By John Waters
There is an ancient principle of the common law, whereby it is held that the people may do everything except that which they have expressly forbidden, and the state may do nothing except that which the people have expressly permitted. How did this principle come to be unstitched and reversed in the past three months? How did the people come to agree to its reversal?
In search of answers, I have been reflecting a lot on a phrase I transcribed into a notebook years ago from Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread: ” . . . a contagion of selective incuriosity, a mindgame begun in self-hypnosis and maintained by mass hysteria.”
While not discounting the impact of short-term welfare payments (buying the people’s freedom with their own money) I have gotten to thinking that the answer maybe includes, as a primary factor, something along the lines of mass hypnosis—the viral entrancement of entire populations.
The process at work is somewhat different to the use of hypnotic or “spell” phrases to herd individuals into a particular way of, for example, politically correct thinking. As the late Roger Scruton described it, spell words like “racist” and “homophobe” are designed to invoke a set of pre-programed demonic tags with which to threaten the subject and dissuade him from truth and common sense. When these words are uttered, the object is as though stung by a cattle prod or electric fence, thus experiencing a kind of mortification which, in the vast majority of cases, is sufficient to cause an immediate falling into line. The process used in the herding of individuals into the mass is correlated but subtly different. The method here is not to repel by a shock but to seduce by means of evocative or empathetic words.
Like any form of hypnosis, mass entrancement depends on the leveraging of several inter-related conditions in the subject: focused attention, including impaired or reduced peripheral awareness; an imaginative state—these contributing to vastly increased suggestibility. The COVID-19 scare and accompanying lockdowns enabled these criteria to be met almost everywhere. The attention of audience-members being focused on one topic, many unconsciously acquired a heightened capacity to absorb even the most unusual and presumptuous messages without blinking.
Imagination is a key tool of the hypnotist. With an appropriate script and slipping into mimicry of well-remembered charismatic leaders of the past—a touch of Kennedy, a soupcon of Churchill—even the most plank-like politician can affect a sufficiency of charisma or gravitas to seduce his audience into the zone where he can present them with word-pictures and teleport them to a place of collective imagining. A mood of siege or crisis is sufficient to inveigle even citizens who yesterday saw the plank for what it was to succumb also to his spell.
By affecting empathy, rapport, a sense of common purpose, he guides his subjects towards the desired frame-of-mind. He seeks access to the unconscious, but not that of the individual person; rather, he wishes to remove each member of his audience to a common place: the herd mind in which he knows they can all come to share approximately the same outlooks, so that henceforth they can be summoned to that place by signs and triggers without leaving their armchairs.
TV creates an ideal medium via which to conduct this form of hypnosis, not least because the news comes sandwiched between movies and soap operas which engage the imaginative and emotional elements of the mind. These, maintained by fictionalised versions of reality, provide the heightened state that renders the subject amenable to be lured into a kind of trance. Once achieved, the trance can be reactivated at will in anyone whose attention, primed on fictional narratives, remains in this state of focused imaginative attention, being highly prone to easy emotional arousal. The purpose is to tap into that part of the subconscious dealing with emotions. When in a self-induced trance, in the grip of rage, hatred, fear, anxiety, sadness, worry, envy, greed, selfishness, humans tend to become cut off from their thinking brains and thereby susceptible to adopting a locked-in, limited view of reality. In the lockdown episode, fear has been the chief emotional trigger imposed by the controllers to be manipulated to further the entrancement process.
Despite having a degree of understanding of this, I am not totally immune. My daughter WhatsApps me a photograph she’s taken out on a morning walk in our beloved Sligo, in the West. It’s of a tiny lockdown shrine left by some surfers, clusters of rocks on a wall near the cliffs at Lislary, painted in rainbow colours and bearing legends like: “We are all in this together”; “Be kind”; “Keep smiling”. For a moment my resolve and reason go into collapse. Longing to be there, I long also to belong.
French psychologist Gustave Le Bon, in The Psychology of Crowds, explained that a crowd has a different psychology to that of an individual. Le Bon was the first to treat of “psychological crowds”, which he diagnosed as forming a single being, responding always to unconscious thoughts, and conforming to laws of mental unity.
