Climate Deniers of the World, Unite!
You have nothing to lose but your freedom
Given how rigid the official orthodoxy is when it comes to the public health ‘crises’, the ‘climate emergency’ and the supposed moral defects of Western civilization, it’s no surprise that the slur words of choice today are “anti-vaxxer”, “racist”, “homophobe”, “Islamophobe”, “far right” and, not least, “climate denier”.
The “climate denier” epithet is used to shut down rational debate on climate change with specious claims about “settled science”. As the physicist Steve Koonin says: “I find it particularly abhorrent to have a call for open scientific discussion [on climate change] equated with Holocaust denial, especially since the Nazis killed more than two hundred of my relatives in Eastern Europe.”
The scurrilous epithet resurfaced last week in an article in the Guardian entitled – cue shock, horror – “Climate change deniers make up nearly a quarter of U.S. Congress.”
How much longer will this heresy be tolerated?
In an interview on GB News with Andrew Doyle, British environmentalist Jim Dale demanded the criminalisation of climate denialism. He said that “climate deniers” are “dangerous” for society and their scepticism about Net Zero “pollutes the discourse”. Mr. Dale demurred in spelling out just exactly what sanctions should be applied to “illegal” opinions about climate change, stating that it would be up to politicians like Sir Keir Starmer.
That interview took place three months ago, and Starmer is now Prime Minister. Having moved from his previous role as the Director of Public Prosecutions to Parliament and then to the highest political office in the U.K., his response to last week’s riots has been to push for quick and harsh sentences, threatening freedom of speech.
Sky News reported on Thursday that a woman was arrested over a social media post on the Southport stabbing attack that killed three little girls and injured several others. Evidently, her media post was considered “dangerous” as she publicly shared a mistaken description of the perpetrator of the Southport killings. The question of her intentions did not seem to be an issue in that arrest, although she still hasn’t been charged.
The U.S. Supreme Court holds that the legal threshold from protected to unprotected speech is crossed when the words in question are “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and they’re “likely to incite or produce such action”. Both those tests have to be met for the words to lose their protected status under the First Amendment, something known as the Brandenburg test. In the U.K., the land of the Magna Carta, recent court cases suggest that no such test is necessary for criminal conviction for “stirring up violence” online or indeed even for believing in “forms of toxic ideology which has [sic] the potential to threaten public safety and security”. The blurring of the line between “criminal thought” and criminal conduct is a sad reflection of jurisprudence in the U.K.
One day before the arrest of the woman who posted inaccurate information about the Southport killer, the Director of Public Prosecutions in England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson, warned: “We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media to look for this material, and then follow up with arrests… You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false.” UK Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told a reporter in response to a question about Elon Musk supposedly “whipping up hatred” on X: “Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law.”
The purpose of blaming the riots on social media, of course, is that it deflects from the real issue: a great many Britons disapprove of the government’s complicity in the scale of the mass immigration of the past two decades. That ‘thoughtcrime’ has fueled the riots in the country is reflected in the deluge of mainstream media headlines singing from the same hymn sheet:
Reuters: “Misinformation fuels riots”
BBC News: “Social media misinformation ‘fanned riot flames’ in North East”
CNBC: “Online disinformation sparked a wave of far-right violence”
Sky News: “Southport attack misinformation fuels far-right discourse on social media”
CNN: “U.K. riots show how social media can fuel real-life harm. It’s only getting worse”
Time: “Misinformation Stoked Anti-Migrant Riots”
In an Orwellian world where the carrying of machetes on the streets of British cities may more easily escape prosecution than the “far right thuggery” of “keyboard warriors”, Mr. Dale’s wish to criminalise “misinformation” about climate change may come true.
Dis- or misinformation is whatever the state says it is. The moral crusade is the war over disinformation with little discussion of underlying policy issues. Policy choices supportive of a Net Zero fossil fuel-free electric grid by 2030 are non-partisan “givens” – with little debate in or out of parliament – as the Covid lockdowns were when they were imposed. Thus it is no surprise that the Counter Disinformation Unit which targeted dissent during Covid has been rebooted by the Starmer government as the National Security Online Information Team to monitor social media in the wake of the riots.
Will the reborn secretive Covid-era spy agency start ‘flagging’ social media posts that question Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State at the oxymoronically named Department of Energy Security and Net Zero? Never mind that a fossil fuel-free electricity grid in Britain by 2030 – the interim goal enroute to a fully Net Zero Britain by 2050 – “is as likely as the second coming of Christ”, as David Starkey said in a recent interview.
