On the
"anti-green" page,
I deal with whether the greens' claims are true (some are).
Here I deal with the impact on society of green thinking.
It does seem to me that environmentalism
is filling a place formerly occupied by socialism (and before that by religion).
When I was young, teenagers in school were made to feel guilty about masturbation and sex.
Now, teenagers in school are made to feel guilty about shopping and consumerism.
It's the same anti-human psychology, it seems to me.
More brainwashing of innocent children by the green religion.
And copy.
And another one.
And round-up.
It's like watching Catholic priests scare children about hell.
Climate change people are often leftists with unpleasant ideas about the world.
Here, someone sets up a site
"IdiotTracker"
to promote climate change ideas.
Turns out he has other left-wing ideas.
As I say on the
"anti-green" page,
environmentalism (or at least some of it) may be true,
but it is funny how conveniently it fits in with left-wing anti-capitalist ideology,
and our post-religious need to feel guilty
about our fantastic prosperity and consumer riches.
It may be just a coincidence. But it's quite an amazing coincidence.
"certain human social
structures always reappear. They can't be
eliminated from society. One of those structures is
religion
...
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the
Western World is environmentalism.
Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice
for urban atheists."
"The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real
nature. What people want is to spend a week or two
in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the
windows. They want a simplified life for a while,
without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a
few days, with somebody else doing the cooking.
Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way,
and nobody does. It's all talk - and as the years go on,
and the world population grows increasingly urban,
it's uninformed talk.
...
It's all fantasy."
"We know from history that
religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism
has already killed somewhere between 10-30
million people since the 1970s."
Without, of course, giving up his
"elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue".
Or his computer.
Or his cleaning lady, for heaven's sake.
The guilt that sensitive westerners like him feel, and the absurdity of that guilt,
is replicated throughout the western world.
As Scott Burgess notes, this is very much like
traditional religious guilt,
mortification
and
flagellation.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods
by Henry David Thoreau (published 1854)
shows that guilt-ridden green asceticism has been around for a long time.
A wealthy, university-educated man, in his late 20s,
with no wife and no children to support,
lives a simple life "in the woods"
in 1845-47,
and then
tells us we should all live
in some back to nature style,
and that our own lives are pathetic and conformist.
He famously says:
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Timothy Sandefur on Thoreau:
"Thoreau's ignorance of economics is absolute. His hostility to material prosperity and spiritual invocations to "simplify" are nothing more than the old asceticism of Savanarola tranplanted into a quaint country cabin. "Trade curses everything it handles," for instance. Yeah, right - unless you have a family to provide for.
...
And how it is expressed! In aphorisms as trite as they are stupid. Oh, yes, many men are owned by their houses. Very deep from a man who at the age of thirty has no wife and children to shelter; no small business to finance through a mortgage; who lives on a sinecure from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
...
There is no doubting that materialism can be a cause of spiritual emptiness and no doubt there are a lot of people who "starve for want of luxuries." But it is always easy to regard another man's things as superficial and another man's pursuits as greedy, while one's own belongings have sentimental value and one's own pursuits are profound (or at least harmless indulgences). It is even easier for self-righteous 30 year olds to regard older men with families as leading lives of desperation, while impressing themselves with the depth of their spiritual access."
What is really funny is that while Thoreau
lived "in the woods",
his mother, who lived nearby, delivered meals to him every week.
His family wealth, of course, was based on commerce and trade.
Asceticism
- There is a long history of guilt-ridden believers
mortifying their body to do penance for the world.
Cilices
- undergarments that torment the flesh
(e.g. hairshirts).
Sadhus
- Hindu ascetics, some of whom practice extreme mortification,
such as
vowing never to use one leg,
standing on one leg for years,
holding an arm in the air for years,
or
remaining silent for years.
Stylites
- the ancient Christian ascetics
who sat on pillars in the desert for years.
Other mortification included standing upright for years,
and a hermit who for decades never turned his face to the West.
St Simeon the Stylite
lived for 37 years on a small platform on top of a pillar in Syria.
The fucking loony.
