Saturday, 5 August 2023
The other side of the looking-glass
Alex Story has a very useful Critic piece on the futility of UK and EU efforts to tackle the "climate crisis".
Killing the planet to save it
Our eco warriors have gone through the looking glass
In Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice climbs through a mirror into a world in which everything is reversed — including logic.
Increasingly, it feels like we have all climbed through the looking glass with Alice, into a dark parallel universe in which reason is turned on its head. In this new world, to save the planet, we must first destroy it.
We saw Mad Hatter examples of this earlier in the year. Last March Cambridgeshire County councillors voted to chop down hundreds of magnificent trees in Coton Orchard for a busway to “tackle climate change”. The orchard had been designated as a habitat of principal importance for wildlife in England. No matter: the trees had to go to save the planet.
A familiar problem, but the whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that Net Zero is so absurd and so damaging that there is no point voting for a political party which is still intent on dragging us through the looking-glass. It's the only filter we currently need to focus on better alternatives. If there are any.
What is true for energy also holds for agriculture. Governments across Europe are working around the clock to fulfil their commitment to shift to a climate-neutral economy, whatever that might mean. Under the European Green Deal, the climate neutrality objective becomes a legal commitment for the 27 agreeing countries to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 55 per cent by 2030.
The implications are nothing short of revolutionary. In Holland, for instance, the government has spent considerable amounts of energy in an effort to forcibly expropriate its diligent farmers to reduce emissions by 50 per cent over the next seven years. Some of the most productive farmers in the world are in the process of being thrown under the bus to meet arbitrary targets — European food supplies and security be damned.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Unsurprisingly, lots of the emerging problems can be blamed on other things. Food security and energy supplies will be blamed on wars, of course, and economic turmoil in American bond markets, or other factors beyond most people's understanding. And we will undoubtedly be told that the massive decline in the standard of living is due to the climate damage already done - we will need to take bigger doses of the medicine because we started taking it when it was too late. Quick, double the dose!
Well said Sam - we could also blame idiots who are in the hoc and let the money-followers walk all over them!
'Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.'
- Eric Hoffer
I suspect that Net Zero started as a movement (or cause), became tied to business interests who anticipated a nice little earner, and is now a racket. A dubious enterprise to separate people from their money perhaps?
The Dutch pm Rutter has been forced out over this though and the new agriculture party threatens the government. It could be even better over here if the electorate had the guts to vote for Reform in sufficient numbers.
Sam and Scrobs - anything but "we were wrong" even by implication. It's too big to fail until it does.
DJ - it's such a huge racket too, with so many reputations attached to it.
Tammly - we don't seem to have the courage to turf out the big parties, or even learn from the Dutch. We could do with a huge shock at the next general election but it seems unlikely.
Post a Comment