Some observations on 2023…
Net Zero scepticism
Net Zero scepticism, if not climate scepticism, has exploded, and is now a fixture of the mainstream, albeit a minor part. Former ministers and broadsheet news media began to find their voices in ’23. This is largely confined to the centre-Right, but that may be merely a consequence of the realities of power – a Labour government is going to inherit the same problems of their own making, and it will be difficult to sustain the consensus. The GMB’s interventions shows that the broad Left’s support of the Miliband set’s preferences cannot be taken for granted. However, independent media and analysts are far ahead of the mainstream, which has yet to form robust critiques of green ideology, except in extreme (e.g. XR/JSO) cases, and is still inclined to apologise for climate alarmism, and/or tinker with policy. The cross-party Westminster consensus on climate holds for now.
Cancellation on steroids
Power is doubling down on its predominant ideologies, and consolidating with unprecedented attacks against the conventions of one-time liberal democracy (RIP). Governments throughout the West have given themselves the power to impose increasingly draconian interventions to police speech, under the pretext of protecting the public from ‘online harms’. In 2023, the concepts of ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ fully escaped the dank confines of the Blob’s nucleus, and are now a cancer: A mutation of the principle that might-is-right. The doublespeak extends from passing off official lies as unimpeachable truth to claiming that this ‘protects’ democracy. Financial institutions have weighed in, appointing themselves as regulators of the public space, though debanking scandals have embarrassed the blobs. ESG is toppling globally, especially in the U.S., but seeking surer foundations in Europe and the U.K. Mainstream discussion has yet to properly connect ESG to authoritarianism and rising costs of living. In the U.S., new precedents are being set for using criminal and civil courts as political weapons against critics of all sizes. Blobs are keen to extend this combination of regulation and lawfare into Europe and the U.K. These are, of course, reflections of the facts of political establishments’ loss of moral authority, and the growing gulf between them and publics, forcing them to take increasingly reckless measures against their own failures.
The UNFCC/COP process and climate alarmism is a busted flush
Attempts to consolidate the climate agenda, at all levels of government, using increasingly high-pitched rhetoric are increasingly falling flat on their face. Epitomised by António Guterres’s sloganeering, such as ‘Code Red for Humanity’ and ‘Global Boiling’, the global political agenda is simply embarrassing. Geopolitics is repolarising, with the west committed to harming itself, apparently in the interests of its sworn enemy in the form of the dominant partners of BRICS nations. One time ‘developing’ nations have found their feet, and they are not going to follow the West, leaders of which have no longer any leverage over any but officials of the poorest governments. The world now has (always did) far more serious problems to contend with than can be solved through happy-clappy green idealism, advanced only by billionaire-backed green NGOs and ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations, many of which are merely ESG lobbying outfits in ‘third sector’ drag. Western politicians succeed only in signalling to the rest of the world the failures of the green agenda, and their hypocrisy and lack of competence and good faith in all matters, including the green agenda, financial regulation, rule of law, democracy and security: They will put their self interest and ideological ambitions before the basic needs and interests of their own populations. The putative achievements of COP26 are already collapsing, with global financial institutions falling out of the Bloomberg-centric ‘alliance’ (GFANZ). The most recent COP was an inconclusive mess, which drew most hostility from the green blob itself, and only served therefore to demonstrate the hopeless fracturing of the world into irreconcilable parts.
The world is not decarbonising
Global CO2 emissions reached 37.15 billion tonnes in 2022 – a slight increase over the pre-covid 2019 record of 37.04 billion tonnes. The world consumed 44,854 TWh of coal in 2022 – pretty much where it was a decade ago in 2014, though agencies such as the IEA are reporting this as a “return to record levels”. Reduced consumption in the West has been matched by growth in Asia, where consumption has tripled since 2000. Oil and gas consumption have also been flat since Covid, reflecting recent extremely high prices – which we might expect to have reduced demand more significantly – though 2022 gas consumption is down on 2021. Coal, oil and gas accounted for 26.7%, 31.6% and 23.5% of global energy demand respectively – a total of 81.8%. 14% of primary energy came from renewable sources – up from 9% in 2010, and barely more than a doubling from its historic 6% through most of the second half of the 20th Century. And those figures for renewables depend on the dodgy ‘substitution method’, which multiplies the contribution of renewables by around 2.4, in order to ‘account for’ the inefficiency of fossil fuels, but which are thus an attempt to inflate the apparent viability of green energy.
The world is not boiling (at least not from climate)
Natural disasters and extreme weather continue to have zero negative influence on any metric of human welfare, when today’s statistics are compared to the past. There are no problems in the world that can be better explained by climate/weather than by the incompetence of policymakers: War, disaster, disease and poverty, where they occur – which they generally do far less frequently than in the past – owe their existences to decisions made by people assuming, often illegitimately, power.
Climate activists are getting sillier by the day
Although it seemed scarcely possible that the green movement could prove itself to be even more intellectually hollow, recent years have seen greens plumb new depths. Starting with the emergence of Extinction Rebellion and its franchises such as Just Stop Oil, a new generation of activist, with negative mass between the ears, has increasingly made its presence felt. They block roads and throw soup. But they have zero capacity to defend their ideas and understanding against criticism, much less state their objections to any counter-position in any reasonable way. Their view of the world is wholly emotional and irrational, yet is seemingly carried on the authority of institutional science – the population of which is no more grounded in reason, though is far quieter. They are collectively the worst of people: Entitled, ignorant, irrational, unreasonable and narcissistic. But I am being too kind. They, like all such zealots, are also dangerous. They exist because society at large has failed to confront green ideology, and because there are such people who seek licence to give expression to their impulses, which would otherwise be prohibited, or at the least inhibited. Unchallenged ideology festers like gangrene.