The consciousness bestowed by membership of a crowd can be transformative of the person, putting individual members in possession of “a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in a manner quite differently from that in which each individual would feel, think and act were that person in a state of isolation.” In a psychological crowd, individual personality disappears, brain activity is replaced by reflex activity, a lowering of intelligence, provoking a complete transformation of sentiments, which may be better or worse than those of the crowd’s constituent members. A crowd may just as easily become heroic or criminal. “The ascendency of crowds,” wrote Le Bon, “indicates the death throes of a civilisation.” The upward climb to civilisation is an intellectual process driven by individuals; the descent is a herd in stampede. “Crowds are only useful for destruction.”
A paradox, then, of the lockdown state: in isolation, using electronic means, it is easier to convert the individual to the collective mindset than if he were a member of an actual physical crowd. Le Bon goes on: “There are certain ideas and feelings which neither come into being, nor transform themselves into acts, except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being, formed of heterogeneous elements which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constituted a living body form by reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from each of the cells singularly.”
A hypnotherapist friend tells me of the three phases in creating a hypnotic state: Idealisation, Devaluation, Alienation. The first phase, Idealisation, can also be called “love-bombing”: when the controller/hypnotist strives to identify with and mirror the target individual or social group. He thanks the people for their stoicism thus far, praises them, reminds them they are ‘”saving lives” then spells out the next stage of the lockdown.
The “perpetrator” in this case is the state/government/president/governor, but also—and more continuously—the media, exerting power in order to manipulate and control using the weapons of fear, guilt and obligation, which impress the presence of constant danger on the reptilian lower brain, ensuring widespread compliance.
All fears converge in one: fear of death. On the pathways in the parks near my home are intermittently placed chalk figures separated by arrows pointing at each figure, indicating the extent of two meters, designed to evoke the chalk marks investigators draw around the corpse of a murder victim. Statistics of deaths, most of them invented or inflated—are rolled out by the hour. Terms like “deadly virus” are used non-stop: The phrase “new normal” has the effect of insinuating the loss of things long cherished, a state of bereavement, characterised by sadness. The applauding by candlelight of “front line” workers is a way of compelling holdouts to throw themselves into the spell, an almost literal form of gas-lighting in which we are required to celebrate our own loss of freedom.
The reptilian non-brain responds to repetition—of words and phrases, memes, catchwords, clichés, which serve to embed the hypnotic suggestions to the extent that they became beliefs, thus immune to rational argumentation. Physical triggers can be more efficient than verbal ones, especially if self-administered, creating an instant pavlovian effect.
Ritual is a key factor in the alteration of expectations, which in turn transforms reality. Rituals are process of initiation and renewal, which reinforce beliefs, behaviors, and values, inducing conformity, groupthink, accommodation to changes in structures, a reinvented sense of belonging. They are transformative, redefining, rebirthing.
In the course of the “pandemic”, the mask has emerged as a new symbol of pseudo-solidarity, though really it is an instrument of fear-mongering and alienating. The more threadbare the COVID-19 story became, the more people seemed to be wearing them, not so much as precautionary apparel as a form of accusation: You are threatening my life! The rituals anchor the subject in his situation. The mask provokes a death of the ego, enabling a new self to be born: the temporary covering of the old face while the new one is immersed in the period of gestation necessitated by the transformation. Once the mask is donned, the subject becomes his more fearful self. Washing of hands has a similar effect, but also gives a renewed sense of security. In both cases, the mood of the subject is changed by the action: going outdoors awhile and returning with a sense of relief to the decontaminating ritual of hand-washing, dividing his reality in psychological as well as physical terms.
Rituals work subliminally to alter perception, to strengthen or exaggerate existing emotions, like an acupuncture of the mind. The initiate in a religious rite is separated from reality and, in advance of the ritual, placed in isolation so as to become decontaminated from everyday influences:Shelter-in-place involves a form of detoxification from the logic, desires, assumptions and language of the world, a process of renouncing that facilitates a coming to terms with losses about to be imposed as part of the initiation: loss of freedom, loved ones, hopes, expectations.
A transition follows: the subject begins to let go of everything she has taken for granted, prepares to enter a new regime, to cross the threshold to a new era. A new mood descends, a mixture of fear and sorrow, accompanied by an escalating sense of powerlessness that threatens to overwhelm until the subject agrees to accept. Then comes the liberation and release that accompany the signing away of freedom for an insinuated higher purpose. This is akin to the liminal state between life and death. The old life is subjected to a form of scorched earth, presaging a surrender to the new normal.
