Many years ago, when I was a young diarist working for the Daily Telegraph’s Peterborough column, my bosses dispatched me to cover the Green Party conference. This wasn’t because I was particularly anti-Green at the time. Rather it was because, of all Peterborough’s staffers, I was known to be the one least interested in politics and the political process, so it seemed entirely appropriate to send me to the big joke event in the conference season, rather than to one of the more serious events.
The only thing I remember about the event was being inveigled into some fringe activity in which I was forced to participate with various Green delegates in some kind of non-competitive group bonding exercise where we all had to roll about on the floor. Someone let out the most repellent fart. It smelt evil but everyone present politely conspired to pretend that everything was normal. I sense something similar going on right now in the collective efforts of the media chattering classes to present the Green Party as a viable, vibrant and credible force in UK politics in the approach to the General Election.
Here are some reasons why I think they are wrong.
1. Green Party membership is on the up and up. Yes but so what?
Apparently the Green Party’s membership has now overtaken UKIP’s. I’m quite prepared to believe this but I think it says more about the fiendish zealotry of the sort of people attracted to environmental causes than it does about the Green Party itself. It’s not as though the Green Party has suddenly gone and recruited a brilliant, inspirational go-ahead new leader – au contraire: see Nathalie Bennett, below – nor as though it has undergone some manner of dramatic, Clause 4 style, policy reinvention.
Nope. It’s just that of all the parties, the Greens are the one whose target market accords most closely with the kind of people who flock to sign Change.Org petitions and join Twitter mobbings and go out on street demos (or better still, attend week-long protest camps where they can smoke dope, get to use the yurt and possibly get to rub shoulders with Vivienne Westwood). These people are signers, joiners, astroturfers. As a percentage of the population they are quite small but in terms of exerting political pressure they punch far above their weight by being highly committed and – for a bunch of dope-smoking crusties – surprisingly well organised. This Green Party membership surge is just another part of that strategy. I don’t believe that it will translate into anything significant at the polls.
2. Natalie Bennett
You know how at the beginning of each new primary school year there are one or two teachers you pray aren’t going to be the ones to whose class your children have been allocated? And it’s not that these teachers are malign, necessarily. It’s just that they’re wet, agonisingly prey to all the usual PC groupthink and frankly a bit thick – so, while you know your kids won’t necessarily be unhappy during their year with Ms X, they’re not going to learn anything more useful than how to colour in a picture of Mary Seacole for their Black History Week project. Well I’ve met the Green Party’s leader Natalie Bennett and I’m afraid she’s one of those.
3. Watermelons
It stands, of course, for “green on the outside, red on the inside”. But as Matthew Holehouse rightly notes in this analysis of the Green Party’s policies, that doesn’t mean they’re as bad as Karl Marx whose main concern was the way wealth was distributed. No – and this really can’t be pointed out often enough – the Greens are much more dangerous than Karl Marx, because though they share his attitude to redistributionism they are also ideologically opposed to the one thing capable of offering each generation a better standard of living than the previous one: economic growth. A vote for the Greens is far more than a protest: it’s a vote for collectivisation, stagnation and immiseration.
4. They’re worse than a joke
Ohohoho yes, the Greens. When I originally started writing this piece, I couched it in flippantly humorous terms, with jokes about a world where your house would get confiscated and handed over to a bunch of crusties, with your garden shed being allocated for dogs-on-ropes they use for their street begging ventures and the suggestion that it would be like living under Enver Hoxha only with more dreadlocks, juggling and pois (Young Poi-oneers, anyone?).
Truth is, though, to laugh at the Greens is to underestimate the viciousness of their ideology – which is an unholy mix of economic illiteracy, pathological altruism, and misanthropy, built on a foundation of ignorance, self-delusion and mendacity. These people aren’t just misguided fools. The policies for which they have agitated over the years – punching far above their weight (see 1) – have caused the world and its inhabitants real harm. For the full ugly details read this damning new report by Andrew Montford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation called Unintended Consequences Of Climate Change Policy. These caring, nurturing hippies have blood on their hands. They should be ashamed of themselves and certainly have no place on the moral high ground.