Image from here.
Of course most greens are wealthy urban consumers,
who often lead a far more extravagant lifestyle
than I do (e.g. I fly less than once a year).
They have to struggle with this hypocrisy and their feelings of guilt.
I just laugh at them.
Al Gore's mansion in Nashville
consumes more electricity every month
than the average American household uses in an entire year.
And this is just one of his multiple homes.
And see update.
"Thanks to carbon offsets, Al Gore keeps his mansion
- and still feels good while warning others we all can't live as he does."
"George Soros ...
can lavishly fund liberal causes such as left-wing think tanks,
Web sites and ballot initiatives - and thereby offset his millions made speculating on exchange rates
and bankrupting small depositors."
"John Edwards ...
lives in a 30,000-square-foot home, gets $400 haircuts and recently made a lot of cash
by working for a profit-driven, cutthroat hedge fund.
How's he supposed to alleviate his guilt over this? Presto!
He can lecture others about the inequity of an American system
that unfairly created two unequal societies"
The Live Earth concerts, July 2007,
burned more carbon in a day than 3,000 average Britons do in a year.
Estimate:
"Its total carbon footprint, including the artists and spectators' travel and energy consumption, was likely to have been at least 31,500 tonnes".
More:
"The most conservative assessment of the flights being taken by its superstars is that they are flying an extraordinary 222,623 miles between them to get to the various concerts - nearly 9 times the circumference of the world.
...
The total carbon footprint of the event .. is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes
...
Throw in the television audience and it comes to a staggering 74,500 tonnes. In comparison, the average Briton produces 10 tonnes in a year.
The concert will also generate some 1,025 tonnes of waste at the concert stadiums - much of which will go directly into landfill sites."
And of course we are being lectured to on our destructive habits by
obscenely wealthy multi-millionaires
whose habits are a thousand times worse than ours:
"an audit of the lifestyles of the A-list performers appearing at Live Earth, reveals that they are among the worst individual polluters in the world, as their world tours and private jets billow thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. One hour in a Gulfstream jet burns as much fuel as driving a family car for a year.
The Daily Mail has found that five of the top performing acts together have an annual output of almost 2,000 carbon tonnes. Madonna alone has an annual carbon footprint of 1,018 tonnes ...
Remember, the average Briton produces just 10 tonnes.
...
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has learnt that Bon Jovi left the UK this week to travel back by private jet to the U.S. to perform at the New York stadium for the American leg of Live Earth."
With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming, 30 Mar 2007.
John Travolta encouraged his fans to "do their bit" to tackle global warming.
He himself owns 5 private jets.
"Clocking up at least 30,000 flying miles in the past 12 months means he has produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions - nearly 100 times the average Briton's tally.
...
Travolta's five private planes - a customised £2million Boeing 707, three Gulfstream jets and a Lear jet - are kept at the bottom of his garden in the US next to a private runway."
Travolta
commutes by private jet
5 days a week.
Harrison Ford
campaigns for the rain forest, saying:
"When rainforests get slashed and burned, it releases tonnes of carbon into the air we breathe. It changes our climate. It hurts."
However, he owns a number of private aircraft, and says:
"I often fly up the coast for a cheeseburger."
Arnold Schwarzenegger
commutes by private jet to his office.
"Some environmentalists say the trips expand his carbon footprint enough to undermine his image as a crusader against global warming, despite the pollution credits he buys to offset the damage."
No kidding.
"The governor's Gulfstream jet does nearly as much damage to the environment in one hour as a small car does in a year".
As Libertas says:
"People like Schwarzenegger and Al Gore, those who claim to study global warming and believe in it, aren't acting like there's a crisis. Why the hell should I?"
In 2009, Trudie Styler (Sting's wife)
took a private jet from New York to Washington DC for the
White House correspondents' dinner. She was accompanied by an 8-person entourage, which included her Manhattan-based hair guru.
Previously she made an 80-mile journey to the home of fellow environmentalist Zac Goldsmith by helicopter.