By persuading people to engage in rituals—essentially collective rites and ceremonies they would not normally succumb to while alone, it is possible to draw them into an imagined herd for the purpose of imbuing them with collective thoughts, breaking with existing or normative patterns of thought and behaviour. Using repetition and emotional enhancement, the ritual imposes a new language, new signposts, contained in words and symbols. Ritual operates to impose new codes as a way of effecting changes in thinking, working primarily at the spiritual and psychological levels, but unnoticed as such. It serves to suspend the cognitive dimension, thus eliminating any individual reservations that might otherwise manifest as embarrassment, while activating elements of the mind not usually engaged. The subject is both actor and spectator.
The second phase, “Devaluation”, is analogous to the live cooking of a frog. Words of praise and consolation are juxtaposed with house arrest, a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Images and ideas of restriction, control, humiliation, are packaged in sentimental forms of manipulation: nurses dancing amidst what we are led to presume are unremitting scenes of death; grandchildren waving to their heartbroken grandparents through a wound-up car window. The glass becomes a symbol of the invisible wall that may permanently separate them, the “new normal” thus far merely announced but part of the dread that is insinuated concerning an unknowable future. Generated confusion, mixed messages, are central elements: you must be sure to take care of old people—just don’t go near lest you kill them; it is important to become infected to achieve immunity but at all costs avoid infecting other healthy people; wear a mask, even though “experts” say they are ineffective. This incoherence destabilises the sensibility of the subject, rendering him amenable to further manipulation. Since he cannot understand, he simply obeys.
Then comes the final phase of the hypnosis: “Abandonment”, the iron fist. No more Mr Nice Guy. The police, it turns out, have been issued with more equipment, more vehicles, more guns, more batons, rottweiler-shaped robots to spy on the public. Reinforcements are brought in, including trainees, part of the process of abasement. This is where the real motives may more readily be seen. Our rights having been stripped away, we begin to awake to the folly of thinking of the controllers as our savours or guardians. My hypnotherapist friend explains that, in order to maintain the control, a method of what known as “intermittent reinforcement” takes place, whereby the tone of the controllers becomes more austere and threatening, establishing another layer of conditions in respect of the future. Unless compliance improves, we are warned, the ante may have to be increased. We should not expect a return to normal any time soon—or at all. The “second wave” is mentioned in tones of disappointed rebuke, setting up an expectation that failure to meet the contradictory requirements may result in further coercion. “With each intermittent reinforcement there will be a further erosion of civil liberties and so the program goes on…”
My friend speaks also of “bread-crumbing”, whereby the controller further undermines, devalues, and denigrates his targets. This concept derives from the idea of the subject of a romantic crush, who though not reciprocating the feelings of the entranced person, nevertheless flirts a little, perhaps by sending occasional signs (breadcrumbs to hungry birds) so the attention does not dissipate. When the subject discerns the patterns of manipulation, control and abuse, his sense of the benign intent of the controller dissolves and foul play becomes more apparent. If feedback indicates that the populace is beginning to wake up to the deception and manipulation, the controller must show that he is indeed working for everybody’s good by intermittently appearing to be on their side. This registers in the entranced individual as a chemical rush of serotonin, oxytocin and other chemicals of relief, which facilitate the deepening of the stranglehold.
If any of this rings a bell, the first thing to do is turn off the TV. The sole way of achieving immunity to mass hypnosis is through the development of awareness of the technique, which involves the constant application of reason. But first we must reclaim our minds from the controllers, and return them to their rightful owners, who must endure a period of cold turkey before returning to sobriety. And then we must take urgent steps to ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again.
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Amen.
And the last hundred years of collectivism in all its different forms, socialism, communism, fascism, social democracy, stakeholder capitalism, diversity, equity, inclusion, Net Zero etc, etc, have been fighting and undermining that simple timeless truth.
The problem we have is that unsurprisingly the people attracted to political power don’t generally get into the game so they can give themselves less of it and make themselves less important than those who came before them. Which is why I think we should consider some written, legal limits on what governments are allowed to do, including what they are allowed to spend money on. Probably that ship sailed a long time ago and won’t call again barring some catastrophic collapse that forces us to reassess things.
I’m part way through this but Rupert Lowe is so far talking sense: Exclusive with Rupert Lowe MP Not many MPs reference Adam Smith these days.
