Climate activists like Extinction Rebellion are no different to all those that have gone before, on just about every issue and are straight from the script of the 1953 Marlon Brando movie, The Wild One:
Woman — “Hey Johnnie, what are you rebelling against?”
Brando — “Whaddya got?”
For decades if not centuries it has been The Simpsons, “old man yelling at the cloud” refrain of frustration that “someone must do something”. No one ever knew what or specified who must do the doing or who or what it was, that was to be done. Just something.
And it’s the same thing with all the shrill and hysterical demands for the declaration of a climate emergency and a climate crisis by the enviro jihadists and zealots, for more action on climate change, (whatever that means).
It should be clearly understood that no amount of action will ever be enough for the climate catastrophist and activist class and they’ll just keep doubling, tripling and quadrupling down because the reality is that it’s not a change of climate they seek, so much as validation and affirmation.
They need a cause, a purpose and justification for their lives and as is always the case with obsessive personalities in search of a cause, if it wasn’t climate change that engaged them and was their motivating and animating principle, it would be something else. Some other millenarian or Malthusian end of times crisis
The unalloyed truth is that it’s not the climate the activists want to change, but YOU. It’s all about control and dictating the way you live your life.
Climates do change, no one denies that and they do so over tens of decades, if not thousands of years. And they have done so totally unassisted as far back as before mankind walked on two legs.
But we live at a time and in a world where someone, somewhere, must be to blame for everything. It’s always someone else’s fault and everyone expects instant gratification and instant results for their efforts. If we’re not getting instant results on climate change then more ‘approved’ action is required.
Most people would be familiar with the guiding theme of the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, “Build it and they will come”.
That same logic and thinking could just as easily apply to the scavenging hordes of climate rent seekers, spivs and hustlers lining up at the trough of government funding for research grants and subsidies on climate and renewables under the same guiding principle, with a twist.
“Fund it and they will find it”. If it’s affirming, climate change research you’re paying for, it’s affirming, climate change research you’ll get
There are too many people with too much invested financially, intellectually and emotionally, so far out on a limb that they simply can’t back down. It would be just too humiliating and career ending.
The thing is that because a changing climate is slow and imperceptible the net effect won’t be felt in our lifetimes with the forecasts out to eighty years from now in 2100, when most will be dead and buried so that with the effluxion of time, if any of the proponents were to live that long, it gives them a kind of plausible deniability when the hoax is finally exposed.
Even if there were a significant climate change in that time frame, it could just as easily be the world slipping into an ice age and we would be just as clueless as to the cause of those changes as we are today.
Remember we are talking about a temperature variation of less than that between say, Sydney and Brisbane or Sydney and Sydney’s west on any given summers day and we seem to deal with those temperature differences quite adequately. Darwin and Hobart, anyone? Hot and cold and people choose to live, work and play in both extremes
Climate change is a political issue like any other, with one side trying to milk it by scaring people to reap a political dividend, as summed up in H.L. Mencken’s observation that: “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Or as Gregory Wrightstone wrote in his book, Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know:
“For the left, climate alarmism is just agitprop, another temporary pretence to achieve other policy goals. Progressives’ solutions to an alleged environmental “crisis” are to raise taxes, grow government, hamstring capitalism, and relinquish national sovereignty. Not coincidentally, those are the same policies the left always pursues, “urgent, time-critical” global environmental “catastrophes” aside.
Ronald Bailey succinctly made the same point in his 1993 book, Eco-Scam:
“Freeze or fry, the problem is always international capitalism and the solution is always international socialism”
For others, judging by their unhinged, panicked behaviour, climate change like so many other issues these days, has morphed into a quasi, mental health, Jim Jones and Jonestown, Guyana type cult issue, complete with the climate and co2 Kool Aid.
Nothing else can possibly explain their hysterical, scatty and deranged behaviour as they prostrate themselves, pagan like at the altar of a 16 year old Swedish girl with her own mental health issues.
Think about it. In the 21st century, what normal, fully grown sentient adult does that?
For the children of the climate cult, it has become a totally irrational utopian cause célèbre for narcissistic people, so unbalanced and untethered from reality that they see themselves as central to and able to influence and control natural, global events.
Even something as intangible, opaque and unknowable as a changing climate. What is that if not delusion? It has become extreme Gaia worship.
It’s not such a stretch from the culture of selfie narcissism to believing that you can bend the climate to your will— too hot, too cold, droughts, flood, bushfires, The Great Barrier Reef — it must be our fault.
If they were serious about solving the problem of Co2 emissions, and more real and particularly do-able action on climate, if it were indeed a crisis and an emergency, requiring urgent and immediate action, they would be demanding that we switch to 100% nuclear, tomorrow. But nuclear would neutralise Co2 as a political issue and in one bold sweep, take it off the table and deprive the climate cult of their H L Mencken, “hobgoblin” political football.
Going nuclear is what keeps them awake at night but not for the reasons you may think.
Nuclear is their kryptonite, their Achilles heel and embracing it would mean having to give up on their co2 and climate psychosis and find another cause to politicise, fret over and become anxious about.
Nuclear is something tangible and something that we can do, something we should do but that doesn’t fit with the idea of keeping climate change as a moving target that has to be funded and researched. It’s like some atmospheric game of whack-a-mole.
With all its eternal permutations and variations climate is the perfect scam. It is the gift that keeps on giving. Forever.
It has become the ultimate, monetised human misery and guilt industry and it infects and infests every crack, crevice and fissure of human endeavour.
What comes through loud and clear in the climate debate is again the wisdom of
H.L. Mencken when he observed that:
“…The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it…”