Wikipedia
says:
"Sting owns several homes worldwide, including Elizabethan manor house Lake House and its 60-acre country estate near Salisbury in Wiltshire, England, a country cottage in the Lake District, a New York City apartment, a beach house in Malibu, California, a 600-acre (2.4 km2) estate in Tuscany, Italy, and two properties in London".
He says
"I rarely fly, for environmental reasons more than anything else."
And then he says that he
"went to the Maldives the year before last".
He has
"had some of my happiest holidays in Mallorca".
Yes, that's holidays, plural.
He had fun when
"My son, sister, niece and I were sea kayaking in Mexico".
When asked for a bad hotel he recalled
"A resort hotel in Varadero, Cuba."
He loves:
"New York. It has great restaurants".
Ed West:
"Green party supporter Marcus Brigstocke must have a carbon footprint the size of Godzilla".
Michelle Malkin
is hilarious on the hypocrisy of the modern
urban "greens",
from the Hollywood celebrities with their private jets
to the liberal-left upper middle-class
with their regular flights, second homes and multiple foreign holidays.
I don't mind them being wealthy and travelling.
I just think they ought to shut up lecturing the rest of us.
A commenter on the ridiculous green ad
by the immensely wealthy multi-millionaires Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow:
"You have GOT to be kidding. Those two wasted more energy and causing more pollution
MAKING THEIR COMMERCIAL than I do in a year. The private jets and giant SUVs
THEY drive everywhere do more environmental damage in a day than I do in a decade.
And they're lecturing me?"
Prince Charles is the archetypal annoying wealthy green
- who flies everywhere, drives Aston Martins, and lectures us little people
about the environment.
He competes with
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams
for most annoying man in Britain.
Prince Charles' lifestyle:
The immensely wealthy "green"
Prince Charles
generated more than 1,500 tons of carbon dioxide in 2006
(the average British person emits 10 tons per year).
Charles and Camilla flew 70,000 miles in 2006 alone
(the average British or American person flies 1,000 miles per year).
"In January he travelled first class to the United States with Camilla and 14 aides,
where he picked up an environmental awareness award.
...
In February he hired an Airbus A319, which can seat 140 people, to carry him,
Camilla and 23 aides to the Gulf at taxpayers' expense.
...
In May Camilla .. took a private jet to Greece for a short break with friends."
Meanwhile back home, the carbon dioxide emissions of
Charles's three homes
are equivalent to the emissions of 500 average houses.
2,200 mile tour by private jet by Prince Charles to promote environmental issues, 25th April 2009.
He hires private jet for tour of Europe to promote environmental issues.
The Prince and Duchess, plus 10 staff, fly from London to Rome, then Venice and Berlin,
back to Britain.
Instead of using scheduled flights, they hire a private plane.
The 5-day trip leaves a carbon footprint of 53 tons - nearly 5 times the average person's 11-ton footprint for an entire year.
The Prince also used a private jet on a controversial 16,000-mile tour of South America in February 2009 as part of his crusade against global warming.
As at 2010,
Prince Charles has a personal staff of 124.
"There are valets to dress him and polish his shoes, chefs to indulge his every organic culinary whim, and a small army of estate workers, gardening being one of his greatest passions.
...
The Prince's total expenditure on staff last year was £6,303,000".
He employs 3 chauffeurs to drive his Jaguar, Audi and Range Rover cars.
Prince Charles, Feb 2011, says we need to stop economic growth.
Only he should drive Aston Martins, not the rest of us.
Daniel Hannan (in the previous)
also considers the Prince's
"belief that governments in general, and the EU in particular, are well placed to secure the natural environment"
(as opposed to private ownership).
An Open Letter
(also here)
by Richard Dawkins in 2000
to Prince Charles
about his hostility to science.
Prince Charles on Islam and the modern jihad:
Prince Charles warns that climate change will drive starvation and terrorism, Dec 2009.
Of course, starvation is mostly caused by third world government,
and terrorism is mostly caused by Islam.
But how nice to be able to blame middle-class western consumers instead!
To deliver this important message to the world, Prince Charles flew from Britain to Copenhagen
"by private jet".