Removal of climate contrarian posts on social media will be one thing. But will it eventually become a prosecutable offense in the UK to point out the tension between Net Zero and energy security, or to assert that Net Zero policy targets constitute an onslaught on people’s standards of living and a denial of reality? Will some future Britain sport an unelected Climate Change Committee sitting in judgement, Star Chambers-like, over climate deniers that congregate in secretive forums at 55 Tufton Street, that bastion of libertarian and right wing organizations?
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/08/13/climate-deniers-of-the-world-unite/
***************************************New UK government bets on green energy. Companies are wary
As Britain’s oil and gas giants scale back their global green-energy ambitions, the UK’s newly elected government is launching a multibillion-dollar effort to regain the country’s place as a global pacesetter for clean energy.
A new state-backed company, funded by increased taxes on oil and gas production, will invest in many renewable-energy projects around the country. Industry executives are split on whether the plan can meet the government’s ambitious goals.
Great British Energy has about GBP8.3bn, or around $US11bn, to invest in renewable projects over the next five years. Its mandate is to speed up the adoption of green energy to help the government hit its target of decarbonising the electricity grid by 2030.
That would require an enormous build-out of renewables across Britain. More than double the existing capacity of onshore wind, triple the solar power and nearly quadruple the offshore wind would be needed to hit the target, according to consulting firm Oxford Economics.
Britain’s dependence on energy imports has left it vulnerable to supply shocks in recent years. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to a surge in prices, it prompted calls in the UK for the country to wean itself off foreign supplies, including by accelerating its green-energy plans. Britain generated 46 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources last year, government figures show.
“In an unstable world, the only way to guarantee our energy security and protect bill payers … is to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels and towards homegrown clean energy,” UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said in a July statement that set out GB Energy’s plans.
UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has advocated a speedier shift toward homegrown clean energy.Picture: James Glossop/Getty Images
UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has advocated a speedier shift toward homegrown clean energy.Picture: James Glossop/Getty Images
Since taking office, the new Labour government has ended a longstanding de facto ban on onshore wind power in England, approved the construction of three new solar farms and raised the amount of subsidies available for renewable energy this year by more than 50 per cent to a record GBP1.5bn.
Meanwhile, some companies are pulling in the opposite direction. Under pressure from shareholders, London-based oil giants BP and Shell have dialled back their green transition plans to maintain the typically higher returns that come from oil and gas production and trading.
In June, BP scaled back its plans for biofuels production in the U.S. and Germany. In July, Shell said it would pause construction work at a Dutch biofuels plant, casting doubt on the future of a facility the company had said would be one of Europe’s largest, churning out sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel.
Executives of both companies have said they would continue to invest in low-carbon energy, but will steer away from capital-intensive projects that lack a clear path to the kind of profits that investors have come to expect from oil and gas.
Oil-industry executives have also voiced scepticism about Britain’s energy plans, which include increasing and extending a so-called windfall tax on oil and gas production to fund GB Energy. Companies have criticised the UK’s shifting tax regime, saying it hinders their ability to forecast returns on long-term investments.
“However this is played, the stability is key. More changes at the goalposts just undermines the element of stability that we would advocate for,” Shell chief executive Wael Sawan said in a recent interview.
Renewable-energy executives say they are hopeful that the government’s plan can help accelerate funding for low-carbon projects, the way the US Inflation Reduction Act spurred investment in renewable-power plants and battery production. Much of the incentive driving IRA-related spending comes from tax credits.
In Britain, direct government investment in low-carbon projects should reduce risks for investors and pull in more funds, proponents say. “We’ve already seen interest from discussions we’ve had with some of our investors,” said Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, a London-based renewable-power provider.
GB Energy’s first move was a deal with the Crown Estate, an entity that oversees most of the seabed around Britain’s coastline, to undertake early development work for offshore wind projects.
Efforts to reduce planning timelines for projects might be “a bit boring and gnarly,” but they are key to getting major renewable developments online, said Alistair Phillips-Davies, CEO of British power generator SSE.
For instance, a proposal to expand what SSE says will eventually be the world’s largest offshore wind farm has been held up over the past three years by snags in the permitting process. SSE is currently leading the development of the project in the North Sea.
While state-owned energy companies are relatively common in Europe, Britain already has a growing, well-funded renewables sector.
The UK has long had levers to stimulate funding in renewables, including a mechanism that offers companies a guaranteed rate for electricity, said Rob Gross, director of the UK Energy Research Centre, an independent institute that receives government funding. That mechanism is widely credited for propelling Britain’s offshore wind market to the second-largest in the world.
