See if you can complete this sentence: Because of Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis, we must… :
A. … build more nuclear power stations
B. … remove unreasonable restraints on fracking
C. … increase exploration of new oil and gas fields, while intensifying production at existing ones
D. … continue at the same time unhurried and thorough research into other realistic sources of energy capable of fuelling a modern economy
If your answer is any or all of the above, congratulations: you are neither mad, nor stupid, nor Rishi Sunak nor a politician in general. Moreover, you are familiar with the basic logic of causality, something that has created modern science.
Mentioning Mr Sunak in that list of deficient responders isn’t meant to suggest he is incapable of logical inference. He isn’t. And I even suspect that neither is he mad or stupid.
He is, however, a politician with far-reaching ambitions. Therefore Mr Sunak couldn’t have given any of the four answers on offer. Never mind causality, feel the fraudulent modern fads, those that have been built up into unquestionable orthodoxy.
Hence he said something entirely different at the UN climate summit COP27. Actually, immediately after downsizing into the flat at 10 Downing Street, Mr Sunak brought a smile on my face by announcing he wasn’t even going to attend that pathetic talk shop.
He had more pressing issues to contend with, he explained, making my smile even broader. However, it has since transpired that no issue is more pressing than swapping fraudulent platitudes with likeminded spivs… sorry, I mean statesmen.
By sweeping the four logical answers off the table, they have effectively committed the West to perhaps the worst economic crisis in its history. And Mr Sunak added his inflated penny’s worth to that collective suicide note.
“Putin’s abhorrent war in Ukraine and rising energy prices across the world are not a reason to go slow on climate change. They are a reason to act faster,” he said. “We can bequeath our children a greener planet and a more prosperous future…”
Now, climate is indeed changing. It always has and always will. The fraud starts with ascribing that law of nature to anthropogenic factors. Thus, contrary to what Mr Sunak pretends to think, we can’t stop climate change because we didn’t cause it.
There exist hundreds of reasons for it, solar activity being by far the dominant one. However, that activity isn’t linear. It goes up and down – and so obediently do global temperatures.
As you can see, both the Roman and Medieval Warming Periods featured temperatures higher than they are now. And I don’t think the Romans and the Crusaders relied on SUVs for their transportation, nor on natural gas for their heating.
The global warming fraud was perpetrated by largely the same people who back in the 1970s were screaming about an imminent Ice Age. That is, if they had any time left from drawing mushroom clouds above pictures of nuclear power stations and marching under placards saying ‘Down with Capitalism’ and ‘Off the Pigs’.
The UN provided a comfortable home for those well-heeled nihilists, generously funding their pseudoscientific swindles with subsidies and grants. Thus global warming became the first scientific discovery in history made not by scientists but by a supranational political body.
Since most Western media sing from the same hymn sheet, it didn’t take long to sell those wild ideas as facts and suicidal urges as virtue. And, since the Fourth Estate now trumps the other three, it took even less time for Western governments to toe the line.
They are all now committed to eliminating fossil fuels and consequently any possibility of averting a possibly irreversible economic downturn. Never in the history of human folly has so much been destroyed by so few to make life miserable for so many on the basis of so little evidence.
But never mind that. Let’s assume – against all evidence, logic and indeed sanity – that the UN knows something we don’t. Climate is steadily warming up, it’ll never again cool of its own accord, and people will all be playing beach volleyball in winter within a couple of centuries.
Having made that wild assumption, let’s not stop now – we’re on a roll. So let’s further assume that replacing hydrocarbons with alternative energy will reverse that vexing trend over the same period, a couple of centuries or at least several decades.
Alas, none of today’s people will live a couple of centuries, and even several decades may be beyond many. And what do you know, while we are still around we don’t want to freeze and starve in the dark. We still want to live in the reasonable comfort created for us by generations of free, industrious, enterprising people.
Yes, thoroughly brainwashed as we are, we also want “to bequeath our children a greener planet”. Yet we’ve retained enough unsullied grey matter to consider the immediate problem in hand.
The problem is purely practical, leaving no room for platitudinous slogans and virtue signalling. Not only has Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine eliminated, or at least downgraded, a vast supply of energy, but it has also emphasised the folly of counting on evil regimes for our vital strategic commodities.
Hence, a) we must become self-sufficient in our energy production, or as near as damn and b) neither wind farms nor solar panels nor replacing internal combustion engines with batteries can get us anywhere near achieving this aim.
Even covering every roof with solar panels and every square yard with wind turbines we’ll fall far short of sustaining heavy industry, which even in this information age continues as the linchpin of a modern economy.