I don’t think Mr Lowe has ever said anything I’ve disagreed with. I appreciate a plain-speaking ‘straight down the middle’ sort of person who gets things done and he is certainly that. I also like how he gives Tommy R credit and continues to mention him in a positive light, which cannot be said of his colleagues Farage and Tice, who are downright insulting towards T.R in comparison. I follow Rupert Lowe on Twitter and his bio says he’s also a farmer, so bonus points for that.
I think the U.K is one of the few countries Marc Vanguard ( who analyses crime data across Europe on Twitter ) has not been able to cover yet due to the fact they aren’t forthcoming in sharing crime data based on migration/ethnicity/nationality status, and it’s very obvious why that would be. The authorities repeatedly ignore or fob off any FOI requests for this data;
”I want a full review into how uncontrolled mass immigration has put women and girls in Britain at risk.
We’re welcoming countless men from cultures that hold no respect for women – is it a surprise that many of them arrive in our country, and hold no respect for women? No. It is not.
This is impacting more women than we realise, of that I am sure.
We need data – a breakdown of crimes by nationality and immigration status. Who is doing it, and why are they in our country? Published regularly, and in full.
The Home Office likes to tell us how seriously it takes violence against women and girls. Yet it refuses to even discuss violent crimes committed by migrants, legal and illegal.
And the issue is with both – those who have come illegally, but also legally.
Let’s have the debate, with the data. If there’s nothing to see, then what’s the problem? Show us the nationality breakdown.
Just imagine. A hotel down your road suddenly fills with illegal migrants overnight…
Would you honestly be happy with your young daughter going out after dark with these unknown foreign young men roaming the streets? The answer is NO. If you say otherwise, you are either lying or utterly deluded.
It’s happening every day, all across the country and nobody wants to talk about it. Again, the usual fears of being called a racist suppresses debate. Where has that led us before?
ALL crime, whoever it is committed by, must be properly investigated. But should we not explore the logic behind welcoming young foreign males from alien cultures into our communities, and the potential impact that has had on women’s safety in said communities?
We should be honest with the British people about what has happened to our country, and the reasons behind it.
Uncontrolled mass immigration has made Britain a more dangerous place, especially for women and girls.”
https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/1888488919886385457
I just saw a video on Youtube where this Muslim Guy pointed out that the extremists in Muslim Countries get locked up or isolated from Society and so what they do is come to the West where they have the freedom to be extremists. he says it isn’t Muslim Countries that have a problem, it is us, because we take ” the garbage” that they don’t want. ——Then ofcourse if you or I were to say that we are importing “Muslim extremist garbage” we would have our social media accounts suspended and maybe even get arrested for hate crimes. So not only do import the “garbage”, we try to silence our own citizens from pointing that out. ——-Yes it is us that has the problem for sure.
Was it this chap? ‘Imam of Peace’ is his handle, I forget his actual name.
https://x.com/Imamofpeace/status/1882484869600817217
It is worth adding that there are passages in the Koran, Suras and Hadiths that confirm that the RoP’s “perfect” Prophet had a perspective on women, rape, and paedophilia that was extreme even by the standards of the 7th Century.
And that this established fact has been claimed as justification by some of the very few perpetrators of gang rape who have been unlucky enough to have faced a British Court.
And doubtless used as self-justification for the tens of thousands of their chums who have “got away with it”.
I’ve always liked the idea of a simple constitution imposing limits on the power and reach of the state.
I.never understand the objections. They rarely amount to more than “it doesn’t work”.
Putting aside that it does actually work, as demonstrated by among other things arms ownership in the US and the current fight back on free speech, what is the downside? What is there to lose from stating the principles you want to operate under so you have something clear to fight over and defend?
It’s ground that you have and has to be taken from you. Unlike in the UK where the freedom of speech is not enshrined and so we don’t have it and have to fight to get it, not to retain it.
I generally conclude that I live among serfs.
The only downside i can see is it will restrict the amount of cash and power grifters joining politics can extract… and that isn’t actually a downside, it’s a good thing!.
