Forty years ago, the Liberal leader David Steele told his party to return to their constituencies and prepare for government. Today as the second reading of the Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill is before the British Parliament, the current leader, the clownish Ed Davey, is effectively telling his MPs to return to the voters and prepare to live in mud and grass huts. All 72 Lib Dem MPs are supporting the CAN bill which will cut hydrocarbon use across the entire UK economy by around 90% within a decade. As the Daily Sceptic noted on Tuesday, the bill if passed could lead to mass starvation, death, disease and societal collapse in the near future. Around 200 MPs are reported to support the private member’s bill and with many MPs departing for weekends in often distant constituencies, there is a dangerous chance it could pass.
The massive CAN cut in hydrocarbon use is much higher than the one suggested by the UK Government-funded UK FIRES reports. Assessing the state of current technology, UK FIRES provides a rarely encountered honest assessment that the UK will have only a third of its energy if Net Zero is attained by 2050. All flying and shipping must stop and beef and lamb will be banned. The only new building materials allowable will be earth, stone and timber. A recent United Nations report set out a collectivist global vision of primary building materials under Net Zero consisting of mud bricks, bamboo and forest “detritus”.
The CAN bill calls for a halt to all hydrocarbon exploration, extraction, sale and importation in the near future. This Wednesday, wind and solar contributed nothing to the UK electricity grid and the lights only stayed on, the sewerage works only continued operating and the hospital ventilators were only able to keep critically ill people alive due to the 70% contribution of natural gas. In the ‘near future’, a society without hydrocarbons will collapse and be reduced in short order to brutal primitivism. Of course the bill is little more than a thinly-disguised attempt using meaningless climate and nature claptrap to ration and control almost everything citizens consume. Control of hydrocarbons looks like the magic bullet that command-and-control collectivists have sought for nearly two centuries.
Despite the heavy support in Parliament, the bill has attracted no interest in the legacy media. Even the Guardian does not appear to have noted its existence. Maybe this is because it is a private members bill that is not expected to pass. But perhaps also it is because discussing the bill opens a pandora’s box. Hardly anyone in the UK, apart from the committed zealots, would support such a drastic reduction in hydrocarbon use. A wider discussion of the bill would open up considerable opposition to the Net Zero campaign and the invented climate emergency that supports a fantasy that is fading fast across the world. Not every journalist has kept schtum, so a shout out to Bev Turner of GB News who has produced an excellent 15 minute commentary on the bill that is available on YouTube.
As we noted on Tuesday, supporters of the bill are either zealots or boobies. The zealots have a political campaign to pursue and know full well what they are doing, but the boobies are almost certainly unaware of the vital role that hydrocarbons play in the modern economy. Hydrocarbons are essential for food and medicine production, they power the modern economy and are the basis for materials such as plastics, cleaning fluids and high-quality steel. Possibly Baroness ‘Joan’ Bakewell thinks the organic hummus will still appear on the shelves of Waitrose if this ghastly bill passes into law, while TV personalities such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Chris Packham assume they will be able to continue to broadcast onto every electronic device imaginable around the world. Disappointment inevitably awaits.
The CAN bill is being re-introduced by Lib Dem MP Roz Savage, having failed in the past to gather support when promoted by the former Green MP Caroline Lucas. Support both within and outside Parliament is being whipped up by the campaigning group Zero Hour. Needless to say, much of the funding of its efforts comes from the Green Blob with Friends of the Earth, the Wildlife Trusts and the Climate Coalition mentioned. This latter operation brings together numerous woke-riddled organisations from the Women’s Institute to the National Trust. Also identified as a sponsor is Dale “jail the deniers” Vince, whose Ecotricity operation has collected over £100 million in subsidies running onshore wind turbines over the last couple of decades.
Down the ages, revolutionary groups have often favoured ‘citizen’s assemblies’. Not based on the Parliamentary system with universal suffrage of course, rather they are bodies that are closely controlled and curated to support the wishes of the people as determined by the Dear Leaders. CAN’s proposal for such an assembly is a hoot. It will be established by an “expert independent body” and comprise a “representative sample” of the UK population to “advise” the Secretary of State. The assembly will consider “relevant expert advice” and all its recommendations must have the support of at least 66% of the members. Of course juries can be unpredictable, so to avoid any unwanted opposition the 66% recommendation can be ignored by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee.