Moving heavy industry into the low-rent parts of the world isn’t so much a solution as a cop-out. In fact, COP-OUT 27 would be a more accurate name for the ongoing conference.
After all, we share ‘our planet’ and our atmosphere with all those less fortunate lands. So from the standpoint of “bequeathing a greener planet” it doesn’t matter whether carbon monoxide is spewed by a factory in India or Indiana.
The upshot is that there isn’t at present, nor will there be for at least several decades, any viable alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear energy. If Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine is the cause of the looming energy crisis, then the combination of the four options above is the only possible and desirable effect.
Yet Fishy Rishi has his own idea of causality, the kind that permeates the virtual reality of modern politics. If the cause were to be his contemptuous dismissal of global warming for the fraud it is, the effect would be an instant end to his career.
Can’t have that, can we now? Never mind that the poorer wrinklies may well die of hypothermia this winter. Rishi can live with that.
Common sense, Alexander! Common sense!
Very uncommon, that.
I listened to you on Sergei Lubarsky’s show and just wanted to ask you whether, instead of weaving a complicated tale ‘people who started a ‘mutiny’ against Boris, you could not bring yourself to say that lying is rarely forgiven by the British. Granted, the press, Labour and some disapproving political voices helped but the main accusation against Boris was that he LIED – to Parliament and to the country. I’d like to believe I am not naive trusting the notion of ‘fair play’ that the British still have in their bones. I actually do like Boris, his charisma and erudition but the reason for his departure is the lack of moral values и общественное мнение. But thank you for the talk.
Thank you for listening. I did mention Johnson’s lying about the homosexual scandal as one of the reasons for the cabinet revolt. You are right, the British don’t like lying politicians, which strikes me as illogical. That’s like hating kleptomaniacs for thieving — it’s what those chaps do. Yet the ostensible reasons for Johnson’s demise are actually pretexts. The real reason is the media and residents of the smarter parts of London pouncing on any Tory the moment they smell a weakness. Labour politicians enjoy much greater latitude — for example, Tony Blair, who never uttered a truthful word in his life, enjoyed a free ride in the media for a decade.
On the ballot in California is a proposition to subsidize electric vehicles. While most voters do not open the literature, I prefer to read and understand before I vote on a matter. The text never states how much money is to be given to each producer or purchaser. That alone should be enough for it to be defeated. However, it goes on to state that having more people plugging in and charging more electric cars will actually improve the performance and reliability of the power grid. With the powers that be already screaming at us all summer to avoid using major appliances during the day and far into the evening (9 pm was this year’s cutoff), it seems that adding more electric cars would be a catastrophe. It is a stupid, implausible lie. Why include it in the text? Surely anyone reading that far into the document is smart enough to recognize it for what it is? Couple that with our President going on national TV and calling anyone who disagrees with him an enemy of democracy (we live in a republic, Joe) and freedom, and we have gotten to the point where voting hardly seems to matter. Good thing we’ll all be dead before those who are elected today will actually be sworn into office.
P.S. We have had rain yesterday and today. After lying to us all summer that we had record-breaking heat, now I’m sure they will lie to us about record-breaking rainfall. All due to me and my family driving combustion engine vehicles and eating bacon cheeseburgers. Sorry, Mother Earth!
I was recently re-watching debates featuring the late Christopher Hitchens. It needs to be said that the ongoing obsession many people seem to have with ‘our planet’ is clearly the result of an entire generation of Westerners being denied the solace of believing in an all powerful, and all loving God (no one really cares for all knowing)
Americans are, I think, particularly susceptible to the sort of derangement that often comes as a result of losing one’s religious faith. It would seem that the consolations of philosophy have been greatly exaggerated, hence the desperate desire to believe in Gaia or some such nature cult.
The modern obsession with the climate eerily mirrors a particular religious impulse: man is a worm, yet the primary object of all creation. Alternately: Wo(man) is the only creature able to save the planet, yet some sort of environmental cataclysm should perhaps be desired as it would drastically reduce the number of parasites (humans) on Holy Mother Earth. Both cases are distinctly neurotic combinations of solipsism and arrogance.
Please forgive my pedant ism but we are currently in an Ice Age, lasting so far about two and a half million years. For the last ten to twelve thousand years the planet has been in a warm phase. These warm phases, averaging roughly twelve thousand years, exist between glaciation phases, which last approximately one hundred thousand years. Therefore it was not unreasonable in the 1970s to suggest that a glaciation was immanent. Perhaps if humanity could increase the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere the next glaciation could be prevented?
I forgive you, one pedant to another. Actually, on a slightly compressed time frame, the atmosphere has been cooling slightly over the past 20 years. Whichever unbiased subset of data one chooses, this global warming nonsense remains fraudulent.