Beginning

Yesterday, I sat in on a webinar about sustainability and the green environment in relation to training the upcoming generation of apprentices in the construction trades. The presenters were earnest and sincere in their desire to promote awareness of the impending – some would say already present – climate crisis. The trouble was, though, none of them were expert in the field, having been drawn in from various, more established disciplines. Nevertheless, this is the way of the brave new world.

Coincidentally, this morning I read in the Spectator about the Unesco’s latest interference in this world: Education for Sustainable Development, ESD for short. It seems that the Unesco is not content with their current levels of alarmism and seek to embed ESD throughout the young people, expressly to encourage political climate activism. The programme states that ‘Empowering and mobilising young people of all genders… is a central part of ESD implementation’. Of all genders? Was it really necessary to trumpet that particular bit of virtue?

Anyhoo, if you were worried that young people are indoctrinated enough in our schools and universities the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization does not share your fear and wants to impose top-down mandates that every curriculum be re-tuned to harmonise with its political goal to ‘climatise’ every waking thought… and probably your dreams as well. Lest you also think you can maybe just ignore all this, the UN has taken the BBC’s stance on balance and central to the imposition of ESD is that ‘the educator has the duty of not being neutral’.

What this means is that, much like with diversity training, every lecturer, every teacher, every curriculum leader will be themselves re-educated to trot out the egregious drivel of the environmental protest movements. Whether they are concerned or not, whether they have the ability to understand ‘the science’ their jobs will be incumbent on toeing this line. And why this is worrying is because they will be fed the  Greta syllabus whereby every shower of rain is climate breakdown and every hot day will be an extinction event and your children are going to have the bejesus scared out of them.

There is the chance that those studying engineering and physics and other related STEM subjects will have the ability to see through the worst, but what of those reading the arts? Relying on the greater wisdom of your tutors used to be a safe bet when in search of the truth, but how reliable is going to be the externally moulded opinions of those with little or no training in critical thinking and the scientific method?

Is this where the Marxist infiltration of our establishments has brought us? From those hippies who became teachers, who rebelled against rigour in education, who embraced whatever new-age claptrap was in the wind and thus influenced the next generation of teachers, and so on. The UN is now questioning and challenging the very purpose of education and making decisions to leave out anything which does not contribute to sustainability, even as it redefines to its own end what sustainability itself means.

This is a war on civilisation, nothing less. And it should be met with a resilient rebuttal at every opportunity. Whenever your offspring seek to ‘educate’ you about your part in humanity’s downfall you need to be ready with more than just a ‘yes, dear’. But I don’t know if common sense can prevail, for this has in effect been happening for many years and many graduates are already approaching positions of power and influence. As far as this brave new world war is concerned it may not be just the beginning, but the beginning of the end.

As You Were

The current culture war – selfish, individual identity versus national cohesion – is quite bad enough, all by itself and threatens stability for all. The LGBTQIP+++ alphabet people are aided in their assault on reason by the parallel war on intelligence, waged over at least the last half-century, which churns out ever more dependent, ever dumber, ever biddable young volunteers to the cause. Meanwhile the judiciary appears to have turned on the majority law-abiding in favour of the disrupters.

Banking is broken, the globalised Ponzi scheme of growth by consumption has feasted on the ready supply of lowest-common-denominator immigration, and we are, it seems no longer able to hire for merit, being driven by the diversity agenda to hire by skin colour or gender or disability. The great and the good, from their altar at Davos have proclaimed that we will own nothing and be happy.

Well, the first part of that certainly appears to be happening, owning nothing that is. Our roads are riddled with potholes, our rail infrastructure is creaking, public services everywhere are physically breaking down when they are not merely on strike, and the chances of getting a doctor’s appointment are close to zero. Zero is the theme – it seems to be the end goal of every policy, every administrative effort; it may as well be in the main parties’ manifestos.

So it seems uncannily timely that the latest orders from the seat of world government, the UN and the IPCC, that despite the impossibility of achieving the already ridiculous Net-Zero targets, developed nations must hit that unachievable milestone ten years earlier than pledged. 2040, they are saying, not 2050, and lest you be in any doubt, 2040 is effectively tomorrow. Emissions are still rising, they wail. Yes, they are, because the unseemly dash to achieve ‘not-zero’ by 2050 is creating industrial output on a scale not seen before… in China. Using coal.

You could not invent a fiction worse than this reality. Cleverer heads than me have worked out that not only do we not currently know of sufficient mineral resources – raw materials for batteries, wiring, electronic components, etc – the extraction of these resources is despoiling vast acres of the natural landscape while also emitting ever more CO₂ into the atmosphere. It doesn’t even matter where you are on the anthropogenic climate change debate, 2050 was problematic, but 2040 is far, far worse.

