Global warming skeptics have got to start making this argument:
Russia’s gambit in the Ukraine can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the global warming project adopted by the West. In truth global warming policy doesn’t have what may be called “shoulders” but you get what I mean.
This argument must be made if the West is to survive.
Our economic foundation rests upon the availability of relatively cheap and effective/efficient fossil fuels - coal, gas and oil. Remove this foundation and the system crumbles. Indeed the vast advances in human well being over the last 150 years are attributable to an abundance of fossil fuels without which “I will send pestilence among you” still prevails.
Global warming has made war on the availability of cheap fossil fuels, on investment and exploration, on delivery (pipelines) and on consumption (green taxes) and on a massive campaign of demonization prosecuted in education and other institutions most notably the polity.
Fossil fuels are portrayed by warmers as the very Devil himself since only the Devil himself can bring apocalypse in this case the end of the world as we know it - cataclysm piled upon catastrophe as the skies become pillars of fire and the oceans boil with blood.
But do not despair for redemption is nigh.
Green energy will save up from this horror of all horrors.
Thus spake the IPPC: “Thou shalt go into the world and multiply your solar panels, your wind turbines and your electric cars; only in them can salvation be found!”
“They will come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves.”
Thus in sackcloth and cassock, hosannas at the ready, the new seminarians marched into the world, bold in their faith that they have struck the golden chord of truth unavailable to the heathen (the global warming skeptic) but still determined to save the heathen from himself. So its reeducation camps for those who wont play ball, like being marooned for a year on an island in the middle of the Pacific with Greta Thunberg as your sole companion.
Enlightenment is mine!
Yet the verisimilitude of the AGW hypothesis is another matter altogether. Now I know global warming acolytes will say that there’s a 99% scientific consensus on global warming but of course there’s nothing of the kind. In 2021 alone there were hundreds of skeptical papers published in refereed journals challenging the assertion of the “new seminarians,” that C02 emissions represent their own version of “the Fall.”
Not only is global warming the biggest scientific fraud of all time, it’s also the most dangerous scientific fraud of all time.
It’s a dangerous fraud because what it does in truth is call for the unilateral disarmament of the West by adopting green forms of energy that are much more expensive and far less effective/efficient than fossil fuels. Green energy forms require enormous state subsidies for them to stay in business in addition to which their intermittency makes them very inefficient. Solar panels don’t work when the sun don’t shine and wind turbines don’t work when the wind don’t blow. By contrast, come rain, sleet and snow - fossil fuels are there for you at a price you can afford.
The malign results of global warming policies are everywhere to be seen: The impoverishment of the people and the country that wont permit fracking on its own soil (look to the UK and the EU). The EU will not frack even though it can’t do without these staples. Substituting that which is unaffordable and efficient for something that is costly and inefficient is the road to economic ruin.
Refusal to frack has its consequences; it produces shortages of a product you still desperately need because alternate forms of energy are not ready for prime time; thus far green energy has not even come close to replacing very same fossil fuels so persistently maligned.
So what to do?
Why, you must rely on others, on imports to provide you with what you need.
The hymnal of the warmers is that “never shall we sin but we don’t mind if others do the sinning for us” So the barbarians will do the sinning and provide us with the natural gas and petroleum that we need. The Medieval Church banned usury but lending money at interest is indispensable for enterprise and so usury was farmed out to the heretic, to the usurious Jew who was going to hell anyway. Warmers farm out the production of fossil fuels and beg the providers to commit the sins they cannot quite come around to committing themselves.
So the West farms out its sinning to the heretic as providers of a product they can’t provide themselves. And if the provider in consequence sinks to Dante’s lowest sub circle of the seventh circle of hell thus shall it be. The volatile Middle East and Vladimir Putin’s Russia are assiduously courted to play the modern role of the usurer. Yet playing with the Devil delivers its own kind of ruin.
Believe it or not America has under Biden also become dependent on Russia for oil imports. As soon as he assumed office Biden went about systematically destroying the fossil fuel sector of the economy. His very first executive order was closure of Keystone and after that he went after fracking turning America from energy independence to energy dependence, in the process creating energy shortages and driving up domestic inflation while simultaneously enriching OPEC and Russia when driving up the price. While the emirs and prince’s of the Middle East squander their riches in ostentatious display, Vladimir has been playing another game, using those riches to build up his military capability. In one of the saddest displays of sycophancy Biden recently cringed cap in hand before the lords of OPEC begging it to pump more oil. “But Mr President,” the sanguine observer may well observe, “I thought you were dyed in the wool opposed to fossil fuels.”
