Jordan Peterson has branded Net Zero a “brutal” form of “nature worship”. Speaking to Spectator Editor Michael Gove, the famed Canadian psychologist says the fanatical agenda is leading only to “petty tyranny” and is a “catastrophe” for the world. Here’s an excerpt.
MG: One of the commitments that you have made is to support a new organisation, Arc – the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship [backed by the Spectator’s proprietor, Sir Paul Marshall] – in its search to provide a better story in a number of areas of public policy. Why? What is the message that you believe that Arc should get across?
JP: One of our principles is that our endeavour is to be invitational. If you tell people a good story, then they’re enthusiastically on board with it and enthusiastically means to be possessed by the spirit of God. The zero-sum Malthusian nightmare story that’s been foisted on us by the globalist, green, utopian, virtue-signalling, manipulative elites is not invitational. It is a story that will produce nothing but the most petty tyranny that you can imagine, regulating every single thing that people do. How much water their toilet uses when it flushes; how much water comes out of their showerheads; how much electricity they’re going to be able to use or not use; how much carbon they’re going to be able to emit. This is a catastrophe. We’re seeing the terrible results of it in the U.K. and in Europe.
We [at Arc] are trying to formulate a more attractive story without being naïvely optimistic. We believe that the West should be striving to drive energy costs down to the lowest possible level. If renewables can play a part in that then more power to them, so to speak. But the fact that nuclear has been off the table for 50 years is appalling. It comes from putting the wrong thing at the highest place. We’ve devolved into nature worship, which is a brutal theological enterprise. People should conduct themselves as wise stewards of the environment – obviously we have to take care of where we live. But the evidence is very clear that if you elevate people economically to the point where they’re generating about $5,000 a year in average GDP, they start to become confident enough in the future to take a long-term view of survival. They start to become, in the modern parlance, environmentally aware. If you’re scrabbling around in the dirt looking for the dung to burn for your next meal, the probability that you’re going to dispense with anything like a long-term view is essentially 100%.
A particular highlight is when Dr. Peterson tells Gove – a key figure in the Conservative administrations of the past 14 years – that the U.K. Conservatives “need a desperate slap” after what they’ve done to Britain.
MG: Which of those in power or bidding for power across the West do you admire or come close to admiring? And which of those do you think have done the greatest damage?
JP: The Conservatives in the U.K. need a desperate slap. They got one in the last election, but that doesn’t mean they’ve learned anything. I’ll speak bluntly: they allowed Boris Johnson’s obsession with his young wife to decimate the U.K. economy. Maybe that’s a bit on the cynical side, but I just can’t believe that the Conservatives fell for Net Zero. Any politician who talks about zero anything has instantly outed themselves as incapable of mature thought. It’s a foolish target because zero is perfect. There’s no way you can make anything perfect without sacrificing everything else.
MG: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
JP: I get a kick out of Nigel Farage. He’s patterned his Reform party after the Reform party in Canada, which put the conservatism back in conservatism in Canada. Farage is a pretty odd conservative, but so is Pierre Poilievre in Canada. And obviously so is this preposterous pack of Republicans that now occupies the White House. I’m pretty much in favour of anyone who dares to question the DEI narrative and the climate apocalypse. That’s at least a start.
On the free speech front in the U.K.… what are you people doing? ‘Non-crime hate incidents.’ Really? That’s what you have your police doing? Jesus, you’ve lost your bloody minds! And then for Keir Starmer to come out (I thought it was an AI fake) and say: “Oh, you know that immigration policy we’ve been pursuing for 10 years and the one that we persecuted everyone for exposing, that was all a big lie and everyone knew it. Sorry.” Kemi Badenoch basically made the same admission. Badenoch could be a force for revitalisation on the conservative side, but I’m just so appalled by what the Conservatives did when they were in power: the immigration mess and the Net Zero mess. I don’t see how you could fail more spectacularly than to fail on those two fronts simultaneously.
The U.K. had better get its act together. I’m hoping it does, because the world would be much less without the U.K. and without Europe. My God, it would be a catastrophe to lose the European endeavour. I can hardly imagine anything worse.
Watch here, and read the full interview (well worth it, with a fascinating discussion of the Bible, faith and family values) here.
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“Jesus, you’ve lost your bloody minds!”
Lol!
Credit to Gove for having him on. I wonder if he expected his former party to get slaughtered as they did by JBP.
Yet MG was one of the politicians fawning over the Swedish child.
I just hope these assaults from Musk, Peterson and Trump hit their target and destroy nut zero before they destroy every forest in this dear Country.
I am fully behind what he said about Johnson’s rather silly wife. In my view the decline of conservatism started when she appeared on his arm.
I’m sure the UN & WEF had more of an influence, even if she is good in the sack and makes good bacon & eggs in the morning.
It was the green, woke nonsense she whispered in his ear that did the damage.
And Johnson’s awful father, Stanley.
And in particular when the police were called out to a disturbance at their home. She didn’t make a statement. What price did he, and the rest of us pay? IMHO she ruined his career.
…don’t let Johnson off the hook though: he was a feckless, lazy clown well before she came along.
‘I’m just so appalled by what the Conservatives did when they were in power: the immigration mess and the Net Zero mess. I don’t see how you could fail more spectacularly than to fail on those two fronts simultaneously.’
And yet the Conservatives managed to fail even more spectacularly…..
‘It’s a respiratory disease, respiratory virus. It spreads very, very easily, obviously. It seems likely that many more people have had it than had been identified.’
‘We learned that in both LA County and Santa Clara County, there were 40 or 50 infections per case identified. 40 or 50 per case identified.’
