CLIMATE OF FEAR

 

 

The Canadian wild-fires currently befogging New York and much of the American east coast has, as you might expect, been ascribed to climate change. Despite official figures showing that the top five causes of forest fires are four of them human. The other is lightning, which I believe is still the fault of Zeus. Climate change is an all-purpose tool, it will do anything you want it to. It’s like an ideological Swiss army knife.

Various facts have been unearthed that argue against this spurious theory, not least that America’s cities experienced twenty ‘dark days’ between the early eighteenth century and 1910, before cars and aeroplanes and with a far lower, largely non-industrial global populace. But anything fact-based makes no dent in opposition armour. Climate change ideology is like every other modern ideology in that is composed of ex cathedra statements made ex nihilo.

Now, climate is a vast subject and laymen rely on various news outlets, websites or books. I have dipped into it, always having had a minor interest after reading Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist some two decades ago. From what I have read, Lomborg is right, or at least he was then. The money expended on green initiatives – far more now than it was 20 years ago – would be better spent on local projects to improve the environment at ground level.

Another problem with ‘fighting climate change’ is that it is only certain Western countries who are fighting this supposed war for the life of the planet. You won’t catch China or India going green. And for the developed West, and particularly their governments, it is an efficient and ingenious way to take even more money from a cowed, surveilled, tired public. Green taxes will cost everyone a lot of money, and make a lot of money for the usual suspects.

At the same time as green is the dominant colour – the ugly spectrum of the pride flag notwithstanding – actual green land in the UK is about to be concreted over to build new houses to house migrants. Green only goes as far as energy. When it comes to land, the government wish that to be their demesne. That is also what is behind the farmland grab that was road-tested in the Netherlands and will doubtless be extended for use elsewhere across Europe.

Climate change is a stick to beat the masses. And, of course, the virtuous subscribe to the mythology, as they are expected to do. The tiresome British organization Just Stop Oil have been antagonizing British motorists for weeks by blocking roads, and the police have been careful to make sure they are just as protected as the BLM rioters were.

Covid outlived its usefulness, and so something else was required that would hand the power over individuals to government. The political climate is certainly changing.