The whole idea is laughable if it wasn’t being proposed in all seriousness. Who can forget the last Climate Citizen’s Assembly when 108 unfortunates were kettled in early 2020 over six weekends and fed a diet of extremist green propaganda? Who would wish to miss the guidance of selected experts such as Chris Stark, then the Chief Executive of the CCC and now the right-hand man to the Mad Miliband? Unfortunately a big disappointment occurred after a hate meat, love veg session when only 10 members out of a third of the Assembly voted that eating less meat was a priority. But the experts rose to the challenge with Mike Thompson, then the Chief Economist at the CCC, putting a slightly different spin on the ball. ”The Climate Change Assembly said it would be happy with a 20-40% reduction in meat consumption. We looked really carefully at the Climate Assembly recommendations and actually we were quite engaged in the process as well,” he said.
Isn’t democracy (properly run by the right people) grand.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: Labour MPs who vote for the CAN bill risk losing the whip, the Express reports. Keir Starmer’s backbenchers have been warned not to defy the party by voting for the bill in a sign of worry from the Labour leadership that its MPs will put ‘planet’ before party.
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There is a long history of comparing humans with animals in comic literature and in comedy programmes.
Bertie Wooster memorably compared his aunts to a pair of mastodons bellowing at each other across the primeval swamp.
Reginald Perrins mind’s eye at every mention of his mother in law conjured up the image of a hippo at the wallow.
Is just me or is there something of the beastly crisp muncher about that diminutive rodent shown above?
Darwinism.
Evolution.
You are an ape. Nay, bacteria. By stuff happens, with trillions of years, by luck, you ended up with 70 Trillion cells and are the same as a rat or a banana.
Darwinism is a religion. And a very unpleasant, anti-science one at that.
A lot of the malaise around us is due to this material religion, which is the demonic spawn of the ‘enlightenment’ (all hail reason, what reason one might ask looking around…)
‘You are an ape.’
Speak for yourself.
Darwin simply observed how evolution proceeds, it’s for adaptation to the environment and it proceeds according to mathematical choices on a grand scale. There is no controlling intelligence.
I ear wot you are saying.
“We have just been through three years in which novel drugs were trialled en masse on children and pregnant women, and corporate investors enriched themselves through the coercion of millions. This repulsive devaluation of our fellow humans needs to stop.”
Spot on Dr. Bell.
Does this philosophy put viruses on par with other animals?
If so, is it then cruel to jab people with mRNA transfection agents in order to kill viruses?
If not, where is the magic line between valued animals and those we can kill?
The Lancet has become nothing more than parody.
One could aptly say that they’ve gone ‘full batshit crazy’ now.
There is also the not insignificant longstanding legal matter and treatment of this distinction. Animals are treated as objects in law. You don’t get life in prison for killing a dog.
Does this mean they will stop mass slaughter of animals on the pretext of containing disease outbreaks? Or will they instead start mass slaughter of humans on the pretext of containing disease outbreaks?
My guess would be the latter.
They have tried to do this with known dangerous “vaccines” recently, there is no proof that the products were designed to be prophylactics.
Hmm. An excellent and pertinent question.
Aside from this, all the toads I know can look after themselves very well.
“Lancet pushes dangerous theory.”
The title seems almost to give credence to the idea that this is bad science. It is, of course, just bad religion, in a journal which would certainly not allow someone to publish good religion because it claims to be scientific.
Does that include viruses and bacteria?
It seems to me as if current scientific orthodoxy has a distinctively genocidal attitude towards viruses in particular.
As far as I know, the complete One Health scope is Taking care of health of humans, animals and the planet. Two things one should immediately notice here is that it’s wrongly claimed that humans are not animals (and hence, that it’s ok to treat them worse than some animals) and that plants are conspicuously absent here.
