rate within months. Where would XR’s ‘new precautionary paradigm, where life is sacred and all are in service to ensuring its future’ be then, with no food on the shelves, only a mad and bloody scramble for survival?
Parallels between XR’s doom-laden, manic fearmongers and the Covid lockdown intervention zealots are obvious. XR’s proud arrestees wear their ‘label’ as a badge of honour in much the same way the Twitterati once virtue-signalled their vax and mask wearing status. The irrationality of their extinction ‘religion’ is not even disguised:
‘Last summer, 2018, there was that horrible heatwave in August where everything died. It made me feel anxious.’
‘How many people must die in London from air pollution for you to take us seriously?’
‘I feel strongly that my care for others has driven me to act in defence of the health of all.’
‘We live in terrifying, unprecedented times. We must all be the very best we can, if we are to be worthy of a future.’
‘I glued my breast to the road. The earth really is our “mother”.’
XR seem to put a great deal of stock in the findings of the IPCC’s climate reports, yet they appear not to read them, only the headlines and selections of the master propagandists of the UN and the huge Gates Foundation-funded climate change industry, that are then dutifully parroted by an uncritical and similarly often Gates-funded media, and science journals. But as Andrew Montfort wrote in these pages two years ago on the counter-evidence presented by Indur Goklany (a member of the US delegation that established the IPCC and helped develop its First Assessment Report, and who subsequently served as both a US delegate to, and reviewer for, the IPCC) you cannot come away from reading it without concluding that the alarmists have never set out to tell the whole story.
XR militants (not just the gap-year Peter Pans amongst them, who must be legion, but the billionaires who fund the outfit) appear to have entirely forgotten where most of the world’s population actually live – not nestled among the rolling, pastoral water-colour landscapes of England, but in highly urbanised landscapes, and in megacities.
Having spent extended stints in a number of the world’s largest cities, including three years in the broiling mass of humanity that is Kolkata, I simply cannot grasp how groups such as XR believe that achieving Net Zero by 2025 without tearing apart the fabric of such megalopolises, is possible. With balcony allotments perhaps?
Or do they simply see their inhabitants as the vital, conveniently-out-of-sight sacrificial lambs of their dystopian/utopian gap-year climate-creed (if they think beyond their zealotry at all)? Lambs consigned to anxiously protesting against fresh waves of government clampdowns from their apartment towers as supplies of foods and vital medicines dwindle: the global manufacturing and supply chains having collapsed so that humanity can penitently start over from scratch, all having then become truly ‘worthy of a better future’?
I’d be interested to know how we would ‘build back better’ the future without oil.
Hold on, something like that is already happening in Shanghai – a megacity of more than 26million inhabitants (approximately three Londons) – and as consequence of the CCP merely ‘acting in defence of the health of all’ drones are advising citizens to ‘control their soul’s desire for freedom’ . . . or else. Common sense or careless cruelty?
Nobody is currently gluing their breasts to the tarmac of the great Chinese mother, the illegality of going outside is only just now beginning to be revoked (in some areas at least). How many have flung themselves from their windows during this latest of the CCP’s lunatic lockdowns, inflicted to eradicate the mere sniffles of Omicron?
Imagine the same scenario playing out simultaneously in Mexico, Mumbai, Lagos, Tokyo, New York, Cairo and Manila in defence of Net Zero policies, and so that we never again experience any more freak years ‘where everything died’ – except minus electricity. And to save the 120,000 citizens of Kiribati, whilst paying virtue-signalling homage to ‘indigenous’ rights.
Did all cost-benefit analyses of absolutely everything cease in March 2020? Does it occur to these fundamentalists that their climate activism is all risk and no benefit? That precipitous climate action is a far greater threat to mankind than climate change itself?
How can XR profess to be fighting climate extinction whilst at the same time championing the universal state-sponsored genocide they nuttily proffer shall save us? Am I talking about Net Zero or the pandemic? I’ve forgotten.
Perhaps what they ultimately believe in (apart from culling our numbers through energy loss) is the spurious ‘climate-friendly’ theory that the needs of those remaining must then be engineered to be met by the metaverse, and not the physical world: an objective the World Economic Forum appear to be obsessed with above all else at times, by the way.
But who would wish to live Bill Gates’s, Klaus Schwab’s, or DARPA’s version of life anyway? To manifest their vision of the future – for our and the planet’s own good, naturally – we would necessarily have to become semi-robotified by Big Tech and Big Pharma, and who seriously wants that?
Not me, sir. Gimme that good old-fashioned treacly black gold and its life-creating carbon dioxide that have done more than anything else to lift the world’s people out of poverty.
Perhaps we just need a similarly good old fashioned lethal pandemic to cull our numbers, and hence alleviate the strain we place on the planet?
Sigh . . . . . if only.
Editor’s note: If you can bear an example of an XR activist’s thinking first hand, then watch this young man ‘clash’ with me on Dan Wootton’s GB News show on Tuesday evening, and note his shock to find a non ‘believer’ still existed in 2022.
