Tilak Doshi for wattsupwiththat.com
Your humble author has pretensions to theory and here is one for your consideration dear reader. Bear with me, but here it is in a nutshell. Governments and policymakers keep drumming it into our ears that fossil fuels are bad and will lead to the “end of days”. The ultimate appears in the form of oil, gas and coal. Ordinary Joe Blow will listen to the self-proclaimed climate change experts and their official sponsors. He will bear higher gasoline and electricity prices, higher airfares for his modest holidays, and even pay more for his beef since cows belch methane. After all, Joe Blow – a decent and humble fellow — wants to be a responsible inhabitant of the planet.
But there comes a point in time when the burden on Joe hits a nerve, that node of effective pain, when he explodes. It seems that is where the Germans are with the ban on oil and gas heating systems from 2024 by the Scholz coalition government. And ditto for the Americans with the loss of their natural gas cooking stoves threatened by the Biden Administration. Peak green seems to have come about as the shards of effective pain hit citizens in the West.
Let me elaborate.
The Green Cult
The Green cult has been long in the making. Maurice Strong, a Canadian environmentalist and principal architect of the 1972 Stockholm conference – the first global summit to make the environment the central issue – proclaimed in 1997 that “If we don’t change, our species will not survive… Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.”
Strong’s prophetic words on industrial civilization are already seeing fruition. Germany, the epicenter of the Green cult, is actively de-industrializing at the altar of “renewable” energy and “fighting” climate change as we speak. Former Economics Minister of Saxony-Anhalt Dr. Horst Rehberger of the FDP party, sharply critical of the country’s “energy transition” ambitions, said in 2021 that “Inexpensive and secure energy is essential for competitive industry. Expensive and unstable energy supply forces companies to migrate to other countries that allow competitive production with coal and nuclear energy.”
In an interview in 2020, Professor Fritz Vahrenholt – a towering if critical voice on German environmental policies — had this to say of the main party in the coalition government: “Unfortunately, the SPD no longer has its clientele in mind. There is already a party for the hip, green urban crowd. But the employees in the steel, chemical or car industry have been lost from sight. The little people will now be punished with a CO2 tax starting in January.”
Perhaps the best meme of the green cult is the picture of an EV charging point running on a diesel generator.
Only Carbon Dioxide Matters!
Over the past few decades, we have been led to believe that it does not matter from a climate change point of view that the earth orbits the Sun elliptically and at an axial tilt, as described by Milankovitch cycles. Nor does solar activity (frequency and strength of sun flares) which affects the cosmic-ray flux and cloud formation processes on earth. It also matters little that an estimated million volcanoes spew materials and gases into the oceans, even if we wonder what might be heating the oceans. Let’s not waste too much time on heat distribution between the oceanic and atmospheric systems with highly complex and variable ocean-atmosphere coupled global circulation.
None of these or many other facts of physics and meteorology matter. The focus is on the carbon dioxide emitted by humans combusting fuels for industry, cooking, heating and transport. For the green cult, CO2 is indeed the control knob of climate and, by extension, our cataclysmic future, unless we listen to the wisdom of a Swedish school drop-out who deleted her 5-year old June 21st predictive tweet about the end of the world. Along with Greta Thunberg are the assorted “climate scientists” who construct global warming “hockey stick charts out of their climate models duly adopted by the UN’s politicized IPCC.
Nor does it matter that the Vikings grew barley (for their malted beer) in their heyday in 1000 AD. And if the Romans grew grapes in northern England (800 – 1300 AD) during the Medieval Warm Period, why that was a one-off, only relevant to a restricted geography and irrelevant to our common global climatological history. What really matters is industrialization and the human contribution to the dreaded CO2, or so the climate cultists tell us.
It may well be true that fossil fuels helped our forefathers to escape endless backbreaking labour, grinding poverty and a life expectancy of 30 to 40 years. It is also true that fossil fuels brought us the steam engine, the locomotive and the automobile. They brought us healthier and longer lifespans. And they allow the world to feed 8 billion people (from 2.5 billion people in 1950) quite comfortably with ever growing yields in crops.
But all these miracle stories of our increasingly improving lifestyles since the industrial revolution pale into insignificance for the cultists. Our children are destined for heat deaths 10 or 50 years from now as the oceans rise, extreme weather afflicts the nations, leading to mass deaths and migrations, as the celebrated doomsayer Paul Ehrlich has warned us ad nauseam over the past several decades.
How dare you burn fossil fuels? So, stop it you all with your wasteful gas-guzzling SUVs and your expectations of cheap tourist flights, your meat-eating ways, your needs for electricity on demand. There is no Planet B!