The main objection or concern i feel people may have is in the journey, i.e how do we get from where we are to the target described – the left will describe it as bedlam, the world will collapse etc, like when they describe any new ideas for NHS ways of working as ‘privatising’ to scare people, even though they’ve privatised and outsource great swathes of the NHS and councils etc.. (that’s ok, cost they did it!).
what the left are actually saying is ‘it’s too hard and we can’t do / don’t have the stomach for it’ and/or ‘we don’t believe in the vision you’ve set – we want to keep spending until we are broke’. Once those other messages of vision from the left are laid to bare, the next obvious question to ask is ‘and when we are bust, what happens to the British people then?’……
no sensible voter will want that outcome once they’ve thought about it, so continuing in that way (as we are now), will look increasingly crazy. Reform need to offer the sensible, long term strategy – at the moment they are presented as the crazy party!
We need to take control and change that narrative, and position it as a positive target, while showing a route we can take to get there, adjusting as needed along the way, as it’s impossible to get things right first time, all the time (again having a politicians say this would be refreshing).
We have one – Magna Carta.
There is no point in any Constitution if it is ignored and buried under centuries of legislation undermining it.
Our freedom of speech is guaranteed under Common Law – but the guarantee is of little use if the judiciary is corrupt and doesn’t uphold it.
I wonder how the US Constituion will fare in 1 000 years time?
Yes. But I rather doubt that, if standing in the dock, a mention of Magna Carta will get you very far with the usual activist Judges and Magistrates. Or with Sir Kneel Stŭrmer, for that matter.
Power corruots; absolute power may corrupt absolutely – is often quoted, but there is an important codicil: power attracts the corruptible
Not to forget that a coalition of England, France, Russia, Italy and the USA fought in favour of forcing this timeless truth onto an economically very successfull German state which had started to outrank England based on a very much different model which combined public and private enterprises with great success.
Among the great heroic deeds of Adam Smith’s nation was that it allowed a single transport of victuals into starving Germany in 1919 in exchange for the complete German merchant navy, insofar that hadn’t already been “appropriated” abroad.
Expanding on that a little: The German territories in Europe had remained essentially rural and largely sparsely populated, held back by their constant internal quarrels, until German unification in 1871 when they rapidly started to industrialize and grow in general wealth.
According to Karl Helfferich¹, the German empire had initially copied the English low/ no tariffs and international free trade model but without much success. A protectionist approach, where nascent German industries where shielded from international, that is, English, competition via tariffs turned out to work a lot better, especially in the area of steel manufacturing. As he observed, it was only natural for the English to champion free trade because this meant they could sell their own industrial products freely everywhere without local competition ever having a chance to grow up much.
¹ I may be misremembering this. The example is either from Helfferich’s Der Weltkrieg I. – III. (the world war) or from Crownprince William’s Erinnerungen (Memories).
What we need, and always needed, was Climate realism, or more appropriately Environmental realism.
Humanity is causing damage to the planet, we are polluting land, sea and air in many ways.
What we need is a proper grown up look at all these issues, with open sensible debate, and figure out what we fix, and what we can mitigate.
If the world is warming, its probably due to something natural and cyclical, which we can do nothing feasible to stop, no matter how much we spend, but maybe some of its effects can be mitigated.
What we call renewables, better refereed to as unreliables are not the answer to replace the reliable and efficient energy systems we have. They just don’t operate at scale and there is no feasible way of offsetting their intermittency, apart from using backup gas power stations, which don’t run efficiently or cost effectively as backup systems.
Soar and PV can operate at small scale, on single rooftops with battery backup and inverters, to produce a reasonable amount of an households electricity needs.
Wind turbines are useless, except possibly in remote locations which are generally off grid.
Is it? I don’t even know what that means.
Does the planet have a proper state that we can clearly define and from which a deviation can be rightfully considered damage?
As the great George Carlin once said, maybe humans are here because the planet wanted plastic.
He nailed it when he declared that the idea of saving the planet is laden with arrogance. The planet was here long before us, will be here.long after we are gone, and the idea that we can “damage” it is just ridiculous.
Humanity is causing damage to the planet is IMHO a bit stupid way to word this. A better one could be: Changes we make to our environment are not always beneficial.
As you mentioned plastic: When I go to an English supermarket, most vegetables are either tightly wrapped in single-use plastic (eg, cucumbers) or put into single-use plastic bags with barcodes on them (cauliflower). Nothing of this exists in Polish supermarkets. So, what’s the point of this mandatory plastic waste? Solely to accommodate mistaken English ideas about “hygiene”? I can certainly do without having to throw this away at home and it certainly consumes resources which could be put to better uses.