The reply goes something like this: “I’m opposed to fossil fuels only if they originate from American soil otherwise they’re perfectly okay.” If this sounds beyond bizarre, if this sounds like a tale told by an idiot then it is
Biden’s actions also led to - if you can believe this - energy dependence on Russia that is currently shipping millions of barrels of oil to Uncle Sam. How then can the President impose meaningful sanctions from this position of dependence. He could of course terminate the arrangement which would drive American consumers even further into the lurch of shortages and rampant inflation.
Under Trump America was not only energy independent it was also a net energy exporter. But now like a mendicant a once proud country is reduced to a servile dependence on Russia and OPEC . Now ask yourself: What kind of mind-set, what kind of imbecility does it take to destroy your very own strategic and economic security forcing you to throw yourself on the mercy of your enemies?
What kind of people would even contemplate such a thing?
It takes the virtuous fanatic to pull off this kind of stunt, the consummate virtue signaller who glories in eulogizing the act of falling on your own sword as an end in itself.
Thus shortages of a strategic reserve are deliberately created. Shortages cause prices to rise and inflation runs rampant because energy prices are pivotal: When energy prices increase, all prices increase and we have what we have now, a forty year high in inflation. Of all the economic dysfunctions out there - inflation is the most insidious of them all.
A critical assumption of the warmers is a stable international order. When that order is stable, nations can degrade their national security with “planned impoverishment” and suffer only a minor short-fall. But when that order breaks down as it has today and many other days in history, planned impoverishment is a one way ticket to the boneyard. Then there’s “planned dependence” on your enemies. That too is a one way ticket to the boneyard.
As America depends on Russian oil, the West writ large also depends on another shady global character - Communist China. The global warming clique is vitally dependent on China for the cheap manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines, cheap because the labour required to make these things is cheap (read the forced labour of Uighurs) which means that when the West imports wind and solar energy forms it doesn’t have to subsidize them quite as much as it would had these things been made domestically.
In this instance there’s an economic motive to farm out your sins to others.
Like Russia, China looks with contempt on the West as it slowly but surely throttles itself: Both nations have sheer contempt for the global warming narrative and its assorted nonsense of green prophecy:
You can just hear them chortling in Moscow and Beijing: “What utter saps these westerners are: Why it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
So it goes that China is opening new coal fired power plants at a frenetic pace. A 2020 article has 184 such plants on the drawing board whose energy will then be used to manufacture solar panels and wind turbines that are shipped to the West where - all of a sudden - nobody seems to care that the manufacture of these green energy icons was about as carbon intensive as you can get, an emissions extravaganza that troubles not a whit the conscience of the new seminarians.
If we are to curb the imperial ambitions of Russia and Communist China (read Taiwan) the most effective sanction is: Start mining coal, start drilling for petroleum and start fracking for natural gas. This would mark the end of wind turbines and solar panels just as it would mark the end of China’s lucrative export in these things: Indeed mana would no longer fall from heaven and the West’s dependence on China for its energy needs broken.
Drilling for oil and natural gas would significantly reduce world prices and the corrosive inflation that goes with it. It would also enhance security by slashing the bonanza of revenue returns that Russia is currently receiving to fund its war machine.
Both Canada and the US could with little effort not only become energy independent but exporters of energy as well, exports that could be shipped to the EU that is currently being throttled by Putin’s Gazprom thumb. But this won’t happen. It can’t happen when global warming fanaticism is in charge, both in Ottawa and Washington. Nor will it happen in the EU where global warming orthodoxy exceeds by a considerable margin that found in North America.
So the West hooked as it is to the wagon of a fairy tale will continue to destroy itself while its enemies stand gloating on the sidelines waiting for an opportune moment to pounce on the geostrategic stupidity of fools, fools who seem more than willing to kill themselves and others while dogmatically convinced that they are saving themselves. The votaries of green are reminiscent of the Cathars who abstained from all matters of sex thus guaranteeing their own demise by refusing to reproduce themselves. The means may be different but the ends are the same.
Russia and China are on the rise while the West says: “Here let me help you.” Both see their ascendance as requiring little more effort than the kicking in of a rotting door.
The more than sobering takeaway here is this:
They are right!