The Theory of Effective Pain
The Joe Blows, the nice folk, the salt of the earth, do listen to the protestations of the experts. They patiently curtail their use of energy; they pay higher prices for everything (since the price of energy seeps into every good and service consumed) and they make do. They share their roads with cyclists who are anointed with climate halos. But that is not enough, it is never enough. And one day, they come for your winter heating device and command: you really do need to wean yourself off natural gas and oil. And for those of you who like cooking with natural gas stoves, only strict regulations to switch to electric cookers will suffice.
But as with Marie Antoinette’s dismissive advice to eat cake if you cannot afford bread, it can only lead to a social explosion. So, the Green party gets walloped in the polls, and deservedly so. And the US Republican party comes up with a House bill that counters the EPA move to ban gas stoves and launches actions against those that push ESG investments.
The theory of effective pain carries a falsifiable hypothesis as Karl Popper, that methodologist of good science, requires. The theory of effective pain states that while frogs can indeed be slowly boiled without their awareness, they will not just die a boiling death. There will come a point of inflection, when the frog jumps out of the boiling pot. Indeed, since we are not talking of frogs but of people, when they get past that point of inflection, their rage and fury will have consequences. The Greens, the climate cultists, will be punished at the polls in some form or fashion. Enough is enough, the Joe Blows will say. It is our world, and we shall claim our place in it.
Long Live The Common Man
We are hopefully reaching critical mass. The pampered ideologues, the laptop classes, those sporting their luxury beliefs as their badge of climate virtue, rule the roost but for not much longer. The time is nigh, and the claims of false prophets shall be put to trial in the people’s court. Long live the rule of the just and the rational. Long live the common man!
I do hope so but little sign of it yet.
Dunno about that-
Renewables growth did not dent fossil fuel dominance in 2022, report says (msn.com)
Way to go climate changers. Don’t rush the exits all at once.
And Simon Virley, head of energy and natural resources at KPMG
“Despite record growth in renewables, the share of world energy still coming from fossil fuels remains stubbornly stuck at 82%”
Grauniad 26 June 2023.
Also, take a look at this report on industrial wind turbines:
https://www.netzerowatch.com/siemens-and-wind-costs/?mc_cid=3317d2c145&mc_eid=5b1dc2119c
from the IMF:
Size of Fossil Fuel SubsidiesGlobally, fossil fuel subsidies are were $5.9 trillion or 6.8 percent of GDP in 2020 and are expected to increase to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025 as the share of fuel consumption in emerging markets (where price gaps are generally larger) continues to climb.
Oh, it’s there, but the Bandar Log* control all the mainstream media.
But in corners, quietly people are voting in people and for people who are not quite part of the current totally incompetent propagandising elite.
*”We all say it, so it must be true“.
“Long live the rule of the just and the rational. Long live the common man!”
Excellent summary of climate emergency insanity.
Not sure if we are reaching critical mass but we are certainly nearing Critical Mass Delusion
Certainly at or near peak climate delusion but to quote some covidoligists will it be a sharp peak? or will the curve be flattened by acquired immnunity to logic. We the skeptics have our Logic vaccine ready For injection into mass of the sheeple To kill the delusion but there will be a lot of ant- vaxxers out there Who will defy logic all the way into stoneage serfdom and starvation
Ultimately whether people believe in climate change, man made, or not is as irrelevant as arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin., What matters is what laws they pass in alleged conformity to those beliefs.
People were happy to go along with the bullshit till they realised it meant blackouts, electricity prices, oil, gas and diesel and food prices, and then finally interest rates, three times higher…then they woke up and started asking ‘Why?’
And the answer was incompetent political classes, and ‘renewable energy’.
When you’ve got nothing left, you’ve got nothing left to lose. That is the big mistake the elites are making – stipping ordinary working folk of the ability to survive, is a very very dangerous thing, politically, to do.
That’s really getting WOKE bot not Get Woke Go Broke…Gone Broke Got Woke
A historical clanger there, by 800 AD the Romans and their descendants had well and truly vanished from Britain.
They’d gone by 450. Offa came and went in the 8th century and Alfred the Great was very 9th century…
Chris thank you very much, I got the two warm periods, the Medieval and Roman, mixed up inadvertantly. Thank you for pointing it out! Much appreciated.
We resourceful Brits did not soon forget the lessons the Romans taught us:
“One historical fact that may surprise you is that England was a leader in grape growing and winemaking through much of the Middle Ages. At the end of the 11th century there were perhaps 50 vineyards in the southern half of the country—most associated with the church—that produced wine. “
https://theinquisitivevintner.wordpress.com/2018/04/01/winemaking-during-the-middle-ages-and-the-renaissance/#:~:text=One%20historical%20fact%20that%20may,the%20church%E2%80%94that%20produced%20wine.