Adam Smith also said that there’s a great deal of ruin in a Nation. (And his name is Starmer.)
And he said: Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; the interests of producers are to be considered only as much as it serves the interests of consumers.
He was quite wrong of courses. Production is only to create and protect “jobs” – green ones – to serve the interests of politicians and their electoral prospects, and their cronies.
Thank you, Dr Doshi. Usual cogent and well-reasoned contribution that goes to the heart of the energy debate.
We’re not all doomed, the end isn’t nigh and rising tidal levels aren’t lapping Westminster and Whitehall. Cheer up, spring is just around the corner:
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
“The Trees”, written in 1974 by Philip Larkin (1922-1985) – born a bit of a miserable old git by many accounts, but with an inner hinterland rooted in reality, that brought forth some mighty fine wordage. R.I.P.
Thank you for getting my Sunday morning off to a good start. I shall ponder those words as I walk through the trees in the park on my way to church.
He wrote a poem called “Church Going” which you might enjoy.
Thank you for that link. Mind you, the mention of the Irish sixpence brought back happy childhood memories when the Irish pound was at parity with the British pound and we used to love finding the Irish coins in our change as they had native animals depicted on them. The sixpence had the Irish wolfhound.
RIP indeed. “Far right”, “racist”, “sexist”. Admirer of Thatcher.
He was kind of miserable but also full of energy for his work, which apparently he did well (he was a librarian) and a love for jazz among other things. Judging by this poem he loved nature too.
From time to time, I dip in and out of Andrew Motion’s epic biography of the great man, and pinging out of the pages come the vibes of that 1920’s generation that included my very own mum and dad. The past is indeed another country.
You are a braver man than I. I believe Motion is an admirer of the work but I dare not read anything written about the man that is produced by someone from the literary establishment.
The Paris Review and Observer interviews are a hoot though hard to find online- they are in Required Writings which also has some good stuff about jazz and art.
Agreed, Motion a bit of a stooge, but despite that I still find the bio evocative.
We used to get Larkin at school and I remember having my own little way of looking at things like this and thinking that night time brings about “temporary death”. —-Living things never knew that the sun was going to rise again in the morning. When the sun went down at night all living things started to die, but then in the morning they were resuscitated. In a sense going to sleep at night is this “temporary death”. The very same thing happens when we get to winter when plants lose their greenery and some animals hibernate. ———Maybe you need to be a “miserable old git” to have thoughts like this, but I prefer that to watching dancing shows or soap operas on the telly
It is not so much encouraging innovation; the important thing is not to punish its success by punitive taxation and restrictive regulation.
It’s a shame Lomborg is trying to keep a foot in both camps. There is not a shred of evidence that any recent very gentle warming (which is good) has anything to do with man. It certainly has zero correlation with CO2.
Burning gas, therefore, isn’t a ‘bad’ thing. However, mini nuclear stations are definitely good, but ‘community size’ batteries are a complete waste of resources.
Lomborg is an economist. He is correct in not trying to make claims about what the climate might or might do. He takes the view that if it is true that there may be some changes to climate because of human activity then we are going about dealing with that in a way that will cost astronomical sums of money, impoverish people and in the end do very little to help as regards changes to climate that might or might not be caused by huma activity. Essentially, he says that Environmental and climate policies are like taking a Nuclear Bomb to kill a Mouse. Which ultimately means that the policies are not for the purpose claimed. The policies are using climate as the excuse for the real agenda, which is control of the worlds wealth and resources —and YOU
I think Lomborg falls into a category of being good in his own sphere and also believes that others are in theirs so when an alleged climate scientist says global warming is true he believes them. This was highlighted in an excellent book The Deniers. There are many of those the author profiled who decried crap in their own area but believed others. The noted Fritz Vahrenholtz for a long time believed in the IPCC reports up the the point where he actually read one and concluded they were mainly activist bollocks – no surprise given the IPCC is a global warming activist group.
