Are these people completely insane? many of us must wonder, as we watch our nations slide faster and faster into the abyss of “net zero”. Have none of them taken notice of what’s happening in Europe? California? Texas? It’s not as though we aren’t getting sufficient warning that the road to net zero is the road to energy impoverishment.
The answer, of course, is no, they’re not insane. Many of them aren’t even particularly unintelligent. But even reasonably sane, intelligent people are prone to believing fervently in the most stupidly destructive ideas. From the more fanatical outbursts of religion to the horrifically bloody secular ideologies of the last century, we’ve seen time and again just how much too many people are willing to surrender their hearts and minds to catastrophically bad ideas.
These ideas are never, of course, presented as bad ideas. Quite the contrary: they’re pitched as very good ideas. Taken at face value, they certainly seem so. Who, for instance, would take issue with the idea that we should improve the lot of the poor and oppressed? That we should “save the planet”?
The problem is, as Game of Thrones’s Tyrion Lannister asked, if you truly believed you were building a better world for everyone, “Wouldn’t you kill whomever stood between you and paradise?” As we’ve seen over the last century, those who profess to be building a better world were prepared to kill tens of millions to pave a road to paradise with bones. Their 21st century descendants haven’t fired up the gas chambers or opened the gulags… yet.
I’m not talking just about the it’ll-work-next-time socialists, but their ideological fraternal twins, the Climate Cult. As I discussed in last week’s Insight, they’re quite open that billions of us humans will have to go in order to clear the way to eco-paradise, and fast. How, even they haven’t gone quite so far as to contemplate… yet.
We could be forgiven for thinking that their diabolical plan is to starve and freeze to death as many of us as possible. Venezuela and Sri Lanka beckon.
This brings me back to the obvious insanity of “net zero”.
Sure, they pitch “net zero” as an unmitigated good: but is it, even in theory? The theory is that it will lower atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations: but prior to the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 was at the lowest levels in the history of life on Earth. They were perilously close (250ppm) to levels at which plants would begin to suffocate (150ppm). Whether human CO2 emissions staved off widespread plant death is obviously highly debatable: what isn’t debatable is that plant growth has exploded in the last few decades. Even the theory of “net zero” is, at the very least, open to dispute.
But if the theory is debatable, the lived effects, to date, are not.
Everywhere that emissions have been cut by large-scale energy transition to “renewables” — meaning, at this point, wind and solar — the result has been the same: electricity prices skyrocket and more and more of the population sink into “energy poverty”. California begs its citizens to cut back on power consumption. Britain and Europe are enforcing electricity rationing as the northern winter sets in. Britain’s energy regulator admits that thousands of people — mostly the poor and/or old — freeze to death every winter because they cannot afford to run their heaters.
Why are so many people still so fanatically dedicated to net zero?
Most of them fit the category of “useful idiots”: the marching morons mentally enslaved to an elite agenda. The agenda espoused by Klaus Schwabs, King Charles III, Bill Gates, and Mike Cannon-Brookes, and the rest of the globalist elite who flit from one climate change conference to another in their fleets of private jets. Note that: private jets — even though we’re constantly lectured that air travel is the most CO2-intensive activity a planet-killer could indulge in.
There are many possible explanations for such a blatant disconnect between what the global elite tell the rest of us, and what they do for themselves, but it’s hard to escape the suspicion that it is all, in fact, by design.
As I detailed in a couple of recent posts, there’s a good argument that current renewable energy technologies aren’t even meant to be a viable replacement for cheap, abundant fossil fuel energy. That, in fact, the real agenda is to force energy poverty onto the masses. The real agenda behind the “net zero” push looks an awful lot like scam-by-design, intended to dupe us all into handing the global elite more power and more money than they already have.
Now, let’s look at how the elite will continue to live in opulent, electrified comfort while the rest of us regularly freeze through the winter and swelter in the summer.
If that sounds incredible, consider two things: who is pushing the “energy transition”, and what they are doing already.
We know who is behind net zero. What they’re doing to leverage the net zero agenda already is like something out of an SF dystopia: EVs which can be shut down or even driven remotely, smart meters that can turn off your appliances and heating from a central control room, and worse. Supposedly “liberal” governments like Canada have already demonstrated their willingness to freeze peoples’ finances merely for supporting legal protest — do you really think they won’t literally freeze us, given the chance?
We know the globalist green elite won’t be inconvenienced by high electricity prices, as will a pensioner, an unemployed person, or even most working families. The average UK energy bill at present is about 10% of average household income. For the 1% pulling in half a million quid a year, it’s about 2%. That’s not even accounting for the massive financial boost that the elite will get from investing in the very “renewables” that are impoverishing the rest of us.
But, you might be saying, won’t short supplies of gas and electricity affect everyone? If energy rationing means that power retailers simply shut off supply, won’t everyone be blacked out? When all boats sink, won’t the elites go down, too?
Oh, you sweet summer child — you never paid attention in history class, did you?
Throughout history, elites have always held themselves above the misery they inflict on their subjects. It was as true of Communist Party elite as it was of the Ancien Regime nobles — and it’s still true of the globalist elite.
The worst offenders are invariably the elite who bullshit us that they’re only doing it for the common good. When Mao and his cronies swanned through the Long March in sedan chairs they vehemently denied that they were living in luxury. Sure, their carriers regularly dropped dead from exhaustion, but the leaders “have it much rougher than we do”. Because the elite carried the much heavier burden of thinking. “We [soldiers] only walk and eat, we don’t have cares.”
When Mao was growing notably fat while everyone else starved, it wasn’t because he was greedy and venal: “It is the order of the Party… the Party can order him to eat a chicken a day.”
So, when, as inevitably happens, wind and solar fail to keep the grid humming — and it will happen, with increasing frequency, no matter how much the Climate Cultists try and bullshit us about “big batteries” — you can be absolutely sure that Al Gore’s mansion will have all lights blazing as usual, that Greta Thunberg will be toasty warm, and all the usual suspects will still be able to fly to their next climate gabfest in whatever exotic resort.
When there’s not enough power to go around for all of us, you can bet your last candle that the elite will make sure they get all they want and leave the rest of us to scrabble after the remaining scraps. The most obvious way to do this will be setting up “tiers” of energy consumers, not unlike cattle class, business class and private jets. Those with the means to pay will be able to subscribe to a premium category: gold class users, platinum users, what have you. Simply by paying a premium, the richest users will be guaranteed uninterrupted power.
In the old days, of course, that would have been prohibitively expensive. Essentially, an entire, separate grid would have to be built to service the platinum users. With the new “smart grids” that are being built with the help of our taxes, that’ll be a much easier proposition. If smart meters can be used to quickly turn power off and on in households, they can be used to shunt load from bronze tier subscribers to platinum households.
Oh, no doubt the elite will make a grandiloquent show of “doing their bit”, but it’ll be as hollow as the CCP elite declaring that they needed to be carried on the sweating, broken backs of starving Party members in order to relieve the crushing burden of thinking deeply.
You will own nothing and you’ll be too cold and hungry to do a damn thing about it.