Starvation and the Wicked Globalists

This winter, tens of millions of British citizens, including children, will be tipped or dumped into energy poverty severe enough to risk permanent damage to their health. Cold, damp houses provide the perfect breeding ground for mold that not only causes respiratory distress but renders houses essentially unlivable once established. One left-leaning newspaper ran the story outlining the danger, but without a word about why this crisis has emerged—because the woke moralizers of the environmental movement helped create it.

Compassion, callow self-aggrandizing incompetent politicians, celebrity lackeys, and Machiavellian journalists have insisted ever more loudly over the last five decades that no cost was, and is, too great for others to bear in the pursuit of blind service to the planet. It is irresistibly tempting at the moment for those on that bandwagon to single out and demonize Vladimir Putin for Europe's energy woes, but his current machinations were utterly enabled by the green ideologues.

Anyone with eyes could see a decade ago that the idiot insistence that Europe make itself reliant on Russia for its energy security made the current situation inevitable. Remember when President Donald Trump, populist Menace Numero Uno, was mocked and derided by the intellectual and political elite in Europe and North America for trumpeting precisely that warning? Well, now the chickens have truly come home to roost, but very little has yet been learned in consequence. Virtue signaling utopians committed to globalization claim we are destroying the planet with cheap energy, but are they truly and deeply committed to the environmental sustainability so loudly and insistently demanded, or are they merely hell-bent in the prototypically Marxist manner of taking revenge on capitalism?

It appears to be the latter. Why otherwise would the mavens of the environmental movement oppose nuclear power, despite its optimal carbon footprint? Why would they demonize the exceptionally clean natural gas, whose fracking-enabled production has allowed the U.S. to dramatically cut the very carbon output that is so hypothetically undesirable? Utility bills have soared in the UK, the home of the Industrial Revolution that lifted the world out of poverty. Now, up to half of small businesses in Britain face the risk of bankruptcy and closure.

The government has had to announce a ruinously expensive energy price guarantee to mitigate the worst effects of this disaster. The rush to renewables—the mentality among the eco-extremists—is as follows: if we have to doom the poor to destroy the system that made the rich, so be it; you just can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Here are some facts to remember: While we so madly and ineffectively rush to renewables, the International Energy Agency recently indicated that two decades of intense support for such undertakings has hiked the proportion of energy provided by such means from 13 to 14 percent to an utterly underwhelming 15.7 percent.

If all governments deliver on their current climate policies, the world will derive no more than 28 percent of its energy that way by 2050, and a hundred percent by 2207—not 2030 or 2035, but 200 years later. Does anyone on the liberal left accept such projections, or are they a mere fabrication of the conspiratorial right-wing conservative imagination? How about the Biden Administration? Biden's experts, no doubt motivated to be as optimistic as possible, project that a mere 27 percent of the energy produced by 2050 will be carbon dioxide-free, and that full CO2 eradication cannot possibly occur until 2242—an even more dismal guesstimation if you regard such realities as dismal.

Then, the tyrannical and emergency-justified panicked crunch is not just happening in the UK. In Spain, officials now dictate that commercial properties must not be heated above 17 degrees Celsius or cooled below 27 degrees Celsius upon pain of law. In Switzerland, similar punishments are being considered as part of a proposed four-step plan for dealing with a gas shortage, which "cannot be ruled out this winter" given the geopolitical situation. The citizens of Germany likewise are now in phase two of a three-stage emergency plan following a reduction in gas flows from Russia, its main supplier. The plan involves bringing coal-fired plants onto the market, according to German Minister Robert Habeck, despite them being "simply poisoned for the climate," and the potential of gas rationing for industrial companies, so that supplies to homes and schools, etc., are not disrupted.

The extended plan involves curtailing the Christmas lighting that constitutes part of the celebration in the midst of the winter darkness in many locations where they generally shine. Nothing either beautiful or pleasing is acceptable in the least to the grinches, and the Grinch was, in fact, green. When confronted by the crisis they created, remember when the aristocracy catches cold; the peasants die of pneumonia. If such extreme measures have become necessary in the richest countries, what in God's name is going to happen in the poorer ones when the shortages strike? The poor will inevitably and necessarily turn to less green resources. Many, even in Germany, are already stockpiling firewood and coal for the winter, leading to acute shortages.

How is incentivizing people to cut down and burn trees and use coal in their fireplaces going to help reduce the dreaded atmospheric carbon load? The actual poor versus the hypothetical poor. Perhaps we'll be able to comfort ourselves here in the West with the thought that the food we take for granted will still be available at our tables. But wait, the crops that nourish our populations cannot be grown without fertilizer—loathed by green folk—and more specifically without ammonia. And what pray tell is ammonia derived from? Could it be natural gas? How many people are dependent on the industrial generation and consequent wide availability of ammonia? Only three or four billion.