Prince Charles strongly opposed the Iraq War,
mocked Tony Blair,
and
believes the root cause of terror and violence in the Middle East
is not Islamism and Arab dictatorship
but rather "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict".
'Follow the Islamic way to save the world,' Prince Charles urges environmentalists, June 2010.
"Prince Charles yesterday urged the world to follow Islamic 'spiritual principles' in order to protect the environment."
He was speaking at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies,
and instead of taking the opportunity to criticise Islam for its intolerance
and oppression,
he talked some imaginary bollocks about how Islam is supposedly eco-friendly
and we can all learn from it.
Great comment:
"Prince Charles is right. Britain should become more like Iraq and Afghanistan, Morocco, Yemen and the Sudan. The environment is a real priority in those countries."
Islamic State threatens to kill four-year-old Prince George, Oct 2017.
All the pious drivel about Islam that Prince Charles has spoken for years does not protect his grandson for one second.
Jihadis cannot be deterred by tolerant, warm words. They are only encouraged by them.
Nice for some:
From 1970 to 2008, Prince Charles
drove
a 4 litre, 280 bhp,
13 mpg,
150 mph
Aston Martin DB6 Volante.
In 2008, after 38 years of driving,
in a fine example of token greenery,
he converted it to run on
bioethanol.
Image from here.
See terms of use.
Spare us Prince Harry's royal hypocrisy, 4 Sept 2019.
"In the summer, the green prince and his wife announced that they would avoid adding to the world's carbon footprint by having no more than two babies. After that, they went on an epic carbon-spewing tour, taking four private-jet journeys in 11 days, including to a Google summit to deliver a lecture on climate change. "
Harry and Meghan abandoned Royal duties for the pursuit of money in 2020,
and angrily declared that Harry's family was "racist",
like a couple of spoilt teenagers.
In Jan 2020,
Harry and Meghan announced their climate-conscious plans to move to America.
They said they have "a long-term plan to end up back in the US with a second home in Canada".
And visits back to the UK.
All on private jets.
Dec 2022: Prince Harry takes a private jet to New York to pick up an award for calling his own family "racist". You literally cannot make a satire about this man's life.
Prince Harry is incredibly unpopular in Britain after attacking his family and his country.
Radical environmentalism, if taken seriously,
threatens billions of innocent people with starvation and death.
Of course, radical environmentalism is only a pose
by people who live comfortable lives
in a wealthy, inter-connected,
industrial consumer society,
and it will never be adopted en masse.
But it is interesting to consider that it is the only major, popular philosophy
that, if it were actually adopted,
would threaten the human species itself
with global death and extinction.
As Scott Burgess
notes,
if everyone lived like "No Impact" man,
urban civilization (i.e. all civilization) would quickly collapse,
hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people would die,
and the world would return to the stone age.
"Eventually some kind of equilibrium may be reached
- a low-population, low-lifespan, pre-industrial world in which
the material and intellectual achievements of the last thousand years or so;
such as, for example, the extension of human lifespan
and mass inter-generational transmission of knowledge (no paper!) are wiped away."
Towards a Deep Green Stone Age by Scott Burgess, March 27, 2007
- He finds some radical environmentalists who actually admire the Stone Age.
And they want to use violence to get us there.
"their .. aim - to
bomb us back to the stone age.
Literally."
Make Wealth History
are at least honest about it.
Socialists pretended they weren't going to make everyone poor.
The Story of Stuff
has a bleak vision for the world.
It has no plan for spreading western wealth and comfort to all humanity.
Rather, it says that is impossible,
and it attacks western wealth and comfort itself.
What a miserable, hope-crushing idea to fill our children's heads with.
The Cambodia democide
of 1975-79
was all about back-to-nature,
empty the cities,
anti-property, organic food produced with no technology, and alternative, non-western medicine.
If you want to know what society the radical environmentalists would lead to,
just look at the Khmer Rouge.
Abandon democracy to save the planet, says James Lovelock of "Gaia" fame.
