Save our planet and win a valuable prize

London isn’t quite burning, but it’s paralysed. Up to 30,000 Extinction Rebellion cretins are blocking major routes because they want the government to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025.

Essentially, these present-day Luddites want to revert to the ecologically pure world before the Industrial Revolution, when energy was solely produced by water, wind and muscle.

One suspects they’d still wish to keep certain benefits of industrialisation, such as, to mention a few, electric lights, painless surgery, computers, mobile phones and modern medicines, none of which would be possible to deliver without offending ‘our planet’, and the cretins’ delicate sensibilities, with carbon emissions.

They want to destroy scientific and technological progress, which is the only kind that modernity can boast. We’ve created a moral, social, intellectual and aesthetic hell, but at least we’re comfortable living in it. Now the cretins want to take even that away from us.

The former Archdruid of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams thinks bringing London to a standstill is a small price to pay if we really want to atone for our sins. I’m sorry to be quoting at length, but every word in the archdruid’s homily is pure gold (of the fool’s variety):

“We have declared war on our nature when we declare war on the natural world. We are at war with ourselves when we are at war with our neighbour, whether that neighbour is human or non-human.

“We are here tonight to declare that we do not wish to be at war. We wish to make peace with ourselves by making peace with our neighbour earth and with our God [or gods, as the case may be with druids].

“We confess that we have polluted our own atmosphere, causing global warming and climate change that have increased poverty in many parts of our planet. We have contributed to crises and been more concerned with getting gold than keeping our planet green. We have loved progress more than the planet. We are sorry.”

How this man acquired a high ecclesiastical office, not to mention a reputation for a towering intellect, is beyond me. But then modernity in general is beyond me.

One sine qua non characteristic of a sound, never mind towering, intellect is an ability to correlate one’s conclusions with the available evidence, sifting the latter to separate fact from interpretation and interpretation from speculation.

When it comes to anthropogenic global warming, never in history has so much mischief been caused by so many on so little evidence. (The archdruid says “global warming and climate change”, which to anyone who understands English should mean that climate change is distinct from global warming and thus may well include global cooling. But then this gigantic intellect is incapable of using language precisely.)

The only scientific discovery made not by scientists but by the UN, anthropogenic global warming doesn’t stand up to serious investigation, of the kind that involves comparative data gathered over millennia. In the very least, some doubt should persist, which would mitigate stridency.

But even supposing for the sake of argument that some warm weather has been caused by energy production, I’d say we should take the rough with the smooth.

Do we really want to go back to the times when most babies failed to reach their first birthday, when epidemics and famines killed more people than wars ever did, when every visit to a dentist or a surgeon involved excruciating agony that many didn’t survive, when a journey of 100 miles took a week, when… well, you don’t need me to explain what scientific and technological progress has done for us.

Let’s just say that, if the 10 million Londoners replaced every car with a horse, the resulting pollution would be a lot worse and much more malodorous.  

It’s an outrageous, idiotic lie to say that science and technology increase poverty. The good archdruid should check his facts before mouthing off. In his own lifetime, people in under-industrialised China and India used to starve to death in their millions.

Now they don’t, and anyone whose Christianity isn’t sullied with pagan admixtures should thank God for those polluting mines, wells and factories – and by the way it’s not Britain and other Western countries, but third-world powers that contribute most of the carbon emissions.

But the Extinction cretins, including clergymen who ought to know better, don’t realise, or refuse to acknowledge, that ‘our planet’ was created to serve man, not the other way around. If that concept is too difficult for them, then they should at least consider the polluting effect of gridlocking London traffic – and the possible cost to life incurred by crawling or stationary ambulances and fire engines.

I suggest that the police treat this madness as ecoterrorism and deal with it the same way they would deal with any other form of terrorism. Things like tear gas and water cannon would come in handy, and if our cops are too squeamish to use such expedients, they could have France’s CRS seconded to London.

The Christian in me balks at suggesting the use of live ammunition, but, as far as fantasies go, this one isn’t without a certain aesthetic appeal.