Some are even calling for – and brace yourselves for this – 2025 (yes, just 20 months) to get the ball in that back of that impossibly small net. If Greta Thunberg wasn’t bad enough, prepare yourself for your kids to come home and denounce you as murderers for daring to have them, clothe them, keep them warm, transport them and feed them. Oh yes, food, that’s something else we are going to have to learn to do without, apparently.

Who is going to pay for it all? Yes, you guessed it, the taxpayer. We are. Again. No matter what the cause, no matter what the cost, the sacrifices will not be made by those making the policy. But here’s their problem; in order to muster the will and the resources to do things on the scale being demanded, you have to herd the sheep along a single path to the slaughterhouse. And for that you have to get some form of buy-in from the sheep. What’s in it for us, we ask?

As it stands, nothing. We get nothing in return for the pain which will be inflicted on us. Worse, we will be berated as ignorant and bigoted (and no doubt, racist) for resisting the reduction of our living standards to that of the third world and the payment of reparation to that same third world so that they can experience the industrial progress that dragged us out of the gutter. It is the same as seeing your hard-earned council tax go to replace the windows in the housing society property next door, occupied by universal credit dependent recipients, while you in your owner-occupied hovel shiver through the winter months.

Coming soon, to a neighbourhood near you...

Madness. If you wanted to dream up a scheme to foment mass rebellion you could do far worse than the climate change lobby. But even in the face of all of the above, I still see little active resistance. In the end the Net Zero lunacy will fail not due to the scale of the technological challenge, to which we are not equal, but to apathy, our new defining national characteristic. For, if the inanities of gender ideology, enforced diversity, and the winding up of all that once made us a force for good in the world isn’t enough to get us out on the streets, I doubt very much that climate action will ignite that spark. 

Level Headed

While still on Twitter suspension (during which time I have achieved many useful things; perhaps I should get suspended more often?) I can nevertheless still browse the site and see what’s winding folk up. Today I came across this tweet: Link Professor Bill McGuire modestly bills himself as “Volcanologist, climate scientist, broadcaster, activist, socialist, best-selling author…” Author of what, you may ask? A new book called Hothouse Earth, in which this Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL posits the gloomiest of dooms ahead for the planet. 

And why not, eh? It’s a hot topic (pun intended) and he's bound to earn a few capitalist quid from flogging this dead horse. After all, it’s not like he’s going to be contradicted and he is certainly not going to be proved wrong in his lifetime; he’s 67 and the cataclysmic forecasts are projections hundreds of years hence. But let’s have a go anyway, shall we? The article he links to predicts a worst-case scenario of 5 m sea level rise by 2500. Yes, 2500, which is 300 years away. Nothing I could see in the Guardian article suggested McGuire’s sensational 52 m prediction.

 His career has long been founded on doom and disaster – you wouldn’t be inaccurate to presume he has a vested interest in scaring people – beginning with an appointment some thirty years ago as Professor of Geohazards and Director of the UCL Hazard Research Centre. A glance at some of his book titles gives you a quick study of the man and his modus: 

• Surviving Armageddon: Solutions for a threatened planet (2005). 
• Global Catastrophes: A Very Short Introduction (2006). 
• Seven Years to Save the Planet (2008). 
• Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards (2012). 
• Waking the Giant – How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes (2012). 
• Knock Three Times: 28 modern folk tales for a world in trouble (2019). And, of course, 
• Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide (2022).

 Oh, he also blogs for Extinction Rebellion; make of that what you will.

 A tour through his timeline reveals all the expected tendencies: anti-Tory, pro-socialism, hater of all things fossil-fuelled, calls for state-run utilities, Palestine… it goes on and on. Tweet after tweet reveals him not to be the data-driven, serious scientist he tells himself he is, but rather a partisan people-hater. We need top-quality minds to be working on this stuff, and we need properly coordinated energy, social and economic policies, yet from what I see, the people with the most influence tend to be these activists posing as pragmatists.

 Whoever inherits Boris Johnson’s crown needs to very quickly get a grip and clamp down on the apparent knee-jerk responses to every bit of climate quackery. If those sea levels really are going to rise we need to be properly planning for decades, if not centuries in advance to adapt to the effects. And given that nothing we do right now will have any measurable effect for half a century hence, we can afford to divert our attention and resources to solving the current difficulties. The green shit can come later.

If this goes unchallenged people 

like McGuire will earn a fortune.

 I am no climate change denier, but neither am I a climate change junkie. I have no need to search for the next fix of apocalyptic rhetoric. I am, I imagine, more in tune with the vast majority of the Earth’s population, willing to work on my own energy budget just so long as I can see that my efforts are not being hamstrung by governments lurching from one faux-emergency to another. So let’s apply a bit of common sense here. Get back to gas, frack for victory, dig up a bit more coal, keep developing diesel, but most of all, let’s just keep a level head on our shoulders.