What Has the Industrial Revolution Ever Done for You?

Much talk at CoP27 about paying for ‘loss and damage’, couched in the terms of reparation for the evil done to the current climate by we bastards in the developed world. In particular, Britain, the crucible of modern civilisation, comes in for massive criticism. As Greta Thunderthighs herself might say, “How dare we!?” But must the ‘sins’ of the father always be visited upon the sons? Just like the eternal nagging of the BLM movement, it is always somebody else’s fault, isn’t it?

Well bollocks to that, all of it. If you feel that you have been punished for an accident of your birth, why should it be somehow just for others to be punitively berated for their slightly more advantageous accident? The pursuit of equality – such an outcome being impossible to both describe and to bring about – invariably take the form of handicapping talent or good fortune. Of course life is unfair, it’s a roll of the dice, but if you try to hobble the winners eventually they take their game elsewhere.

It is literally madness if you seek help to come threatening violence (or, as we call it now, invasion by mass immigration). The industrial revolution brought you roads, medicine, industry, a means of escaping agrarian poverty and mere subsistence. It brought you communication and education and reduced your death tolls immeasurably. And, in fact, despite your perceptions and prognostications about extreme weather events, fewer people today, across the entire plant, lose their lives due to the effects of climate.

Life expectancy in what we used to call the third world is greatly increased, and with prolonged better health, as a result of which, your populations grow. And because so many of the supposedly ‘most vulnerable’ live in societies where procreation appears to be a competition, if mankind is the driver of climate change, then it is these countries where the future problem lies.

Just as the movers and shakers of the Industrial Revolution brought solutions to the economies and the health and welfare of the world, it is those same advanced societies which are doing the most to ameliorate the effects of former industrial processes. The solutions do not lie in sub-Saharan Africa, nor in China, Brazil, India or even the appallingly backward provinces of Pakistan, one of those most vocal in their condemnation of Britain's unintended malice.

None of these countries will be in the vanguard of future advances in combatting the effects of climate change. Instead they will play the bigger part of making it all worse, as they demand we reduce our emissions simultaneously with them acquiring all the means by which to increase theirs. It will be Britain and the US and Germany and the Nordic countries which will drive progress, not them. Reparations? They should be paying us.