"We need a more authoritative world. We've become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It's all very well, but there are certain circumstances - a war is a typical example - where you can't do that. You've got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it.
...
But it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."
'Only global fascist tyranny can save us now' says nice old man, by James Delingpole, March 30th, 2010.
Delingpole points out that, oddly, the rest of the interview with Lovelock
is filled with apparently sensible scepticism and uncertainty about climate change prediction.
NASA's James Hansen
admires China because it is not a democracy,
and therefore climate change measures can be passed without
needing the consent of the people.
And more.
Pentti Linkola
(see quotes),
Finnish eco-fascist,
wants, like Pol Pot,
to either kill you
or make you live in impoverished slavery.
He hates not only capitalism and consumerism,
but also democracy and civilization.
To save the planet, he calls for
forced infanticide and eugenics,
a licence for having babies,
with forced abortion,
the banning of all cars and most electricity,
an end to most business and foreign trade,
a ban on emigration,
and
the forcing of people out of the cities to the countryside.
He wants a forced end to most science, technology and research.
"Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed."
He praises totalitarian states and genocide.
He wants more than 99 percent of all humans to die,
and suggests the world's cities should be destroyed with nuclear weapons.
(This reminds me of a
Gates of Vienna
quote that:
"you can bet that the bulldozer and the pistol will be the last technological artifacts to be given up
after the Green Millenium arrives.")
Kill the infidels!
Like all religions, some environmentalists dream of killing the unbelievers.
Incredibly, the film above - in which children are brainwashed by eco-loony teachers,
and then eco-sceptics, including children, are murdered - is not a joke.
"No Pressure", released 1 Oct 2010, is a genuine film for the
"10:10"
eco pressure group.
This film is a unique glimpse into the mind of eco-nutters who live on a different planet,
people who might, in the right circumstances, start actual killing.
In another life these people would have been Red Guards.
See
copies.
The 10:10 founder Franny Armstrong
says:
"Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction ... What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody's existence on this planet? Clearly we don't really think they should be blown up ... but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start? ...
We 'killed' five people to make No Pressure - a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change."
Zombie
calls it the "most honest political ad of all time":
"If someone set out to intentionally discredit the Global Warming movement, they couldn't have made a video more devastating than this one. It's as if the eco-fascists have an irrepressible urge to expose their unconscious fantasies to those whom they seek to dominate - like a serial killer who sends taunting letters to the media."
Melanie Phillips:
"I assumed that Curtis ... was making the savage point that, beneath the veneer of principled and high-minded concern for the future of the planet, the advocates of man-made global warming theory were actually psychotic fanatics".
Comment here
sums it up:
"Advocating the murdering of children because they disagree with your unproven beliefs - and treating it like a joke - is evil, sick, inhuman, fascist, and cannot be defended by any sane person for any reason."
Thomas Fuller, 1 Oct 2010, notes the clear message to children
"That it's okay to ostracize, bully and dismiss those who don't agree that climate change is uber alles ... and that skeptics or the children of skeptics are fair game for .. whatever.
... there is a special place in hell reserved for those whose intent it is to legitimize the cruelty of children towards each other based on what has evidently become a religious belief."
Ed Morrissey:
"Can you imagine the reaction had an organization like Move America Forward produced a video like this, where those who didn't support a robust strategy for the war on terror were blown up by a button-pushing advocate for the strategy? Especially children in a classroom being terrorized by their teacher into compliance with the groupthink?"
Donna Laframboise says that 10:10 are
"clueless about how deeply offensive it is, in a free society, to suggest that people with alternative points-of-view deserve to be liquidated. If we are not free to disagree, we are not free. Period."
Comment
says it's not a joke.
"It's meant to be a personal threat to everyone that doesn't intend to submit."
The video is by Richard Curtis,
who made Love Actually, with its
crap anti-American speech
dumped into a pleasant romantic comedy.
Just as Curtis lives in an echo chamber
and couldn't imagine anyone who wouldn't like Hugh Grant's speech,
so he couldn't imagine anyone who wouldn't like this.
Hilarious:
Richard Curtis lives in upscale Notting Hill in London.
