Isn’t it quite wonderful that the governments of the world, which are clearly incapable of breaking the recession-slump that is sucking us to perdition, are nonetheless certain that they can reverse global warming?
They have proved their utter ineptitude at coping with tangible, man-made phenomenon, the global economy: yet this doesn’t prevent them from telling us they can solve a problem which is even deeper and longer term, and might not even be man-made.
I’ll accept for the purposes of this discussion that global warming is a reality, and that it is primarily caused by man, rather than by the sun. But I will not accept that that any of the global-warming conferences, which are always held at the end of long first-class flights in places with beaches and cathedrals and good restaurants and opera houses, have actually lowered the amount of carbon dioxide anywhere. We know that all the alleged “targets” have actually only been to diminish the INCREASE in carbon dioxide output: which is like saying to your teenage son, it’s fine that you’re driving at 100mph, and it’s even fine that you’re still accelerating — just so long as you don’t add more than 10mph every minute to your speed for the first minute, and then 9mph for the next minute, and so on. So how long does it take to get the car back to 100mph, which is of course still a lethal speed?
Never, is the answer.
If we already possessed lethal levels of carbon dioxide, absolutely nothing that mankind has done in the past 20 years has reduced those levels. Moreover, the entire debate — if you can call the biennial orgies of self-congratulatory bilge in Rio and Kyoto and other exotic places ending in “o”, but curiously, never Mayo or Sligo — is based primarily on the notion that the damage is being done by power production. It does not address the probability of population growth being a primary cause of climate change, because that raises questions which have no politically acceptable answers. How does the UN stop India’s population increasing? Or Africa’s? Or Brazil’s? Or England’s?
Vast swathes of Africa have no trees because of the cutting and burning of forests to create fields to generate food to feed the peoples there, who, thanks to western medicines, are doubling in population every 20 years or so. Much of Ethiopia, Malawi, Uganda, are ecological disaster zones because of deforestation. No trees means no leaves to inhale atmospheric carbon dioxide, and replacement trees are not being planted. In other words, no one is stopping the teenager accelerating his car.
So what does the world do to deal with this imminent environmental catastrophe, heading for us like a moon-sized meteorite? Why, it bans 60 watt lightbulbs in Europe. This is EU juju, a cocktail of superstition, eco-dogma and political expediency, not dissimilar to Mao’s Great Leap Forward, though done by democratically endorsed political elites.
These modest efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses — though magnified massively in the popular mind by media witchcraft — are of course being overwhelmed by the consequences of population increase. Yet instead of admitting to their impotence, our political elites continue to hypnotise with the magic of illusory targets and the voodoo of windmills. But of course, that’s rather like what elites always do. As the very last tree was felled on Easter Island, leaving it an environmental catastrophe that is a model for much of the world today, no doubt the local headman explained why this particular tree was a nuisance, and should be got rid of. And of course, he was backed by the local priest, who duly infused the agreed suicidal policies with the myrrh of sanctimony.
A similar sanctimony fills those modern Eucharistic Congresses called “climate change conferences”, which have amongst other things endorsed the windmill as a solution to all our woes. Now, there is not a single state in the world that has been able to permanently decommission any of its conventional stock of power-stations, nuclear, oil or gas, because of wind.
AIR is so unreliable in its lateral habits that it needs 100pc back-up; and even on usefully windy days — which are probably in a minority — every windmill has to have an alternative stand-by power supply, ready to go, 24/365. Such infrastructural duplication itself generates vast amounts of CO2 in its manufacture, and of course is incredibly expensive. Yet these simple truths are not allowed to interrupt the ecstasies of religious mania surrounding wind as a source of power, any more than Catholic bishops pause amid the celebrations of Easter Sunday to discuss the scientific plausibility of Christ’s resurrection.
It wasn’t deliberate economic policy which ended the great slump of the 1930s, but the Second World War, and I very much doubt if economists will rescue the world from our current crisis.
Equally, I am reasonably confident that nothing that mankind consciously does to reduce greenhouse emissions will achieve anything of the kind. Which of course will make no difference to our leaders: like the tree-cutting lunatic on Easter Island, when they can no longer explain, they simply delude.