Lost world (Part 1)

If you are a fan of global conspiracies – and I know many of you are – you could do worse than to plump for one literally involving the entire planet in its evil designs for total control of all humanity. Except that’s all bollocks. What is undeniable, however, is that the world’s leaders have succumbed to an unprecedented level of groupthink as a result of the coalescence of science, mumbo-jumbo and fear which has risen from those same huddled masses you think are being controlled; if anything this is the other way round. I blame education.

Since the 1960s a low grade cultural Marxism has slowly taken hold and people power has resulted in many changes in our societies. A great many of them are for good, undoubtedly; the power of the crowd given a free vote has inevitably forced the kind of advances that probably would never have occurred to a ruling class who were not dependent on popularity. But the crowd isn’t always right and the crowd rarely joins the dots, with the result that unintended consequences often remain unforeseen until it is too late.

You want clean air for your kiddies to breathe? Of course you do. You want to save the planet from the spectre of catastrophic climate change? Who wouldn’t? The logical conclusion of all these leading questions is that climate change is publicly undeniably: bad, our fault, can be reversed… and can only be challenged by drastic action, no matter what other alternatives (such as adapting to climate change) are available. Something must be done, says the mob. Fuck me, say governments, as a result of which…

2035 is just the blink of an eye away. The UK government has gone deep with its pander-to-Saint-Greta strategy banning new petrol and diesel car sales in just 15 years. But to what end? If the UK ceased to exist, if it was obliterated entirely from the map, the world CO₂ emissions would reduce by less than 1% and all the experts, insofar as anybody can be an expert in something as ill-defined as ‘climate science’ agree that this would make no difference whatsoever to whatever they are predicting today (prophecies vary).

But this isn’t what the UK is proposing to do. The Road to Zero moniker suggests that we will have a zero-carbon transport infrastructure in just a few decades, but this is nonsense. Even if the entire fleet was converted to electric we still generate plenty of CO₂ emissions in the extraction of materials, transportation across oceans, manufacture and infrastructure implementation. Plus we still have to somehow generate the electricity to run this new miracle fleet which will, inevitably, have to use fossil fuels well into the next century.

Electric cars are powered by coal

At best we might reduce our overall carbon footprint for vehicles by about 20% and even then only by hiding it somewhere else. And at what cost? A quarter of a century ago the world of science said diesel was the answer, and not so long back hybrids were the key. Now both will be on the scrapheap. No more research and development, so no improvements and notwithstanding the VW debacle over the cheated emissions controls, small diesel engines were getting better and better all the time. That alone might have resulted in a similar reduction in footprint but those potential advances are now lost.

Instead the population faces a massive upheaval, not to mention massive cost. At a time when the new government could have got to grips with tackling the root causes of mass discontent within our society it has decided, instead, to embark on a vainglorious vanity project. Instead of doing the thing it was elected to do, it is trying to leap onto the world podium before the race has even been run. They used to say look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. That holds true for individuals, for communities, for governments and for the entire world. We should be jealously guarding our resources, Mr Prime Minister, not spaffing them up the wall in a pointless pissing contest.

To be continued…