According to the Guardian, a bunch of long-past-their-sell-by-date musicians have been mobilised by Brian Eno, who used to prance about in a spandex psychedelic body suit for a living, to protest about climate change. Eno is the founder of a green NGO called EarthPercent, which turns donations from the music industry into grants for green organisations that lobby for the policies that have created Britain’s crises. In a stunt last week, 211 pop stars put their names to a letter drafted by Eno to Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, urging them to reject the proposed development of North Sea oil and gas. But what has it got to do with them?
“As artists, we have become starkly aware of the fact that our livelihoods often depend upon the reliability of safe weather conditions and stable energy costs for live events,” the letter states. Yet most of those artists – many of whom haven’t really been a thing since the 1990s – also owe their industries to oil and gas. What would recording artists of the past have ever been without the vinyl chloride and vinyl acetate of records, the polycarbonate of CDs, and the polyethylene terephthalate of cassette tapes? (All these substances were produced from hydrocarbons.)
And what kind of rock and roll is dependent on “safe weather conditions”? Did none of the 211 play at the Glastonbury Festivals of the past, which were neck-deep
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Sadly, many of the musicians I have liked over the years have turned out to have brains (if not feet) of clay.
I was amazed and disappointed to learn a while ago that Neil Young and Joni Mitchell (both immigrants from Canada) having enjoyed successful careers and earned lots of dosh tried to get Spotify to cancel Joe Rogan’s hugely successful podcast because they disapproved of him. So much for the rebellious musical spirit!
That such artists feel the world needs to hear what they think, rather than what they sing, suggests that their egos have been fed for a few decades too long.
Now, it’s Eno and Thom Yorke trying to wield influence that they should not have.
Shut up and play your instruments, you utter plonkers!
Chris Martin took Cold Play on tour with some sort of “energy recovery” system where the punters dancing generated the electricity his equipment used. A good question would be “did it work?” And ask someone who was involved with setting it up and running it.
Guess what the truthful answer would be?
The audience was ‘wired’?
I logged on to the EarthPercent site to check out these luminaries and was delighted to find that I recognised only about 5 names out of 211. Of course, old age may be a factor, but what a collection of self- important nonentities. Three caught my attention: Joy Anonymous (it would have been preferable if she had lived up to her name); Hot Chip (I wondered which source of heat was used to heat the chip); and The Orchestra of Cardboard (who should be sent packing).
My poor attempt at humour is to heap ridicule on these sad souls who have this belief that they are so important that they can demand that the government listen to and heed their demands.
Thank God for Bryan Ferry!
No-nonsense Geordie.
I am in complete agreement with Ben Pile. Artists of whatever genre should stick to their day jobs because once they venture outside they invariably release their rank ignorance and stupidity for all the world to see.
Just. STFU Eno and the rest. Bloody muppets.
Pop and Film Stars, just like footballers allow their popularity to be exploited for political purposes, and they mostly don’t realise they are being used.
As soon as I read the article, a picture of the arch – hypocrite “ Dame ” Emma Thompson popped into my head. Yet another eco – warrior to whom none of the rules she would have imposed on the plebs, apply to Mrs Private Jet. Why on earth any of these people think that their opinions are any more important than those of the rest of us, is beyond me.
They think they’re worth it.
Must be all those years of being feted and admired.
Pop Stars are just as susceptible to climate brainwashing as the rest of us. They too can easily fall for the Sustainable Development Agenda that comes from the UN pretending to be about climate, when infact it is about control of the worlds wealth and resources.
Rather more susceptible, I’d say, since many didn’t pay attention at school and were writing songs rather than exam papers.
All these years later, it starts to show.
The fact that they play concerts to which the audience has driven many miles floats airily over their little musical heads.
I still like the music, but it’s disappointing that so many of them turn out to be munchkins.
A very well written piece.
It would be trivially easy to expose the fact that none of these prancing fools knows anything about climate science.
So why don’t interviewers ever ask them some penetrating questions?
You could be absolutely sure that if you asked them “what is the most important greenhouse gas?”, they’d respond CO2 (*).
How about: “What is the relative importance of radiative forcing from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere compared to latent heat effects?”.
And: “What does the isotopic signature of carbon reveal about the relative masses of the various terrestrial reservoirs?”.
(*) water vapour is by far the most important greenhouse gas, 60-70% of the effect according to the IPCC, or as much as 95% according to other studies. So, not “settled science”.
“So why don’t interviewers ever ask them some penetrating questions?”
True, but to ask a penetrating question requires some knowledge of the subject, which in the MSM is absent.
You got there before me. Thank you.
“Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. …they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.
The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use…”
Jacob Bronowski
Notice that no government, let alone World government, was involved. And neither were the Universities.
As recent events show, after a brief flirtation with science and rationalism, the universities have now reverted to just training the priesthood for the maintenance of the prevailing cult.
The cult now has its martyr – enter Jason Ardei
“It was Thomas Edison (or Tesla, Faraday, Volt) who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader.
Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing ‘compassion’ for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”
Thomas Sowell
Life expectancy has increased across the planet and that is as a consequence of growing affluence from industrialisation. There are no low energy wealthy countries – none.
I only recently discovered (and read) Sowell. Don’t know how I missed him up to that point, but glad to learn of his existence.
Written in the 1960s
“Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world’s politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.
Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor’s intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world transforming and world shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the design-science revolution. Despite this historical demonstrable fact, world society as yet persists in looking exclusively to its politicians and their ideologues for world problem solving.”
Buckminster Fuller
Most of the problems in the world are caused by the Political Class. Politics is a nasty business, and as Mark Twain pointed out —“Politicians are like diapers. They need changed often and for the same reason”
Caused by the political class and the excessive trust or deluded hope that many seem to have that politicians can solve problems whereas in general the best that can realistically be hoped for is that they don’t cause problems and they create the conditions that allow the people to solve them, or decide that they are not worth solving.
Quite:
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
Richard Feynman
Who knew that Feynman was a far right extremist???
In any article about letters to politicians there should be a link or listing of those who signed. Then we can use our own judgement about how to respond – praise, ignore, condemn.
Most of this sort of letter have one or two well known names and then some second rate or third rate names. Who cares except those struggling to recapture celebrity?
Brian – who would you choose to be the leader of this Global Government, each of the candidates having some sort of ambition of global leadership? The short list is (1) Kim Jong Un (2) Vladimir Putin (3) Xi Jinping (4) Mojtaba Khamenie (5) Donald Trump? Just one name please, and there’s no going back. Once installed, that’s it. And no dissent afterwards.
Sir Anthony Blair?
The saying is that the devil has all the best tunes – that’s as true now as it ever was.
Exception made for Jerusalem, England’s unofficial national anthem.