Taking more of a big picture view, the planet is a thing and not a being and its health isn’t a well-defined concept. Which reduces this grandiloquent claim to We want to get access to public health budgets in order to funnel the money into arbitrary political pet causes of us. Even to the detriment of humans, other animals and plants: It’s about the planet, stupid! Unfortunately, we must cull your cat and sell your daugher into slavery (or the other way round).
Addition: It’s already known what health the planet usually means, namely combat so-called climate change. There are certainly a lot of ‘interesting’ NPIs to try in this area.
“If the public health industry truly views the world through this lens, then the public should consider whether its protagonists can be trusted with any influence or authority.” The public does not have the choice. Welcome to pagan Britain.
Medieval, surely
“The Lancet’s editors are calling, specifically, for animals to be considered on a par with humans”
But only the cattle. I very much doubt this concept includes them or their morally malignant bourgeoise circle.
As ever, all animals are on a par, but some animals are more ‘on a par’ than others..
“Taking a fundamentally different approach to the natural world, one in which we are as concerned about the welfare of non-human animals and the environment as we are about humans.”
Not fundamentally different at all, it’s Paganism – it’s Nature-worship, the worship of the gods of the forest, gods of the rivers and seas, the animal gods, the weather gods, Mother Earth. Father Sun, Daughter Moon.
It’s about superstition, Anthropomorphism, sacrificing Humans… particularly children and enemies… to propitiate the gods and atone for sins against Nature.
Time for a religious pogrom.
This is parroting exactly the sort of guff the Club of Rome has been coming out with recently: https://www.clubofrome.org/impact-hubs/emerging-new-civilization/
But of course an organisation funded by oil barons to maintain their interests through political manipulation, now controlled by their moronic billionaire grandchildren with open wallets for any cause that compensates for their lack of imagination and buys them moral absolution, couldn’t possibly have any influence on medical journal already known to slavishly follow the dominant progressive narrative. That would sound like globalism, and we all know globalism is a conspiracy theory, right?
Given that The Lancet is a medical journal, where does this article Dr Bell is citing, with it’s ”all life is equal” stance, sit with the subject of vivisection? I mean, this is a topic that makes my fillings itch, it’s so nasty and cruel, but we’re told so necessary to drug testing and medical advances. Doesn’t this just smack of hypocrisy? Is there an alternative? And I love rats. Not the vermin kind, but as pets they are very under-rated.
There’s no hypocrisy if researchers equally use humans in their cruel experiments. I have no doubt the Uyghurs are familiar with this practice of equality among species. And rats are affectionate, intelligent, and yes, entertaining, pets.
When these paragons of scientific and medical virtue lead by example I might consider taking their message seriously. I bet they wouldn’t be preaching this message ‘that all creatures are of equal worth’ when standing naked on the African savannah confronted by hungry, prowling lions. What utter fools these people are.
The Lancet editorial looks like another desperate but subtle attempt to give credence to the (implausible) theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by coronavirus-infected animals at the Wuhan wet market.
“But understanding the causes of the pandemic demands a broader ecological perspective. This lesson has not been fully learned and so we remain susceptible to future lethal emerging infectious diseases.”
“..For example, demanding that wet markets be closed to halt an emerging zoonosis might be technically correct, but if it does not account for those who make their livelihoods from such markets…”
Maybe just ensure that a virus can never escape from a lab again.
I’ve been happily vegetarian for all of my adult life, and I would never go back to eating meat, not least because I wish to be kind to animals.
However, the animal to whom I am most kind is my cat, whom I love and care about as much as any human, and she eats meat, and could not live without meat. Cats cannot live without meat (whereas dogs possibly can). I buy cat food for her because I love and care about her, and the cat food is mainly chicken, duck and turkey. So I cannot treat all animals equally. I value my cat more highly than the chickens, ducks and turkeys who have to be killed so that cats can live. That’s the reality.
Going to an extreme of trying to treat all animals equally makes no sense, and going to the other extreme of not caring about the welfare of animals makes no sense. We all have to settle for what we believe is best in our own lives and nobody should feel the need to preach to us about what we ought to do, because going in either direction to its logical conclusion makes no sense.
The Lancet article states: “all life is equal, and of equal concern” – I don’t think anyone who lives in reality believes that. Does the writer believe that the life of a house fly is equal to the life of a human being, and of equal concern? I don’t believe the writer of this article is sincere.
