People no longer fear God, hell or eternal damnation. Yet human nature is such that they have to fear something, the more apocalyptic, the better. That need opens up countless opportunities for scaremongers, those who peddle wholesale fears at the exorbitant price of social and economic stability.
What the fears are doesn’t really matter: put enough resources behind a campaign, and people will be quaking in their boots at a mere mention of, well, Ebola, flu, pollution, nuclear energy, Covid, GM crops, fracking – and of course global warming, or climate change, as it’s now called.
Not all of such mass-marketed fears are completely without foundation. None, however, merits a panicky response. And climate change merits no response at all, other than telling Greta Thunberg to shut up when grown-ups are talking.
Yet climate change peddlers can package their product with a sermon about the evils of capitalism, which adds much subversive value to the offering. That’s why all progressive (i.e. subversive) people swear by climate change.
They are prepared to sacrifice not only our prosperity but indeed the survival of millions at the altar of this anti-scientific, inhumane, ideological hoax. That’s why grown-ups who ought to know better, and secretly do, get up and salute whenever that demented child Greta harangues them rudely and demands that all – ALL!!! – carbon emissions be stopped now. Not by 2030, not by 2050 – NOW!!!
Should those transfixed adults attempt to comply with that Lord of the Flies diktat, the West would instantly sink to the level of the Third World, whereas the Third World would simply die out, just as instantly. But never mind the people – ideologues never do.
Such fanatics can be found anywhere, but especially in the intellectual jungles they roam in vast herds: The Guardian, the Independent, the BBC, Sky News and other similar (de)formers of public opinion.
Thus, one of the first items on this morning’s Sky News dealt with the low yields suffered by our cereal farmers this year. A wet autumn combined with a hot and dry summer produced what in the expert opinion of Sky presenters betokens a calamity.
The blame can be placed squarely at the door of Climate Change, always pronounced with initial capitals. That, of course, is another name for Global Warming, an unprecedented catastrophe that’s going to destroy all our crops, melt both Arctic and Antarctic ice, flood the landmass everywhere and eventually – no, SOON!!! – lead to the extinction of life on Earth (aka Our Planet), with Homo sapiens the first to go.
Sky presenters and their ilk have no doubt that the catastrophe we are facing due to rapacious capitalist greed is indeed unprecedented. When told that Our Planet has been hotter than now for three-fourths of its life, they treat that as a conversation stopper. One can’t talk to reactionaries, even – especially!!! – if they have facts on their side.
Having worked capitalised Climate Change into their narrative several times in a few short sentences, the presenters then commiserated with consumers, who’ll soon have to take out a mortgage to buy a loaf of bread. After all, it’s the common folk who always find themselves at the receiving end of the capitalists’ sharp practices.
They then introduced an expert, Tom Bradshaw, Vice President of the Farmers’ Union. I reached for the remote to turn the spectacle off – if Sky people were mouthing such twaddle, I thought, I could only imagine what a union man would be saying.
However, before I had time to push the OFF button, Mr Bradshaw began to speak – and he was talking sense. A farmer himself, he hasn’t just seen wheat fields through the window of a first-class carriage carrying him to the Edinburgh Festival, and he displayed unsentimental common sense typical of his profession.
Mr Bradshaw agreed ruefully that farmers are indeed at the mercy of weather vicissitudes. But it has always been thus, nothing new there.
A shortfall in yields? Well, yes, though last year we had great yields, this year’s weather has let us down. But not to worry. We’ll just import some more grain from elsewhere.
You see, Western Europe has suffered a bit, but they’ve had good harvests in Eastern Europe, the Ukraine and Russia. Even farther afield, Canada and Australia have had no such problems, and they’ll be happy to export their surplus.
Cost to consumers? Negligible. The extra imports will only add half a penny to the price of a loaf – nothing we couldn’t handle.
Here the Sky people must have wanted to scream: “Are you out of your mind, Tom?!? What do you mean, we had great yields last year? Didn’t we have global warming then? Next thing you know, you’ll say we just may do all right next year too.
“And what’s with all those places, from Australia to Canada and everything in between, minus Western Europe? What part of GLOBAL warming don’t you understand? Global, Tom, means everywhere, not just Britain and her neighbours.”
All in all, Tom Bradshaw somehow managed to get through that rather lengthy segment without once mentioning global warming or even climate change. But what can you expect from those yokels who have been tilling the land for generations? What do they know about climate, compared to the founts of wisdom at Sky News?
By the end, my fear deepened – but not of climate change. I was mortified that our woke opinion (de)formers will end up getting their way, and not just in shoving the climate change hoax down our throats. Theirs is the god of ideology, and it’s a wrathful deity, always athirst. Only real God knows how much damage this lot will wreak.
Dangerous stuff, common-sense.
“Our Planet has been hotter than now for three-fourths of its life”
Even warmer during Roman times then now. Good campaigning weather. Spread of empire and all that.