Climate of Fear

It amazes me that so few people see climate change and the government response to it for the brazen fraud that it is. There is a core of true believers, who want climate change to be true. With religious zeal they tell us the end of the world is coming, it’s all the fault of the rich and the decadent, and our only salvation is poverty and self denial. But like religion and communism climate change has created enough fear and credulity in the wider population to be a useful tool for our would-be saviours.

You can argue about the science forever, as some people seem intent on doing. But this just tends to lead to a sort of Pascal’s Wager, where we might not be very certain about whether climate change is happening at all or what is causing it, but the consequences are so awful that doing something to tackle it seems worthwhile anyway.

You can go for the ostrich approach, favoured by many on the right, which is to say it’s unstoppable now anyway, and we might as well enjoy the good life while we can. They point out that while China, India and the rest of the developing world are all aspiring to own cars and fridges and fly off on holiday then our driving a smaller car and not leaving the TV on standby overnight is probably not going to make much difference.

This worked OK for most of the last two decades. A bit more duty on petrol, tighter emissions controls and a few other nods in the general direction, and let’s hope they shut up and let us get on with it.

But that’s not working anymore. They didn’t let us get on with it, because they couldn’t. And now the UK is going in to winter with talk of blackouts in the power grid, electricity prices rising even further and pensioners unable to heat their homes. Yet still they lobby more subsidies for wind farms and solar panels paid for by more charges on energy use. Just as with socialists and religious zealots the climate believers will not stop in their crusade until there is nothing left to tax or destroy. It’s time to start calling them out directly on this blatant fraud.

Just like when a builder tells you your house is about to fall down and would you like him to fix it. Or a garage says that the slight misfire is the first sign of the wheels falling off, the brakes failing and the engine is about to explode, and would I like to buy the low mileage one he has in at a very reasonable price. You can go so far politely saying you’d like a second opinion or that you’ll get to it next month, but sooner or later you have to say a firm No.

It’s too obvious that this was mostly just made up in the 1980s when communism was dying, and it really gathered pace in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. No surprise then that it’s now found a new home on the left of modern politics.

The proposed solution is a giveaway too. They’re reformed Trotskyites, so the problem is bound to be cars in general, perhaps the most revolutionary invention of the 20^th century, which gave more freedom and choice to the ordinary working man the failed ideology of socialism could ever dream of. To be more precise, relatively affluent people in Range Rovers and sports cars, along with big business chewing through the planet’s resources and destroying our climate. The boom in cheap flights that coincided with this escaped almost untouched.

And the solution? Tax is the first step, of course. Taxes targeting powerful cars and bigger engines. Petrol is a dream product to tax as it’s demand is highly inelastic – people need it and increasing the price will not decrease the demand proportionally. Big cars are a perfect thing to tax because they are bourgeois status symbols. Climate change my foot. It’s a fraud!

Once all the taxes are in place, they have our money and they need something to do with it and there’s nothing that socialists like better than grand, government projects. We will “lead the world” in wind farms, and when building them in fields proves to be not wasteful enough we’ll go and build them in the sea! We’ll pay people to put solar panels on their houses. We’ll turn the rivers and the seas to our advantage. The state will save the day!

Of course the Church of England is only too pleased to jump on this bandwagon, believing doing so can help stop it’s slide into irrelevance. And the assorted charities are in on it too.

These people have an innate need to believe in something and be fearful of something. They yearn to answer to a higher power, and to be held to account. They call themselves progressives but they are truly the most regressive people in the history of mankind. At least the medieval peasants knew no better than to blame their poor harvests on the devil. The caveman had reason to fear fire if he couldn’t understand or control it. The revolutionary communists often actually were overthrowing unpleasant regimes, even if they replaced them with something that wasn’t necessarily much better. And the relevant priests, shamans and commandants were there to take their cut.

The current true believers have no such excuses. They have burst forth into a vacuum left by the collapse of previous failures, and have simply made up a new God to fill it.

It’s high time to stop playing the nice guy, stop humouring them and kick the whole, horrible, cynical climate change fraud into the dustbin of history where it belongs.