Oh come on!
What did the Romans ever do for us?
(apart from aqueducts, roads, . . )
The Romans grew grapes in Britain during the eponymously named Roman Warm Period.
The Mediaeval warm period was different.
Right, the Vikings (Normans/Norsemen) were on Great Britain by the MWP.
“What we call the Viking Age, and their relationship with England, lasted from approximately 800 to 1150 AD”
-history.org.uk
I doubt all the Romans left – Roman power left, but I doubt all the Roman settlers left. I dunno, if anyone knows for sure, I’d like to know. So, there may in fact have been Romans in England during that period- growing grapes and making pizzas. 🙂
Seems more likely the Romans grew grapes in England during the “Roman Warm Period”
Perhaps the best meme of the green cult is the picture of an EV charging point running on a diesel generator.
_____________________________________
And …
US town rejects solar farm amid worries it
would “suck up all the energy from the Sun”
is certainly a runner up.
The imbecility of some people makes me weep.
It makes me laugh, but then I’m a nasty old cynic.
Is that the town Hank Johnson is from?
“Perhaps the best meme of the green cult is the picture of an EV charging point running on a diesel generator.”
I’m going to have to take a picture of a local EV charging station on a main thoroughfare of my town. There are four charging stations located at this place and in all this time I have *never* seen even one car sitting there charging.
Of course, I’m not there all the time, but you would think I would spot at least one car there over all these months.
In this part of NE Wales a local Tesco supermarket and the much larger one in the town, now ‘city’ of Wrexham have installed EV charging points. They are very rarely seen to be used.
40 years of teaching in a university to the supposed cream of the crop leaves me with consciousness of how little an above average IQ gets you.
On the other hand, people who actually do things, make or repair things often have solid common sense,
“”Cheshire villagers will not be forced to join hydrogen energy trial
Backlash prompts companies to give residents option of keeping natural gas rather than joining pilot project
…
British Gas and Cadent had been prepared to cut off gas supplies to nearly 2,000 homes in the village of Whitby, just outside Ellesmere Port on the south bank of the Mersey, as part of proposals to create the UK’s first hydrogen-fuelled village.
However, the companies have since rowed back…””
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/30/people-cheshire-village-not-forced-join-hydrogen-energy-trial-whitby
Here’s one that does a spot of cross-threading – you’d not believe how ‘perfect‘ that is
It started off from a ½hour podcast by the BBC.
I ain’t listened to all of it but within the first couple of minutes introduced ‘Mental Agility’ – this being at the centre of many of my raves about ‘where the babies have gone‘ and why science/politics/media are such train wrecks.
It is the art of diplomacy and compromise – being able to exist without going into Blind Panic Mode when something bad or unexpected happens.
e.g Covid, a wildfire, bird-flu, mad-cow disease, a tornado – just for starters
Because Mental Agility = the Good Sense Of Humour = the GSOH as much sought after by girls looking for boys.Hence rampant divorces, no babies and myriad sexual dysfunctions.
It is my assertion that a diet of sugar, alcohol and carbohydrate mush have destroyed that and why the current mess we’re in.
All about ‘Perfection’
In a nutshell – isn’t that what we’re being asked to be, by Greenies not very least?
Hence the book and the podcast it spawned = that the demands for Perfection, that we should all be perfect all the time, is ‘Doing Our Heads In‘ – even the heads of the very people demanding that Perfection
Also esp in the UK and how Tony Blair and his hideous barrister wife tripled the size of the UK Statute Book = the exact same dynamic as Boris & Princess Nutz
And so, people look for escape and if Al Gore isn’t the perfect example – who is?
He demands perfection of everybody, implicitly himself also but even he cannot cope – hence his extravagant lifestyle.
The beach-side mansion and huuuuuge use of electricity being his escape from what he’s demanding of everyone. Himself included.
But folk of more limited means use other things,
e.g. comfort food, booze, cannabis, cocaine/ecstasy, laughing gas, crystal meth, gambling, working-out etc etc
Here we are and BBC are bound to be stupid about who/where can access the podcast but here it is and also the book.
The perfection trap: do you feel ‘good enough’?
BBC Podcast (30mins)
The book: “The Power Of Good Enough In A World That Always Wants More”
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447202/the-perfection-trap-by-curran-thomas/9781847943842
The book:
I have come to realise that people like myself, with older books could become the founts of true knowledge in the brave new world of trigger warnings, sensitivity readers and re-writes.
“These days, collecting [books] is no longer the hobby it used to be. It is, instead, something of a public duty. “
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/25/collecting-old-books-is-now-a-radical-act/
I still have my books from when I was at university and they are woke and narrative free. Yes, there are two sexes (with occasional DNA coding errors) and most mammals know homosexuality.