He has a
£1 million
country house in Walberswick, Suffolk.
He has another country retreat in Henley, Oxfordshire.
His
brother-in-law
has a private jet.
The Green War on Children by Michelle Malkin, October 8, 2010, usefully notes the children that have in real life been attacked by eco-terrorists (family homes of researchers attacked, and so on).
"A hundred odd people must have spent months preparing, with casting, scripting and special effects meetings, so they could capture the effect of exploding ten-year-olds without once noticing the rather invidious parallels with, say, Pol Pot.
...
To avert leaping into this disaster with two feet and a jet propulsion unit, all they had to do was run one focus-group, say, on three people at a bus stop."
"They had spent years dehumanizing, ridiculing, and denigrating anyone that disagreed. Two decades of noxious name-calling and rampant bullying had laid the groundwork
...
They had dehumanized their targets to the point that no one in a room of supposedly top brains stopped and said "maybe blowing up kids is just a bit base?"
For a gregarious species, executing our own offspring breaks a basic rule of biology. But it's a starring idea if you want to turn most-of-the-human-race into your sworn enemy. Is there any better way to swing the fence-sitters against you than by threatening their children?"
Even more incredible:
"The 10:10 team didn't just target active deniers, they attacked people who just shrugged; who had other things to do
...
the 10:10 eco-terrorist-cell assumed that in cinemas most people would get the same base "thrill" as they did. Instead, most of the population identifies with the shruggers".
What the eco-nutters really want to do.
A briliant edit of the original.
Pull down the castles
(or via here),
by Melanie Reid
- A writer in The Herald, 25 Apr 2006,
actually advocates destroying Scotland's heritage,
apparently
because it offends in some way her unexplained
(socialist? green?)
beliefs.
The spirit of Marx, Lenin, Mao
and the other barbarians and destroyers
is still very much alive.
"Think of how liberating it would be if we could flatten such divisive symbols, escape from their faux-ancient yoke, and start to enjoy the freedom to build afresh; to design modern buildings for a technological age. I'm talking about buildings scaled to the lives people must lead in the future, not to the empty reassertion of status and excess. Society has changed. Tomorrow's enemy - the global shortage of energy, the prospect of a world reduced to a husk - is a far more grave one than we realise."
I suggest that tomorrow's enemy is, as it has always been, people like her.
Eco-terrorism in Ireland
Eco-terrorism came to Ireland in 2007,
when disturbed Englishman
Noah Bunn
attacked one of the most beautiful roads in Dublin,
Eglinton Rd,
and burnt the beautiful old headquarters of the
Jesuits.
Bunn, from Northampton, age 26,
destroyed an invaluable library and irreplaceable old Jesuit records
in an arson attack.
He was a member of
Friends of the Earth,
and destroyed the house
because he believed the Jesuit order
"were not using their moral authority to alert the world to the dangers of climate change".
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008).
Earth is invaded by genocidal alien eco-nutcases.
To "save" the planet,
these cold alien bastards
plan to exterminate every human being,
and destroy all our works, our libraries, our science,
our art, our buildings,
our history.
This film is a
grim warning of the dangers of deep green extremism.
Or at least it would be, if not for one bizarre thing:
We are actually meant to sympathise with the aliens.
We are meant to
agree that humans are destroying the planet
(a claim that everyone in the film accepts without question).
We are actually meant to
agree with the humans who beg forgiveness for their "sins",
and beg for a chance to exist.
At the end, humans are allowed to exist (for now) by the alien overlords,
but all human machines are destroyed.
Cars, oil, electricity - all must cease.
There is then an absurd shot as humans listen to birdsong that the machine noise had drowned out.
Not shown is what happens next - global famine and democide.
If all human machines were destroyed, at least 1 billion people would die in agony,
perhaps 5 billion.
And yet we are meant to think it wonderful that city folk can hear birds singing!
Are there people so nutty in their green beliefs that they sympathise with this film?
It seems so.
Maybe this film is a warning - a warning of a small-scale green democide
that some group of starry-eyed believers
will carry out this century.