5. In office they’re a disaster
As witness the hell they inflicted on the Green Republic of Brighton and Hove. It’s redolent of the loony left councils which ran various London boroughs in the 1980s, only with added eco-worthiness. So: out-of-control spending and uncollected rubbish, but with added nonsense like proposals that everyone should experience meat-free Mondays.
6. What all this is really all about, of course, is UKIP
The reason the “rise of the Greens” is getting so much enthusiastic coverage is because the mainstream media appears to have decided en masse that anything is better than UKIP, even a party which, if it got anywhere near the reins of power would bomb the UK economy back to the Dark Ages. An unfortunate side-effect of this shameless bias towards Cameron’s Conservatives (who, of course, fear and loathe UKIP far more than they do Labour) is that it means few journalists, commentators and broadcasters are subjecting the Greens to any kind of serious scrutiny. If UKIP had a single policy half as lunatic as the ones the Greens have got, it would be front page news for the next four months.
From Breitbart London
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- Peak oil really could destroy the economy – just not in the way greens think
Groper says:
Hannam says:
Chris P says:
Manuel says:
Daniel says:
chris says:
Paul M says:
Velocity says:
Mike says:
Will says:
D Segal says:
He is clueless about exponential growth and doesn’t understand that we live on a finite planet with finite resources. He’d do well as a republican in the US because it requires ignorance to be one.
We evolved to be selfish – just like James. Unfortunately it doesn’t work when demand is greater than supply.
So “There is nothing “smart” about james ”
(Smacks head on table)
Silent Running: Science-Fiction Story With Cheerful Robots
By VINCENT CANBY
New York Times, April 1, 1972
The year is 2008, sometime after the earth has been defoliated, its valleys filled in and its mountains leveled, when it’s 75° everywhere from Murmansk to Tanzania, and when everyone has a job. It is, in short, hell, at least to Freeman Lowell, the chief astro-botanist on the American Airlines space freighter Valley Forge, one of three space freighters cruising like arks in the vicinity of Saturn. The ships are a task force of giant greenhouses in which earth’s vanished plant life is being preserved until the day of refoliation.
– http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9504E4DC1F31E73BBC4953DFB2668389669EDE
In 1974, the Club of Rome published its second report, Mankind at the Turning Point: “the world is facing an unprecedented set of interlocking global problems, such as, over population, food shortages, non-renewable resource depletion, environmental degradation and poor governance.” It concluded: “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
The delusion in the computer program (used to obfuscate the errors), was the old one by Mathus: using an exponentially rising population but a more slowly rising rate of resources and food production! This was pointed out by Dr Allen Kneese and Dr Ronald Riker and reported in Newsweek, 13 March 1972, page 103.
Wartime style rationing would be ideal for our present recession and debt problems: we need to bring back rationing because consumer debt (not just national debt from Brown and Blair) is out of control, people are unhealthy, drinking too much alcohol and flooding the NHS with unnecessary drunk accident time-wasters making some genuinely sick people wait forever or even give up trying to get treatment. We need not prohibition, but rationing of alcohol consumption, tobacco consumption, food consumption, and expensive imported goods that increase our trade deficit and make us poorer. There should be no rationing of British made goods, apart from unhealthy foods and alcohol. This will boost the British economy because people will be encouraged to buy unrationed British-made goods more, not save up ten years of ration coupons to enable them to buy imported cars. Obviously, rationing needs to be accompanied by strict deterrence of ration coupon racketeering, e.g. by using computerised finger print ID systems to verify ration coupon ownership.
1. As aluded to by Ferguson, as a result of the Opium Wars more than anything else, 20th Century China was very anti-Western in outlook and certainly wouldn’t do anything becasue we told them too.
2. Neverthless, in 1972 they joined the UN and thus began the end of their isolationism.
3. My 1989, they had a whole raft of Environmental Legislation on the go (but only because they saw the need for it – not because we forced it on them).