Renewable markets such as offshore wind and solar already have plentiful funding as well, said Michael Liebreich, CEO of consulting firm Liebreich Associates. GB Energy could be better utilised if it narrowed its focus on nascent technologies such as long-duration battery storage and floating offshore wind to signal the government’s commitment to those markets, he added.
Another concern is that GB Energy’s cash pile is too small to tackle the costly challenge of connecting green-energy projects to the UK’s electricity grid. More than 700 gigawatts of renewable projects are waiting for a connection, according to the UK energy regulator, around 12 times what the country currently has in renewable capacity.
The UK grid was initially built to deliver power from coal-fired plants to cities and industry. To hit the government’s green-power target, some 2,500 miles of new and upgraded transmission lines would be needed, according to data provider Aurora Energy Research. That would cost several times GB Energy’s budget.
Meanwhile, proponents of continued oil and gas drilling warn against potential new limits to production in the North Sea. The Labour Party had pledged in its election campaign to end new drilling licenses there, though it is yet to confirm its plans. The UK still sources around half its gas from the region.
“Their manifesto says oil and gas production in the North Sea will be with us for decades to come, so we’ll be reminding of that,” BP CEO Murray Auchincloss said.
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Dumb Head Girl Eco-Activist Explains How Best to Deal With Your “Climate Feelings” in Perhaps the Stupidest Climate Change Essay of all Time
Many valued readers advised against wading more deeply into Unlearn CO2, that doubtful and ridiculous tome of climate lunacy that first came to my notice a week-and-a-half ago. Why should we waste our attention on the ravings of crazy people, they asked? Surely, our time is better spent pondering what the well-informed, the measured and the mature have to say.
I understand the objection, but I must reluctantly disagree. Climatism is a political programme bound to a broad social movement. Most of its momentum comes not from The Science or The Experts, but from diffuse cultural forces that we should probably try to understand, if only because they are driving our entire civilisation straight into the ground. Against all advice, I will therefore steer the plague chronicle into this ridiculous quagmire of leftoid green babble, with a look at our first lesson in Unlearnings, namely ‘Unlearn Repression’.
This superficial and disorganised essay is the work of an infuriating young woman named Katharina van Bronswijk. She’s a psychotherapist best known for her 2022 book, Climate in Our Heads. Fear, Anger, Hope: What the Ecological Crisis is Doing to Us. It belongs to that genre of inevitably unreadable monographs in which the author herself appears on the cover, looking windswept, pioneering and undaunted:
“Climate feelings” are van Bronswijk’s niche in the extremely crowded enterprise of CO2-bothering. In ‘Unlearn Repression’ she argues that we should not suppress our negative feelings about climate change, but rather embrace them in constructive ways on behalf of the planet.
Now, van Bronswijk is the kind of deeply unoriginal person who just says the same things over and over. Everything she writes in ‘Unlearn Repression’ flows directly from Climate in our Heads; she’s been digesting, reheating and reworking this same overboiled intellectual artichoke for almost two years now, through various media interviews and even in this English-language TEDx Talk. Throughout this woman’s work is the vague anxiety that the climatists have perhaps overdone it with doom and gloom, and that a lot of people have had enough of hearing about a climate apocalypse that never quite happens.
Van Bronswijk is naturally very dumb, but more than that she is painfully condescending, oblivious, verbose and just awash in litres of estrogen. I defy anyone to read her work and not come away from it a raging misogynist. This odious overpromoted schoolmarm belongs out of sight in a childcare centre teaching young children the alphabet. Perhaps she should also be in a choir, or part of a local environmental club dedicated to collecting litter in parks. That our society has denied van Bronswijk and so many others like her these proper outlets for their instincts and instead pushed them into public activism and intellectual production itself explains a great deal of what is wrong with the world.
‘Unlearn Repression’ opens with some autobiographical details, because of course everything van Bronswijk talks about is all about van Bronswijk. Like so many Germans of her generation, she was radicalised by school climate propaganda – specifically, by her teacher’s fateful screening of that classic propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth:
Back then… I was happy for the welcome distraction of watching a film instead of doing normal lessons. But afterwards I was shocked and asked my mum for answers to all the questions and challenges. She didn’t have any solutions for me, how could she? I was alarmed and started to think about the impending consequences of climate change and what could be done about it. I found approaches in newsletters from NGOs and by reading up on animal and environmental protection… That was when my dream bubble burst and I realised: the world is unfair and, unlike all the Disney stories of my childhood, there will be no single heroine who saves the world. And there is no magical or technical miracle solution either.
