Baroness Theresa ‘Darling Bud’ May has delivered a rousing oratory waxing indignant about the likes of Trump and Farage who describe climate change as a “hoax” or a “scam”.
You could see me wiping my brow even as we speak. Since I only describe it as a swindle, I find myself outside the range of Darling Bud’s slings and arrows. That’s why, rather than feeling defensive, I can sit back and reflect on her remarks dispassionately.
The first thought that comes to mind is that susceptibility to cults is inversely proportionate to the level of culture. And this is one telling difference between a religion and a cult. The former heightens one’s ability to acquire culture, the latter nips it in the bud.
(G.K. Chesterton said the same thing with epigrammatic precision: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything”.)
This observation is true of individuals, and it’s equally true of societies. That stands to reason.
An essential part of culture is discrimination, and I’m using the word in its proper, rather than political, sense. A cultured person has an ability, both innate and acquired, to tell right from wrong, good from bad, true from false, beautiful from ugly, intelligent from stupid, credible from incredible, plausible from impossible.
His ability to discriminate makes him impervious to any newfangled orthodoxies. Before he accepts them as such, a cultured person will cast a critical eye over them to make sure they fall on the left side in each pair I listed in the previous paragraph.
If upon such scrutiny he finds them wanting, a cultured person will reject such orthodoxies out of hand, regardless of how many people accept them. Conversely, an uncultured person will avidly gobble up any thin gruel of an idea as long as it caters to his hunger for a higher purpose. Because he needs to believe in something, he is ready to “believe in anything”. Including such unscientific, ahistorical nonsense as a climate catastrophe awaiting the world unless the western part of it destroys its economy with ‘net zero’.
I don’t know whether Baroness May has any religious faith but, if she has, it hasn’t in her case fulfilled its civilising potential. Either she genuinely worships the cult of global warming or, as a politician, accepts that it has already graduated to the status of orthodoxy, and I don’t know which is worse.
Most zealots will react angrily, possibly violently, to anyone who dares to argue against their cherished cult. Rather than being seen as a sensible individual coming up with well-reasoned arguments, such a naysayer will be regarded as a heretic or apostate. And no aspiring politician wants to be cast in any such role: there’s no applause awaiting and, more important, few votes.
When I ill-advisedly find myself arguing against exponents of the climate cult, I always ask a lapidary question: “Have you read a single book on the subject?” So far I’ve received a single yes answer to that question, which made me ask a follow-up: “Which one?”
The next reply I received, “What the **** does it matter?”, confirmed what I knew already. My interlocutor, along with most people, arrived at his belief without having taken the trouble to study the subject. Like most modern, which is to say uncultured, people, he suffers from the deadly combination of high passion and low knowledge.
In what sounded like self-laceration but was meant to be a scathing attack, Darling Bud lashed out at the “out-of-touch elite” that uses the climate change debate “to fight a culture war”. This brought to mind the canonical story of a thief running away at full pelt from his pursuers and shouting “Stop thief!” louder than anyone else.
Having set up her stall, Baroness May then proceeded to fill it with pseudo-evidential goodies. One such is the economic bonanza that net zero will create: “When the sceptics say that the green transition will cripple business, we say they could not be more wrong. Study after study shows that the transition to renewable energy will unlock global market opportunities worth trillions of dollars over the next decade alone – with businesses in every world region able to capitalise.”
Show me your study, I’ll show you mine. And mine will demonstrate convincingly that, even if we assume that wind farms and solar panels will eventually provide enough domestic energy, they will never be able to sustain a strong industry. Since the need for industrial output will persist for ever, industry jobs will go to countries that ignore Western cults.
The other day I experienced acute schadenfreude when I read an article calculating that the cost of running an electric car is already twice that of a petrol or diesel vehicle. And that’s before millions of batteries go zonk.
Though Baroness May isn’t as far as I know a communist, she operates in the same idiom. The cost of energy is climbing up steeply, and households are already reeling under the impact. But Darling Bud wants them to grit their teeth and accept today’s pain for the sake of the glittering future awaiting tomorrow. Or perhaps the day after. Or maybe never – it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is keeping faith in the cult.
In the same spirit, she then attributed everything awful in life to global warming, showing a creative ability to construct chains of causality out of thin air. Modern slavery, for example, is a direct result of warm weather.
Those who couldn’t keep up with the runaway train of her thought were treated to a staggering explanation, link by causal link. Because of warm weather, “life becomes a matter of survival from one day to the next, and into that picture come the criminal gangs making money out of human suffering. Because these situations make people more vulnerable to being trafficked and taken into slavery.”
Darling Bud then added a few touches of colour by telling her audience some harrowing stories of a 53-year-old Romanian electrician forced into the sex industry and a seven-year-old girl sold into slavery and forced to sleep with dogs, one hopes only literally.
All because of global warming, Baroness? If you have to ask, you don’t worship the cult.
One could offer her any number of facts showing this swindle for what it is. Such as that warm and cold periods have always alternated, and climate has been warmer than it is now for about 85 per cent of history, or that the warm peaks have produced periods of the greatest prosperity.
But that would be a pointless exercise. Cults are impervious to facts or reason, and their worshippers, such as our former PM, neither activate their own minds nor appeal to anyone else’s. They just scream their harangues, and in this regard the supposedly grown-up Theresa May is no different from that evil Swedish child with learning difficulties.