‘evidence of the disease already, you know the disease is very, very infectious, that’s a strategy that cannot work. At that point what folks should have realized, including folks like Fauci and the CDC should have realized, is that a strategy to stop the disease from spreading down to zero was not possible.’
https://www.hoover.org/research/what-happened-dr-jay-bhattacharya-19-months-covid-1
‘Current estimates of the total cost of government Covid-19 measures range from about £310 billion to £410 billion. This is the equivalent of about £4,600 to £6,100 per person in the UK.’
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9309/
‘I’ll speak bluntly: they allowed Boris Johnson’s obsession with his young wife to decimate the U.K. economy.’
Frocking hell!
‘In WhatsApp messages shared between Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, former No 10 communications director Lee Cain, and Johnson’s former chief advisor Dominic Cummings, the three seemed in agreement that Carrie was the true power in government.’
https://www.thenational.scot/news/23853875.simon-case-carrie-johnson-real-person-charge-no-10/
A period of several years of silence from the Conservatives would be most welcome.
I wonder if the Conservative Party are a dead party still walking – and they will never get back into power. I expect that Kemi Badenoch needs to break the wet Conservative pattern by relaunching a new conservative part – the New Conservatives, or the Real Conservatives but she would be obliged to dump all the wet dead wood. I rather fancy Reform have got there first.
Rubbish! The Nigerian Birth Tourist with her Bloated Sense of Entitlement should be the first to be “dumped” as “wet dead wood”.
Not only that ….. WEF wet dead wood.
Absolutely spot on, you are!
She can start with herself and any that call themselves the ‘centre’ because these are the useful idiots for the Globalists who run the show. It’s a big club, and you’re not invited. George Carlin.
Another new party to split the vote letting Labour back in at the next election?
People did try and warn but Fauci conspired to silence & sensor. Like Greta, Carrie was just another stooge down the food chain, a useful idiot that may be good in bed.
I hope Gove felt acute embarrassment listening to JP eviscerate the Conservatives and their failures over Net Zero. Gove fawned over Greta like a pubescent schoolboy and he still appears to be completely unaware of any alternative scientific opinions on climate science. The only thing wrong with this interview is that JP still hasn’t woken up to the globalist covid plandemic narrative.
I think he’s pretty sceptical with regard to “Covid” though I don’t know what he has said specifically about the whys and whereforea.
During the plandemic he seemed pretty on board with the untested genetically altering ‘waxines’ which surprised me. I remember he got his shots. Whether he railed against lockdown I’m not sure.
I remember he got “vaccinated” though I don’t think he was very enthusiastic about it
Maybe because he knew that his shot was a placebo…
Desmond Swayne was a let down regarding the jab because he was very vocal about the Lockdowns. Some woman was vaccine injured and he said she “took it for the team”….I’m happy outside that team mate!
I wonder what he really thinks, now. Apart from Bridgen, no British MP has denounced the “vaccines” – and look what happened to him.
Exactly. I’m not saying that people can’t change but Gove was indeed publicly fawning over Greta and enthusiastically supported the vaccination program and lockdowns. As an absolute minimum I feel there is something slimy about this guy; I don’t think he’s got the authenticity that I would expect the editor of the Spectator to have.
He was late to the show on that one, but he did start to notice in 2021 on his YT videos. “get the F out of my life”.
Oh dear, Dr Peterson. If Boris had merely decimated the UK economy we wouldn’t be in such a pickle. A bit of etymology required, I think, to get the full enormity (in the true meaning of the word) of what he and his successors have done.
Yes, the UK economy is the least of it. People forget that when Boris was Foreign Secretary under Treason May, he delighted the Bangladeshi Muslims when he made an official visit to Bangladesh and declared that Britain needed MORE Bangladeshi immigrants, NOT LESS!
Indeed
The economy can be rebuilt over time, but once our culture, society, civilisation has gone, it is lost. It’s that culture that enabled the economy.
People and cultures are not interchangeable. Thomas Sowell provides a very clear example of the problem with equity.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/f-4th0R7Q70
Sowell is a legend. The left hate him, all the more probably because he’s a black man.
The Treacherous Tories deserve more than a slap for it. And for the Covid Tyranny. And for 14 years of failure.
They deserve to be obliterated.
Of which Gove was part of!
It is brutal but it has nothing to do with nature worship. None of these creatures has ever struck me as being a nature worshipper. Quite the contrary and they affirm this with their own utterances in terms of their lauding of the rise of systems and machines as means of control. Nature worship has its problems but these guys are far darker than that.
A reminder:
Greta Thunberg
“This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind. You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to.
The UK, was very special due to its “mind-blowing historical carbon debt, (a reference to the country’s record as the birthplace of industrialisation). But this was also, because its claims of world-leading progress on cutting emissions are partly the result of “creative accounting” and are belied by the government’s plans for more high-emissions projects.
The UK’s active current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels, like for example the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports, as well as the planning permission for a brand new coalmine, is beyond absurd,”
Response from Michael Gove:
“Your voice – still, calm and clear – is like the voice of our conscience, When I listened to you, I felt great admiration, but also responsibility and guilt. I am of your parents’ generation, and I recognise that we haven’t done nearly enough to address climate change and the broader environmental crisis that we helped to create.”
One Aspie talking to another and both hopelessly lost. You shouldn’t worry too much about this agenda. Humanity won’t be around in an organised form for much longer. The vaccinated represent the power bloc. They are by their own admissions weaker by the day. Who knows next week it might be turbo cancer. Then you go quiet and you waste away and you die shortly thereafter.
Gove was very much a key player in the years of Tory failure. As others have said, fawning over the Swedish doom-goblin was unforgettable.
A scotch egg is a substantial meal.
Excellent by Jordan Peterson. It’s obvious really, the Tories have created a catastrophe for the country. Kemi seems reluctant to admit the truth and is incapable of articulating a new set of policies
She wasn’t appointed to admit the truth.