Al Gore’s film so terrified the young van Bronswijk, that for a while she retreated into conspiratorial theories about why climate change is not happening, which qualifies our crayon psychotherapist to pronounce upon the psychology of those who deny the climate. This deeply evil and irrational movement is driven primarily by “white men” because they “still enjoy most of the privileges in our society, and therefore have the most to lose”.
The necessary change in our way of life and the upheavals of recent decades are threatening these privileges. We’re questioning the role of “men”, we’re questioning social narratives of superiority through gender, through academic attainment, through professional success, through the burning of fossil fuels… through the over-consumption of luxury goods. This is understandably unsettling and can trigger feelings ranging from anger to a sense of threat… for those who will have to give up their privileges in the future.
We are only on the third page of this abomination and already van Bronswijk is laying bare her ulterior motives. At first, she thought climate change was terrifying and she sought after reasons to doubt it was happening, but then she realised it was just great for sticking it to old white men, and so once again she was fully on board. Before even mentioning one single, concrete negative consequence of carbon emissions, van Bronswijk is deploring male “privilege,” and those advantages of the wealthy and the well-educated that climatism must sooner or later spell the end of. All of these villains will have to give up their “fancy cars”, they will have to go without their precious “status symbols” and those things they “consider especially masculine”. It is the standard, shopworn ressentiment of leftism in general, presenting merely a different matrix of justification.
This is a political programme that naturally inspires anger in people, and in this way we come to our first Climate Emotion. Sometimes, van Bronswijk writes, “our biographical background means that we tend to repress certain emotions and overcompensate with others”. Those “angry citizens” (“Wutbürger”) who vote for AfD are in fact dealing with feelings of “fear” or “insecurity”, which they repress by expressing “Anger at the Greens, at people who eat a vegan diet, who live in big cities, who are young, who have a refugee background, and so on and so forth”.
While this airtight pop-psychological analysis shows that the anger of the climate denialists is illegitimate, there is another kind of anger that we must embrace, if reluctantly. This is Climate Anger:
Climate anger makes us aware of the injustices of the world out there and our own limitations. For many, fairness and justice are extremely important values – and when there is a lack of inter-generational, social or global justice, this makes many people angry. A large part of the local population sees climate change as a threat and also the need for a transformation of our lives, and many want this transformation to be fair.
The problem, as van Bronswijk sees it, is that nobody can agree on what amounts to “fairness”, which opens “a great potential for conflict…. if people can’t regulate their anger and channel it constructively”. A lot of leftists really, really love anger; Antifa are some of the most murderously enraged people I’ve ever encountered. Alas, van Bronswijk’s schoolmarmery warns her against this more entertaining approach. She would prefer to “regulate our anger” and use it as a motivation to “sign up for projects in social justice, go to protests and support petitions”. That’s right, you might be angry that the earth is melting before your eyes, but the best thing to do about that is to self-soothe by… attending Friday lunch hour demonstrations, volunteering and signing things. It’s at least some comfort that if the climatists are ever out of power, their crack schoolmarm brigades will fight rearguard actions in favour of destroying the economy and our lives in the most tepid and ineffectual ways imaginable.
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Bumper crop of stories of BBC climate bias
Net Zero Watch has just published its annual review of the state of the BBC’s climate reporting. The author, climate and energy writer Paul Homewood, has had plenty of material to choose from, and his paper outlines more than 30 of the most egregious misrepresentations of the facts, with climate change spuriously blamed for everything from hot weather in Spain, sighting of rare bird species in England, to potholes in the roads.
Paul Homewood said:
The BBC produces so many ludicrous climate stories, the only difficulty is deciding what to leave out of the report.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
If the BBC wants to reverse the ongoing decline in its audience share, and the decline in its reputation as a reliable news source, it is going to have to start taking climate and energy seriously. Employing correspondents who are fanatical environmentalists, and then giving them a free hand, leads to coverage that is superficial at best and misleading at worst. Paul Homewood’s report shows just how bad things have become.
Tall Climate Tales from the BBC, 2023 can be downloaded from the Net Zero Watch website.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/campaigns/view-email/fVNtrUH0XuW0nNL3M_BYEwRYVPEMGN1ztR-EZEPNdogjlHOagY89WEAk8q-UN-NgKs5ppHc4pzRjZLxWcSsBtAk21bk1-wWQB9-z_vY4yYOO5haJZhpVY-9tmeQHJ28YkYkZX9EZa-q9GGKBgTDaiXmaT8Hh0yqxYKki_w== ?
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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