What happens to the continuous production plants responsible for making ammonia if the natural gas supplies are halted, even momentarily? They destroy themselves, as they were not designed for such an unlikely event, and they cannot be restarted. The World Bank itself has recently indicated that 222 million people are already experiencing the threat of starvation, described oh so nicely as food insecurity. The communists managed to kill a hundred million in the last century with their utopian delusions. We've barely begun to implement the Save the Planet nightmare, and we've already placed twice that number at risk.

We are told an emergency confronts us: the climate crisis. The solution? The masses will have to tighten their belts to forestall an even worse future catastrophe. The elite academics, think tanks, corporate consultants, and the politicians who subsidize their intellectual pretensions will not be particularly affected by such tightening, privileged as they are. But the actual poor, to such an elite, they must be sacrificed now to save tomorrow's hypothetical poor. And 222 million people is no doubt an underestimate. As the food insecurity gets more severe, more countries will place restrictions on food exports that will harm the international supply lines we all depend on.

Then, when the consequences of that manifest themselves, increasingly desperate politicians will begin to nationalize and centralize food distribution, as the French and Germans have already done on the energy front, and cut their farmers off at the knees, who will in turn stop growing food—not out of spite, but because of dire economic impossibility. Then we will have engendered the kind of feedback loop that can really spiral out of control. It will be poor people who die first. At least, but as we all have been taught by the malevolent eco-moralizers, the planet has too many people on it anyway.

Think about this well— you shiver all too soon in your cold, damp, and increasingly expensive and now substandard lodgings. You and your family may well have been deemed an expendable excess. Food for thought: this is simply not acceptable. If you dare to claim the moral high ground while serving the cause of starvation, then by my reckoning you've placed yourself firmly in the enemy camp, and you richly deserve whatever is coming your way.

In the psychological and educational arenas too, we demoralize young people, feeding them a constant diet of concretized apocalypse. We're focusing particularly on tempering or even obliviating the laudable ambition of boys, hectoring them into believing that their virtue is nothing but the force that oppresses the innocent and despoils the virginal planet. And if that doesn't work—and it does—then there's always the castration awaiting the gender dysphoric. And you oppose such initiatives at substantial personal risk.

But we can reassure ourselves with the fact that a beneficent government is going to set up warm spots in public libraries and museums this winter so that freezing, starving old people can huddle together to keep warm while their grandchildren cough up their lungs in their frigid, damp, and moldy flats. In such circumstances, in the face of such mandatory privations and manipulations, it's obvious that the last thing our tyrannical, idiot, panicked, virtue-signaling government should be doing is directing their demented attention toward regulating what people serve at their tables.

But because meat has also been deemed yet something else that is destroying the planet, the woke narcissists of compassion are already insisting that people eat less of it—plants and bugs for you and your children, peasants, and the sooner you get accustomed to it or else, the better. Let's turn our attention to the claim that animal husbandry and the meat it produces cheaply enough for everyone to afford is unsustainable for a moment, because we haven't yet dispensed with enough moralizing and authoritarian stupidity.

Remember what happened the last time the government agencies applied their tender mercy to determining what the people they serve should consume? We were offered the much-vaunted food pyramid, telling us to eat 6 to 11 servings of grains and carbohydrates a day with protein and fat at the pinnacle—something to be indulged in with comparative rarity, if indeed necessary at all. That all turned out to be wrong, and not just a little wrong, but so wrong that it might as well have been not just wrong but a veritable anti-truth—something as wrong as it could possibly get.

The food pyramid was brought into being, not least by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, that is, by marketers, not scientists or nutritionists, with no shortage whatsoever of lobby efforts by those whose products ended up being promoted. The dietary recommendation to prioritize carbohydrates produced a veritable epidemic of obesity and diabetes, resulting in what has been deemed by reliable researchers as one of the worst public health disasters of all time.

Doing almost the entire Western population to a lifetime of catastrophic chronic health problems, 42 percent of Americans are obese; another almost equally large percentage are overweight. At least a third are in the early or later stages of diabetes, which is an exceptionally serious disease. 1.7 trillion dollars is spent annually on chronic illness in the U.S., and the rise in such illness and cost is directly associated with the beginning of the godforsaken top-down dietary guidelines that set us all on a carbohydrate-heavy dietary pathway.

There have been, in addition, dozens of studies debunking the claim that red meat causes disease. The PURE study, P-U-R-E, published in the journal "Lanset" in 2017, analyzing 140,000 individuals from 18 countries, revealed that "higher carbohydrate intake, not meat and fat," was associated with an increased risk of total mortality and that "higher saturated fat intake was associated with lower risk of stroke." Lower, that is, exactly the opposite of what we have been told by the beneficial centralizing agents who tasked themselves with determining what we, as sovereign and responsible individuals, should put in our mouths.

So, the health benefits of a pure vegetarian and vegan diet are dubious at best. But what of the argument that animal husbandry is killing the planet? Well, the American Environmental Protection Agency estimates that all farming produces only 11 percent of greenhouse gases in the U.S. Transportation produces 27 percent, livestock accounts for 3 percent, and plant-based agriculture, 5 percent. According to the National Academy of Sciences, if we eradicated all animal-based agriculture, we'd reduce greenhouse gases by a mere 2.6 percent.

