Don't Save The Planet

Climate hysteria is the latest luxury belief of the Radical Chic.

Death in the Sickroom — Edvard Munch (1893)

Conspiracy theories are often gateway drugs to horrific mental derangements, like belief in the magical powers of healing crystals, and essential oils.

Dear reader, if you ever encounter someone who’s renamed themselves ‘Gaia’ wishing you a day of ‘wellness,’ don’t reply. Just nod carefully and shuffle toward moving traffic. With the raffish charm of the improperly medicated, Gaia will corrupt your senses: ‘the planet is burning!’ She’ll wink and she’ll nudge, and she’ll whisper coquettishly: ‘Zionists.’ Indeed, ‘Zionist’ is the demented person’s euphemism for ‘The Jews’. Clever, eh?

From conspiracy theory sprouts its demented cousin, hysteria. Gaia might link you to the New Statesman’s recent take: ‘Would Extinction Be So Bad?’. Misanthropy has mainstreamed.

The diehards attest that billions will die, that entire eco-systems will dissolve if we don’t Do Something!™ That doing something unfailingly involves handing over your money and everything you like doing.

At least some are openly mental. Like every good chap, I don’t begrudge an honest nutter. Such characters are essential threads of the human fabric. On the more exotic end of the nutter spectrum sits the eco-fascist. Such desirables contend that Mother Earth can sustain just 500 million people. For that earth to flourish, they say, 85 percent of its population would have to shuffle off. Of course, they don’t include themselves amongst those who are to shuffle. They forget they are the luxury, that they wouldn’t survive their own eco rapture. A planet winnowed down to the essentials wouldn’t waste a square metre on bloggers named Cheska, and oat milk ambassadors named Spencer. Who would survive? Daily-breaders named Vince and Dawn, useful types who fix pipes and mend limbs.

The divide has seldom been more obvious. A poll last week revealed that the climate ‘crisis’ is an elite obsession. Almost three in ten Cheskas and Spencers say the climate is their biggest concern, whilst working-class Vince and Dawn concern themselves with the pandemic, the economy, Brexit, and the NHS.

Indeed, that’s not to suggest Vince and Dawn spend their evenings burning piles of rubber tires. Perhaps they think that any climate policies should consider those such policies will encumber most heavily.

The better-off one is, the more psychic capital one spends on what social scientist Rob Henderson calls ‘luxury beliefs’. Those imbued with luxury beliefs are keenest for Great Britain to ‘Do Something’ and become ‘The First.’ It matters little what doing something costs, nor what becoming The First entails.

Net Zero is the latest in luxury beliefs. Cheska and Spencer can afford an electric car. They won’t notice their energy bills going up by £400 this year alone. They won’t notice the raft of encumbrances and costs going net-zero will incur. They’ll be too busy dreaming up new ways to humblebrag about ‘doing their bit’. A luxury belief isn’t luxury unless the lower orders pay for that luxury.

Boris Johnson’s net-zero obsession will cost between one and three trillion pounds. Our entire GDP is two trillion and change.

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One bright idea is to replace Vince and Dawn’s perfectly good gas boiler with a ‘green’ hydrogen pump. Such pumps cost £10,000 apiece—one-third of Vince’s annual salary—and won’t heat his less energy-efficient home.

They’re the perfect modern metaphor: An expensive-looking, approval-seeking, clever-sounding contraption with no idea of what it’s doing, praised on account of its good intentions. How very modern.

Perhaps some hipster at a voguish start-up can invent an energy system that runs exclusively on our endless and renewable supply of modern piffle; a system powered by lentils and oat milk and pithy hashtags and self-regard.

Each morning, you could wake yourself up extra early and feed into the magic machine the latest pronouns, hashtags, clips of Justin Trudeau, and words you’ve just learned off a ditzy Instagram influencer; words like ‘systemic’ and ‘structural’ and ‘self-care,’ and ‘she-covery.’ In exchange, the magic machine will grant you enough energy for a three-minute shower.

Indeed, our drive for net-zero is oh so modern. Great Britain produces less than one percent of all global carbon emissions. If we returned to the soil tomorrow, forever denouncing rioja and cigarettes and everything which makes life worth living, we’d achieve absolutely nothing in doing so. Life would be meatless, cold, brutish, and mercifully, short.

Meanwhile, China laughs at our modern folly. That unrepentant belcher of 30 percent of global carbon emissions recently announced 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces. These alone will pump out 150 million tonnes of carbon per year—the same as the entire Netherlands.

Don’t mention that to Greta Thunberg. Greta this week shared her disappointment with a world that refuses to conform fully to the half-baked whims of an angsty teenager. Greta said Great Britain was ‘lying’ about our carbon emissions figures. According to Saint Greta, our progress is little more than ‘creative accounting.’

Dear reader, don’t argue over the state of existence with someone whose entire existence depends on not hearing your argument.

Greta would rather have the hysteria. That hysteria belies mainstream science. No mainstream scientist claims that billions of people will die. Yes, the climate is changing. Indeed, we probably have something to do with it. Yes, we should be prudent. No, the end is not yet nigh.

Such indulgent piffle used to be the exclusive preserve of those weird kids in school garbed in hemp shirts and who claimed the weed they bonged at lunch-time cured cancer. Now, it’s mainstream.

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Later this year, Great Britain hosts the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow. That summit, the convinced attest, is the ‘last chance’ to save the world. They say this every ten years or so.

You’d have to be an intellectual to believe the grand narcissism that we humans can bend the climate to our will. Few believe the folly of hashtags and paper bags.

Consider this. By some magic, scientists today declare that the climate ‘crisis’ is over. Somehow, all the hashtags and self-regard and narcissistic incantations healed the earth. Would we rejoice? Perhaps. Would it last? No. Within two weeks, Greta and her friends would conjure up another ‘imminent disaster, the solution to which would involve giving them whatever they so wish and praising them for their ‘bravery.’

I must confess, I’d rather the world were a pile of burning car tires than subject myself to rule by those who believe in essential oils and shiny rocks. One thing I have noticed, call it Gage’s Law, is that the more someone projects their compassion on to others, the more likely that person is nasty, vindictive, neurotic (and not the sultry kind), and keen on two things: power and control. I spent much of my youth in muddy fields, my brain scrambled on MDMA and LSD, with such people. Indeed, they’re good to talk to when you’re zooming across psychedelic planes, but to run the country? No.

Yet, we all need a reason to be here. The only species aware of its looming death needs stories to tell itself and difficulties to overcome to give meaning to mystery. Saving the planet is just one of those grand stories. Without them, we’d have never left the caves. Perhaps some amongst us would prefer to return to those caves. They can go ahead without me. I’m off down the pub.