I don’t know about where you live but I am finding it increasingly common to see the addition of veggie ingredients in wet cat food. And it’s no longer just run of the mill peas and carrots, but apparently obligate carnivores cannot just eat the animal protein without the addition of cranberries, quinoa, rice, tomatoes, lotus flower, and on and on it goes. I’ve even seen pineapple in there! It definitely never used to be so bad that the majority of foods have unnecessary carbs in them. Weird. They don’t require such things and my cat will ingest a bit of grass now and again if she needs to vomit a fur ball up.
Yes, I see some wet cat food is touted as grain-free but then vegetables are added instead. I try to buy low-carbohydrate food for the cat, keeping in mind offal and road kill are allowed and are used in cheaper pet food (at least in the US). Exhausting.
I wonder how the ground-up insect powder will be described on the labels? I call it s**t but I suppose it will have some fancy camouflage name.
Cats and dogs need to be fed just raw meaty bones in appropriate sized pieces, not processed junk food. Chewing, gnawing, ripping, tearing cleans their teeth and exercises their jaws. They are carnivores. All my dogs and cat fed on that for 20 years. Labs who reached 16 and 17 without once having their teeth “cleaned”, no skin issues, calm temperaments without the additives. The kindest thing we can do for our pets!
Some vegetarians also do not realize how many animals are killed on crop farms. Mice, rats, voles, snakes, and birds are all killed during harvesting. These aren’t the cute, doe-eyed mammals that we don’t want to kill and eat for meat, yet they’re killed nonetheless. Additionally, farmers are very quick to kill pest animals like skunks, coyotes, and raccoons that are attracted to the crop food chain on their land. Badger-killing is an issue in the UK, as I recall. Tough decisions all around, but as humans we can be humane.
Something a lot of vegans also don’t realize is that there’s going to be detectable animal contamination in all of their industry foods because of animals living in or close to the machines used to produce it who are also feeding on it. Everywhere where edible stuff is handled in quantities in a somewhat open location, omnivorous rodents won’t be far away and not all of them will make it out of the machinery all of the time before production starts again. And then, there are of course lots of much smaller animals, from insects down to monocelluar organisms which are everywhere where food is to be found, anyway.
It’s hard to know even what to eat. Some legume and insect meat substitutes cause allergies. We don’t eat mammal meat in my household because of alpha gal tick allergy. My husband read about factory farming and now he doesn’t want to eat chicken. We don’t like fish and avoid after learning about factory-fishing and over-fishing of the oceans. Processed food and seed oils will kill you. Pick your battles I guess.
Sounds to me the Editor of The Lancet should be taken straight to the local loony bin. What a horrible person to suggest the degradation of the human race. Dare I use the H word…?
These technocrats have assumed the position of overlords of the universe without anybody electing them to this status. They are one world eugenicists of old. The same process is used by climate alarmists et al. The process goes like this, buy a load of compliant “experts” come up with a jazzy name for a think tank, buy a load of compliant journalists, get them to quote the think tanks gibberish, Hey Presto, you have a “main stream” accepted wisdom.
I suspect this theory won’t be applied to themselves or their own nearest and dearest. They are “a protected species.”
As a Master student in One Health I do take issue with some of the rhetoric.
One Health basically tries to use human-, animal-and environmental health perspectives when looking at solutions for health issues. Most of the time these 3 pillars have operated in silos in the past, but these are intrinsically linked. If you plan to intervene in one you need to be looking from all angles to make sure that the eventual outcome is makes sense and is a better outcome than doing nothing.
And this is exactly what is needed in this current world.
Too many people trying to solve issues by just having one perspective, rather than trying to work out all permutations. Just as we have experienced with the pandemic response and climate.
So it is not about saying that you are worth as much as a rodent. That is not what One Health is about.
I’m quite fond of rats. I believe they are loving and loyal little critters, unlike their human counterparts.
I can think of a few sports presenters that are less valuable than rats.
I hope they don’t call in the pest control teams
Seaside town residents invaded by ‘monster rats’ ‘living in terror’ https://mol.im/a/11877781 via https://dailym.ai/android