Spring Fever

The spring has sprung, the grass is riz, etc. It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life and all that. Actually, although we are into the first spring month, March, official spring doesn’t being in the UK until the 20^th this year. That gives the weather less than three weeks to get its act together, not that the daffodils seem to care. The spring blossoms are pushing ahead with business as usual and no matter how many lawns the climate crazies want to ruin, nature will take its course anyway.

It’s all so exhausting, this climate change malarkey, and it’s somewhat perplexing that the world’s governments seem to be happy to let the most annoying population sector take the lead. I mean, come on, you’re taking your cues from children? The members of Extinction Rebellion may be a little older but no more mature, hailing, as is so often the case, from that peculiar proportion of the comfortable middle classes who swallow all the hippy aphorisms whole.

Whichever group you despise the most is irrelevant; they all preach an unwholesome message of doom. Greta Thunderclap Newman thinks the world is on fire; she should have been looking out of my window for the last six months where it has barely stopped raining. And the XR lot want us to return to a pre-energy age where they can try out their weird brand of communism. Communism of course, involves hardship, starvation, torture and sans electricity threatens to bring death by boredom. Why did she die? She just wanted to.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I mean, we’re going to die anyway, so why begin now? If the human race is going to become extinct and with it the rest of the planet, why not go out in a blaze of glory, rather than cowering like helpless wimps as the flames lick towards us and the famines take us? Why not buy the most luxurious car you can afford and swig Champagne as you burn up the country roads at fifteen miles to the gallon on your hedonistic way to whatever takes your fancy?

The preachers see only horror and squalor and, fetishists as they are, they sound as if they welcome it. Ten years to save the planet… again? Because, see, even if we are headed to hell in a handcart it’s not happening in ten years, nor even a hundred. Humans will adapt and survive or, yes, we may actually die out. But not in the immediate future. Think of the children? Oh, please, they will have their own children and grandchildren and on and on because they will find a way. It’s what we do.

And so what if it actually does come to pass in a few hundred or a few thousand years? Why limit the life chances of all those future generations because we were too frit to live our own? And in any case, if you like your conspiracy theories extra gloomy, the corona virus is going to get you soon. So, I say ignore XR, tell Greta to get to fuck and carry on regardless. Enjoy your life, what’s left of it, because you only have the one. If the Earth is on fire it is likely due to all the hot air spouted by juvenile climate alarmists. My message to those future generations? Future generations can suck my dick.

Going Extinct

The Extinction Rebellion mass hysteria has certainly worked on some. People have been obstructed from going about their innocent, non-planet threatening business, children have been frightened out of their wits, police have been shown to be toothless and politicians have lost no time in jumping on the bandwagon. Even those of us who are mocking from the sidelines have been drawn into the ‘debate’ by their antics; everybody is now talking about it.

And one of the things they are talking about is the coming age of the electric car. I tweeted several weeks ago that I have never actually seen an electric vehicle charging point in the flesh and was greeted with incredulity. But it’s not so hard to explain. I live in a small village and I work 40 miles away. I can’t charge at home (no off-road parking), I can’t charge at work and I have to go out of my way to find a garage. I rarely travel outside of that pattern and I never fill up at motorway services. I repeat, I have never seen an EVCP in real life.

This doesn’t make me a bad person. But, judging by the callers to Nick Ferrari’s LBC programme this morning, maybe it does. In the wake of James Dyson’s decision to abandon his own electric car project, a segment of the show was given over to the shining disciples of the new dawn. I don’t think there was a single dissenter and even those for whom, like me, a supercharged milk float is impractical, expressed regret that they could not take advantage of this energy revolution.

Electric is clean, electric is free (for some), electric is a miracle and electric will save the planet. How dare Dyson bow to economic considerations rather than join the gold rush? But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Just like wind energy, the advantages are loud-hailered to the world, but the downsides, the hidden costs and the aggressive subsidies are given rather more subdued coverage. Subsidies? Yes, if you currently use a plug-in electric vehicle everybody else is subsidising your travel; somebody always has to foot the bill.

But Dyson is right, it should be considered in the round. For all the Tesla supercars out there, which are really just virtue-signalling status symbols, the all-electric transport system is still a long way off. For the vast majority of drivers – those who live in terraced houses, in council flats, in those odd, low-rise fifties developments where you have to park dozens of yards from your front door – plug-in charging is an impossible dream. And where is all this extra electricity coming from, especially when electricity generation is one of the activities at which the environmentalists’ fingers most vigorously wag?

But don’t worry, procrastinate, because some members of Extinction Rebellion claim that 90% of the human population will have died out in just two generations. That’s probably how much time it would have taken to properly develop the infrastructure for us to go all-electric. On this basis Dyson’s decision would appear to be economically sage. What’s the point of spending all that investment if the market isn’t going to be there when it comes to fruition? Thank you, XR for defeating your own argument.

Rebellion Extinct

The revolting kiddies– Extinction Rebellion – have eschewed their chocolate eggs to take to the streets, rend their garments and openly weep into their iPhones about how they may never get to be parents. Give me strength; having survived the any-four-minutes-now imminent assured mutual nuclear destruction hysteria of the nineteen sixties and seventies and the great extinction scares of the nineteen eighties, please excuse me if I call bullshit on ‘the end is nigh’. Repent, sinners, they all seem to say: the religious, the climatists, repent and admit thy sins and... what? Go on, what?

The climate will change and no doubt we will have some effect on it, but running all our transport on coal isn’t going to help a jot. A recent German study claims that electric cars are environmentally more disastrous – if that disaster can ever be proved – than diesel. True or false one thing is for sure and that is, once governments stop raking in the massive fuel duties, expect the price of electricity to soar. Once again – like solar photo-voltaic farms, or planting forests, or carbon trading - the costs will be disproportionately borne by those least able to gain an economic advantage. It’s the poor wot gets the blame, etc.

Yet here we still are. Despite the regular-as-clockwork predictions of running out of food, water, oil, oxygen, etc, the human race keeps on finding solutions to the problems it creates. Unique among the animals, when we do shit on our own doorstep we can always find another, lesser, human to clear it up, but I expect nothing less than a Malthusian event will ever satisfy the weeping wall of climate alarmists busily recording for a posterity they believe will never be realised just how terribly sad they were about it. But look around and see how much the world gives a shit.

Ukraine elects, by a landslide, a comedian as president. The religion of peas shoots up Sri Lanka and well, the earth continues to turn despite all the protestations of an immediate cessation of such rotational activity. Climatism has far more in common with religion than it does with science - there can be only one orthodoxy and all else is heresy - and to continue that observation, it is much more like islam than it is any other faith. Who else but climatists and islamists would go to the extremes they do?

Think about it. It isn’t long ago that islamic terrorism was being blamed on the wicked climate change of the west. Are they the last generation, the ExtReb children tearfully asked? God, I hope so! But no, there will be plenty of future generations of needy, whiny, entitled idiots, persuaded that they have relevance and that anybody gives a toss what they think. Their new messiah appears to be a Swedish child, Greta Thunberg, now being touted as the next Nobel Peace Prize winner. Children are the future? Take us now.