4. By 2007, they had publicly admitted to their own people and the outside world that “development first, environment second” was no good.
5. China is now actively pursuing policies to mitigate pollution and climate change becuase it has calculated (by and for itself) that it will suffer if it does not. To repeat, as is evidenced by its brinkmanship within the UNFCCC process, China is not doing anything because we in the West want it to, it is acting purely in its own self interest.
It is time that the fossil fuel lobby stopped funding the “debate” over climate change; prefereably without being taken to court like the tobacco executives were over perpetuating the “debate” over whether smoking causes lung cancer for 50 years. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has been happening (w.r.t. AGW) for at least 30 years already…
However, returning to the Club of Rome, the subsequent reports produced by the Meadows et al team at the MIT have validated their World3 model; as do the recent hikes in food and fuel prices and political instability that we are now seeing. Indeed, as Meadows et al repeated most recently in Limits to Growth – the 30 year update, the world is indeed beginning to run out of the “ability to cope” with what we are doing to the planet (p.223). Therefore, we would do well to live within the Earth’s means (not just our own); and remember that, as Herman E. Daly once remarked, “the world may be developing; but it is not growing!“
Opinions may not change our livelihoods, but government policy is designed to.
Population is a drain on resources because the only thing it is good at is depleting and polluitng them (i.e. sources and sinks respectively). Oil production has already peaked; and one day it will run out. The same goes for all of the Earth’s other resources; including uranium for nuclear energy (especially if we continue only to use 2% of what what there is out there).
Martin, your “lebensraum crisis” and “oil crisis” are traditional reasons dictators give for ethnic cleansing and starting wars, yet this population crisis myth was popularized and endorsed by your beloved Monty Python, in their politically-correct, absurd attempted ridicule Catholic Theology (which, as a Catholic myself, I find disgusting). Of course fossil fuels are being depleted and becoming less economic as they are depleted. This naturally forces consumers away from burning fossil fuels, without any need for carbon credit schemes and increased taxes. This is being accelerated by the civil war in Libya, which is has pushed up the cost of crude to $110/barrel. Our government may soon have to face the fact they need to reduce petrol taxes, not increase them! In 1974, the Yom Kippur war between Israel and oil-producing Arab countries pushed oil prices up from $3 to $11/barrel, forcing the British government to cut speed limits to 50 mph to increase fuel efficiency. As oil prices rise, more and more people will end up buying electric hybrid cars, recharging at home, and only using petrol for long journeys or in emergencies when they run out of battery power. There is no need for political action to discourage oil consumption, it’s happening naturally! As for nuclear power, we have immense reserves of Th-232 and U-238, which can be converted into fissile U-233 and Pu-239 by neutron capture in reactors. U-233 and Pu-239 are ideal for very compact, high-efficiency nuclear power supplies. The only hold-up is widespread ignorance of the facts about radiation hormesis.
Let the record show that it is you that keeps referring to Nazi deology, not me. However, I note that you do not deny that perpetual growth within a closed system is impossible. Stephen Hawking’s solution is, of course, to suggest that within 200 years humanity will colonise space. However, I think the vast majority of planet Earth could be pretty unhospitable (if not uninhabitable) long before then… Therefore, although I do not think population growth is our biggest problem (because it is expected to stabilise at 150% of it current level within 50 years), I must confess that the Catholic Church has been – and remains – one of the biggest obstacles to getting under-developed countries out of their low death rate/high birth rate – perpetual poverty – trap. In the interim, since I am not a eugenics/one child policy/enforced sterilisation supporter, I am forced to pin all my hopes on the education of women; and the acceptance of contraception. Sorry about that.
The government cannot afford to permanently cut the cost of fuel. If they do anything it will only be a short-term attempt to prevent civil disorder. The cost of fuel must reflect the environmental damage it causes. That is why we must pursue alternative sources. In the interim, I agree that speed limits might well be on the cards again (or were you being sarcastic?).