And it is no simple matter, by the way, and perhaps impossible to manage a diet that is sustainable in the medium to long term by merely dining on plants. Chew on that. Exodus—the pathway forward. What might we do instead? If we chose to be genuinely wise, instead of inflicting want and privation upon the world's poor while failing utterly and disastrously to save the planet, we could begin by assuming here in the West that all those frightened into paralysis and enticed into tyranny by their apprehension of the pending apocalypse have bitten off more than they can properly chew.

Have taken on a dragon much more fire-breathing and dire than they are heroic. Have failed entirely to contend with the moral hazard that comes in assuming that the faddish emergency of their overheated imaginations entitles them to the use of power and compulsion. If your apprehension of the looming catastrophe, whatever its form, has made you into a terrified authoritarian willing to frighten and compel to get your way, you are simply not the right leader for the times.

As the unconscious manifestations of your own nervous system tell you that you are just too small for the job at hand are clearly indicating even to you, we could begin by dropping our appalling attitude of moral superiority toward the developing world. We could admit instead that the rest of the planet's inhabitants have the right and the responsibility to move toward the abundant material life that we have enjoyed, despite ourselves, for the last century, and which has been so entirely dependent on industrial activity and fossil fuel usage.

We could work diligently and with purpose to drive energy and food prices down to the lowest level possible, so that we can ease the burden on the poor and open up the horizons of possibility so that they become concerned, as they inevitably and properly will, with long-term sustainability instead of acting desperately and destructively in pursuit of their next meal. We could concentrate on an intelligent plan of stewardship instead of anti-human environmentalism, along the lines of the plans outlined by multifaceted and diligent experts such as Dr. Bjorn Lomborg.

He pointed out years ago that we have a multitude of crises facing us and not just one—the hypothetically apocalyptic danger of carbon—and that we could spend the money we are wasting killing poor people in a much more intelligent and judicious manner. Devoting some resources, for example, to ensuring a stable food supply to poor children in the developing world, treating malaria—something we can do and cheaply—and delivering fresh water where it is truly needed.

We could, as well, work out the details of a truly sustainable agriculture with the most expert farmers to improve the quality of our soil and the air and provide everyone with enough high-quality food, which will most definitely involve animal-based agriculture. We could bring a halt to the presumption that the state should extend itself by dent of its hypothetical moral superiority to the governance of how we heat our houses and feed and provision our own families.

We could finally delegate authority to the most local possible levels, following the principle of subsidiarity, and produce a hierarchy of responsibility that extends necessary purpose to everyone individually at the family, community, and state level. That serves as a necessary bulwark against the blind, luciferian, prideful, intellect-based top-down tyrannies of emergency and compulsion that will otherwise necessarily reign.

We could work out our concerns with sustainability through consensus and in the spirit of voluntary association and free play instead of relying on top-down edicts justified in principle by our misplaced existential terror and carrying with them the moral hazard of the accrual of unjustified and dangerous centralized authority. We could distribute to everyone their requisite responsibility as sovereign actors and could bring them on board with the power of a common vision—one of life more abundant, enough high-quality food for everyone, enough energy so that slavery becomes a thing of the past, enough purpose so that nihilism and decadence no longer beckon, enough reciprocity so that we live in true peace, the generous provision of education and opportunity to everyone in the world.

The conviction—to say it again—that policy based on compulsion is misguided and counterproductive. We could thereby have our cake and eat it too, and so could everyone else. And we could work toward that in a mutual spirit of productive generosity and fair play, in competition and cooperation. Or we could let the world go to hell in a handbasket, blame that disintegration on the very enemies we specified as causal in the first place—those damned capitalists—and fail to clean up our own souls as we persecute the imaginary wrongdoers responsible for the destruction of our planet.

Identifying the real danger has, as the psychologist Carl Jung said in the aftermath of the Nazi atrocities and the use of nuclear weapons, "It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is mankind's greatest danger." For the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. That great man knew the technological man had a stark choice in front of him: to become as ethical as he had become powerful, and that a real hell awaited if we refused the challenge.

The rate of change is accelerating. Our ability to do almost everything is doubling faster and faster as our ability to communicate and to compute accelerates. The consequences of our inner disunity and insufficiency become ever more serious as we become individually more powerful. In other words, we must take on more responsibility; or else, if we fail to rectify our personal pathologies of pride, envy, and the willingness to lie, we will find ourselves mired in conflict with the world—both natural and social—and in precise proportion to our refusal to check the devil within.

So we have a stark choice in front of us. We can reorient ourselves to the cause of truth, or we can act out the conflict, imposing ourselves, serving instrumental delusions on the world, bringing about in that manner an external apocalypse that will result in precisely the same judgment. And so, in conclusion, it's time for all of us, but especially the self-righteous moralizers, to get our individual acts together, to take on some real moral responsibility instead of falsely broadcasting unearned virtue far and wide and so cheaply and carelessly.