Debate with silly people is pointless
Over the last year, I have been on 10-minute ‘debate’ slots with a grown man wearing dungarees and plaits in his beard, calling himself a “professor” (whose name I cannot be bothered to find), weather-bloke Jim Dale, fire-and-brimstone eco-zealot Donnachadh McCarthy, and wind spiv Dale Vince (among others). I have also had a constant supply of vapid invective from Twitter trolls. The green blob does not send out its best and brightest to fight its cause because it is not a movement that is founded on the best and brightest – it has no culture of debate, democracy or science, and it eschews these things, requiring only obedience and emotion from its adherents. In fact environmentalism requires the suspension of rational faculties. Hence, you will only find appeals to authority, not a sense of history, proportion or logic in green arguments. That is how ideologies work. They need to be protected from criticism by seemingly unimpeachable claims to truth, which are beyond the moral or intellectual capacities of unbelievers’ understanding. Bad faith thus precedes green activists’ contributions to ‘debates’. They are there to harass, to waste time and to smear and fear monger, not to contest the issue. We need to speak to the vast part of society that has been excluded from politics by the green blob’s dominance, not kid ourselves that blobbers of consequence will lower themselves to debate: They don’t believe they have to. Hence you do not find any fake academic, blobcrat or wonk defending their work; you find only the jokers. And we need therefore to overcome the limitations of news media in the era of Ofcom.
Global climate politics has regrouped in local politics
Global climate politics (see above) is dead, and has been since Paris. National politics, at least in the U.K., despite the Westminster consensus, is similarly stalled. Sunak’s smallest possible U-turn on the car ban date signalled the growing recognition that the Net Zero agenda risked generating real conflicts. The Government has few means left at its disposal to hide its interventions behind fake ‘market-based’ solutions, such as rising sales mandates – i.e., salami-slicing. The emphasis has therefore shifted to local government. LTNs and CAZs/ULEZ and 20mph zones are the consequences of climate change being reframed as ‘air pollution’ (with no scientific foundation). Similarly, local authorities are now penalising older car owners – a regressive, class-based tax – for services such as parking. And they are using their functions in the planning system to require Net Zero compliance faster than is mandated by national policy. This is happening because of mass disengagement from local democracy, with turnouts rarely above the 35% mark, and often barely making it into the teens. This makes local government extremely vulnerable to the blandishments of the blobs.
The Blob is dead. Long live the Blob!
The most ridiculous outfit in the world is the WEF. We should take some comfort in the fact that it has spent countless £millions on the most self-destructive PR campaign in history. But the WEF is just one of countless such organisations and agencies, which we should not obsess over. Moreover, the Blob is a liquid. It can pour itself, and its unflushable turds such as our former PMs, through any crevice into any institution. It can therefore reconstitute itself, whether or not it is the WEF. We need to see the Blob as a tendency, not as a particular organisation with particular attachments to ideologies. As well as being liquid, it is fickle. It has no real form or structure or agency. It can be defeated, therefore, not through mere exposure and humiliation, but by us, organising ourselves in our own interests – and that is the Blob’s worst nightmare. We don’t need to kick it out of institutions; we displace it. Notice, for example, that despite the powers that some credit him with, everything that Tony Blair ever touched is now a pile of rubble and corpses. But neither that, nor the WEF’s agenda are yet a done deal.
The ghost of Covid lingers…
A number of things surprise and disappoint me. First, though other transformations of culture that were triggered or encapsulated by much less significant events, we do not yet mark the current time in the way we did, for example, ‘post-Diana’, as ‘post-Covid’. Yet lockdowns were the most significant political intervention into our lives in postwar history, marking the end of perhaps centuries of political norms. Second, when I point this out to some, they are puzzled that I could think it not a jolly old time as they found it. They do not even recognise their house arrest and their impoverishment as such. Perhaps because they were not separated from their relatives, or did not care. Or they did not see their parents left to rot under illegitimate DNR notices, or their children forgo their formative opportunities and education. Or perhaps their assets allowed them to survive inflation, where countless others had their businesses and livelihoods destroyed. Worse, and third, they do not seem to recognise the architecture of the future being built on Covid as a model, not as an abomination that must never be repeated. However… the Covid lockdowns have focussed the minds of many on the nature of politics, power, money and public institutions. And many are being brought together on this new understanding. As well as launching Climate Debate U.K. this time last year, it has been a great pleasure in 2023 to have been working with @Togetherdec, which unanimously decided at its AGM to focus on a No To Net Zero campaign. Please get involved and support them if you can in 2024.
Things I have not mentioned much: War, and other contemporary ideologies such as gender and confected grievances. This was simply getting too long, and I want to focus on climate. Happy New Year to you! May your homes be warm, your babies plump, your plates full, your jobs fruitful, your horizons broadened and your cars powered by petrol and diesel.
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