The last time I heard of radiation hormesis, it was being put forward as a reason for not acting to control ozone depleting chemicals in the atmosphere. However, my point was that if we must have nuclear energy, it would make sense to use all the resources we have, which will eventually require the construction of commercial scale Fast Neutron Reactors that can run on Uranium-238 – and all the reprocessed fuel that is knocking about waiting to be stolen by terrorists – none of which can be used in thermal reactors. We already have a massive waste legacy to deal with, so, if we are going to bury it deep underground, we might as well “go large” (as even a small repository will be built entirely at taxpayers expense and cost tens of billions of pounds).
Can we end this “discussion” here please; as I really need to focus on preparatory stages of my MA dissertation entitled “A Discourse Analysis of Climate Change Scepticism” (whereas, being a mild OCD sufferer, I cannot seem to focus on it at the moment)…? I only mention this so that you will not be offended if – miracle of miracles – I suddenly stop replying (i.e. you have not been part of my research – that would have been unethical and devious).
The generation is evil begins with the moral ambiguity of “the ends justify the means”. As soon as you accept that in science, you’re on the road to hell, distorting data to fit a false theory. The pandering to eugenics pseudoscience in the 1930s by appeasers of the Nazi regime was “justified” in the name of preventing overpopulation, ensuring world peace, avoiding another war, etc. It was lies from beginning to end, encouraged racist aggressors, and caused disaster. Apart from eugenics, there was another big lie in science in the 1930s that was supposed to make the world safer. This was exaggeration of weapons effects.
The British Government before WWII started a scientific quango to predict what aerial bombardment would do, and they decided to exaggerate casualty rate data, leading to a prediction of a million casualties a month. (This is documented in great detail in T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence, United Kingdom Civil Series, History of the Second World War, HMSO, 1955.) Everyone believed these exaggerations, no questions asked. They believed because they wanted to believe that explosives, incendiaries, weather-dependent gas fallout, etc., would destroy London instantly. But it led Prime Minister Chamberlain to appease Hitler out of fear, encouraging his aggression, thus WWII.
When you look at the exaggerations, they’re pathetic. In after the first aerial bombing of Britain by airships and Gotha bombers in WWI, the British Government issued a “duck and cover” warming in July 1917 that dramatically cut casualty rates from flying glass to people standing behind windows, and from people being blown over by blast in the open. They ignored post-July 1917 bomb casualty data in the pre-WWII exaggerations.
The reason they got away with these lies, leading to appeasement of racist aggressors and thus an escalation of aggression followed by WWII, is the widespread belief that it was “safer not to take risks”. Everybody thought it a good idea to exaggerate the scientific facts in the name of peace, prosperity, health and safety. Few wanted to challenge the accuracy of the “scientific” assumptions of scare mongering lies, so even Winston Churchill’s eloquence was unable to sway public opinion in time to avert WWII.
The lying dogma of climate change, “justified” ultimately not by data by fashionable groupthink pseudo-ethics like weapons effects exaggerations “for peace” before WWII, needs to be debunked. Maybe you could do the debunking in your MA thesis, “A Discourse Analysis of Climate Change Scepticism”?
http://www.uscentrist.org/about/issues/environment/john_coleman/the-revelle-gore-story
Just so you grasp the meaning of the sentence above, here it is more plainly: just because oil companies may have funded some pseudoscience claiming to refute CO2 global warming, that does not mean that science-based criticisms of the mechanism and data are all tainted. Churchill was not a communist for collaborating with Stalin against Hitler. He needed all the help he could get. The same for Reagan’s “Rambo III”-style efforts against Soviet foreign policy in Afghanistan, using the Taliban.
Just because some of the oil companies have taken short-cuts in the past, this does not prove Al Gore correct. You’re just using a strawman argument, which ignores all the strong evidence I gave you (which debunks the data and the mechanism of CO2 warming).
“[Propaganda is] the art of simplification, constant recapitulation, appealing to the instinctive and the emotional and simply ignoring unpleasant facts.”
– Dr Joseph Goebbels.
I said I was not going to argue with you anymore; so I won’t.