They don’t know cultural Marxism
I came to the same-dish conclusion a while ago that second hand book shops will if not already become very valuable as long as they banish any element of wokery…
I cherish my library daily.
I wouln’t be surprised if most of the people who post here have large libraries of books on many subjects which is why they are able to take a rational look at the world around them.
We purchased a set of Brittanicas and the so-called Great Books back when we bought our first house. Recently we were thinking of reclaiming some space, but opted to keep these books in case the wheels really do fall off Western civilization at some point.
As an eternal optimist, I much appreciate a fellow traveler. Thank you Tilak.
Yes, an optimist, the madness has to stop.
Careful Tilak. I use a laptop.
So do I, but I don’t consider myself the laptop class! I don’t think it hypocritical in that the term is used for the Oxbridge greenie types. Perhaps I will avoid that term in the future.
Well thought environmentalism is actually a good thing and should be discussed very separate from climate alarmism and CO2 policies.
It is a real shame how easy some environmentalists abandon their well researched and science based goals in favor of climate alarmism.
Problem is that, in many places, for example England, there is no alternative party to the greenies.
Also Wales, N. Ireland and Scotland.
Or did you in fact mean GB&NI? And if so why didn’t you use it?
The world needs more than intermittent electricity from wind and solar.
Wind and solar only generate intermittent electricity from unreliable breezes and sunshine, but manufacture nothing for the eight billion on this planet.
Ridding the world of oil, without a replacement in mind, would be immoral and evil, as extreme shortages of the products now manufactured from fossil fuels will result in billions of fatalities from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths, and could be the greatest threat to the world’s population.
The problem is that much of the blame is with the “common man”. The common man, the common voter, is what brought on all this nonsense to begin with. You (collectively) voted for this garbage.
I disagree – most of those who support the green insanity are the educated chattering laptop classes; the common man voted for Trump and for Brexit despite the mass propaganda campaign against both.
Trudeau only got 33.7% of votes in 2021. He only “governs” due to support from the even further left New Democratic Party. Both were elected on promises of give-aways. The Greens only got 2.3%.
The real problem is how many depend on government largess and can be bought.
It seems as if only Carbon Dioxide matters, but if you introduce other ideas about dealing with this imaginary “crisis” the climate change advocates sure go into a hissy fit. Ask about nuclear. Ask about mitigation instead of prevention. See how they respond.
I fully agree with this analysis, but the hard part is predicting the turning point. I think we see early signs. Like many major socio-political shifts I suspect small early signs will quite rapidly turn into a torrential tipping point with serious consequences for the individuals who pushed us down our current self-destructive path.
We seem to be ruled by imbeciles with no critical thinking, but a more jaded view is that these are just opportunists who know the harmful outcomes of their policies but wish to enrich themselves with the power those policies give them.
Regardless of motive, it is worth those “leaders” and policy-makers taking a step back and considering their own fate once the knowledge of their misdeeds becomes widely available to those with the power to make them accountable. There is still time to come clean and start working for the greater good but not very much time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
Lemmings, ostriches, and “cake”
Like bad weeds, these things keep popping up.
I hope the author is correct, but then one sees headlines like this:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/australia-considers-fining-social-media-223711423.html
Even without suppressing “alternative media”, governments control ALL the news the majority of the population gets..
My theory is we are frogs in a pot of water that is slowly being heated to boiling. We’ are not supposed to notice we’re being cooked alive until it’s too late.
The “green Movement” is a pot of water or maybe a cesspool.
Boiling is peak hysteria.
Works for me.
Being a former engineer for a large power company and having earned a Master of Science in Energy and the Environment, I had PV panels installed eight years ago, with my estimated payback of 15 years, . . the right thing for an eco-freak to do. Before they could be installed, we acquired a VW e-Golf electric car. The savings in gasoline alone took the solar system payback down to 3 1/2 years. So, we added a used Tesla Model S, P85, and that took the payback down to less than three years, which means we now get free power for household and transportation.
We do not need to go to gas stations, we fuel up at home at night with cheap baseload power. During the daytime, the PV system turns our meter backwards powering the neighborhood with clean local power, which we trade for the stuff to be used that night. If we paid for transportation fuel, the VW would cost us 4 cents/mile to drive, and the Tesla would cost 5 cents/mile at California off-peak power prices.
No oil changes are a real treat along with no leaks. And since it has an electric motor, it needs NO ENGINE MAINTENANCE at all. We do not go “gas up”, or get tune-ups or emissions checks, have no transmission about which to worry, no complicated machined parts needing care.
Do you still pay for electricity and gasoline?