In the past the West used the technologies that were the cheapest and most efficient ways to produce energy. This is what made the West prosperous and gave us our current standard of living, long life spans, freedom from preventable diseases and from back breaking labour, and more leisure time Then with all going well and citizens enjoying a lifestyle that previous generations could only dream of, along came the Green Agenda that saw our use if fossil fuels as “unsustainable”. It is important to realise where this agenda came from to understand what its goals are. ——It came from the UN who saw the wealthy west as having used up more than its fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground and who wanted it to stop doing that and use wind and sun instead. So essentially we are to use more expensive less efficient fuels and reduce our consumption of everything as a result. —-Left wing governments all over the west have been pandering to this agenda and have raised the cost of electricity for their citizens, by putting use environmental costs onto fossil fuels and trying to coerce their citizens into accepting that this all has to be done “because of the climate crisis”. But “climate crisis” is not the language of Science, it is the language of Politics. President Trump does not speak this language and does not need an Interpreter. He knows this is an eco socialist scam and that is why the likes of Miliband are so determined to follow this phony save the planet path.——By mostly scrapping this energy policy of getting rid of fossil fuels and encouraging wind, sun, EV’s and the rest of the GREEN Agenda Trump will restore the prosperity Americans have been accustomed to because standard of living is directly tied to price and availability of energy. —-Our silly Politicians in Europe and the UK are still onboard the eco socialist train and as a result we will pay 5 times more for our energy. This bad in so many ways for business competitiveness and for private citizens forced more and more into energy poverty. —–When will UK citizens WAKE UP and stop voting for Political Party’s that want to indulge in NET ZERO?
The UN has admitted that the Climate Change narrative and Net Zero have nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with wealth re-distribution ….. from the developed West to “more deserving” 2nd and 3rd world countries. Global levelling-down in action:
https://www.climatedepot.com/2017/05/24/global-warming-is-not-about-the-science-un-admits-climate-change-policy-is-about-how-we-redistribute-the-worlds-wealth/
These people believe that Communism/Socialism have only failed because they weren’t applied everywhere at the same time.
You lost me with your use of the term fossil fuels, a stupid, politically loaded name.
I assume you actually meant hydrocarbons. Why not say that.
I am curious. What is it that causes you label “fossil fuels” as a politically loaded name?
What is the problem with using the term “fossil fuels”. Kindly explain, thank you.
Lomborg and Koonin blow it by thinking that batteries are of any use in a proper electricity grid and that we need clean energy innovation pushed by government. If there is advantage in it then companies will do it anyway. Coal plants are much more efficient these days as it means higher profits.
Seems like multimillionaire Lomborg is very AC/DC about non-existent anthropogenic climate change. He wants to cash in whichever way the wind blows (or doesn’t blow)
“The one ingredient his energy policy lacks is investments in innovation… the new administration should invest more in clean energy research and development…”
Innovation occurs when somebody has an idea for a new use for current technology(ies.) There is no way of investing in ideas… here’s 20 quid go and have a good idea.
Innovation is NOT inventing new technology; it builds on what we have got. Amazon: innovation was combining existing tech: mail order, computers, telecommunications, internet, credit card payment system.
No amount of “investment” could produce this.Someone just had an idea… ditto Netflix.
So Bjorn Lomborg doesn’t understand what innovation means, and he thinks Mankind is causing global warming/climate change but doesn’t think it’s a problem, but we should do something about the non-problem anyway. What a drip.
”Clean energy” is meaningless twaddle. “Clean energy” means no C02 emissions, but C02 isn’t dirty. In any case how is this “clean energy” going to be possible without involving oil, coal and gas somehow?
Innovation has been the development of horizontal drilling… 1960s and not driven by activist Governments… which made possible draining of small, peripheral deposits for which sinking wells over them would be impossible, and which led to fracking.
Innovation has meant we have more fossil fuels now than we did 100 years ago.
Agree with all your comments, that is exactly what I wanted to convey in my article. Thank you.
‘Among energy realists not beholden to the cult of climate alarmism, the praises for President Trump’s flurry of executive orders after inauguration on January 20th were fulsome.’
English has plenty of words for abundant. Fulsome is not one of them.
Dear GB,
please worry less about the USA and our President. Focus on your nightmare government in situ. The previous gov’ts were incompetent, the current one is evil. There is a difference.
My main worry about the USA and Trump, is whether the powers who put the dead husk sock puppet Biden in place and pulled his strings will succeed in assassinating Trump.
Have no doubts, we are very focused indeed on the evil (and gross incompetence) of Stürmer’s government. Even more dreadful than their Uniparty (Tory branch) predecessors,