Freezing Texas should commission a monument: Greta Thunberg and Bill Gates save the Texans from global warming by turning them into icicles. So much for global warming, the reddest herring ever caught in the Gulf of Mexico!
The Texans have got the real New Green Deal, very expensive and uncertain. The deal is “Freeze and pay through your nose!” The green alternative pure cheap and plentiful energy is the stuff the dreams of AOC are made of. It is not likely to work out. Wind and sea are wonderful but hardly a reliable source of energy for heating in sub-zero temperatures.
The destruction of the oil, gas and coal industries (as preached by the Global Warmers) would definitely kill a lot of people, many more than its normal exploitation. The spell of frost in Texas would cause only small discomfort if the local providers weren’t threatened with extinction and unwilling to work on the gas-oil-coal infrastructure. They aren’t likely to invest if warned that this work will soon become obsolete, to be replaced with wind turbines and solar energy. Just compare the poor condition of Texas with that of Russia, where temperatures below -30 Centigrade (-22 F) cause no discomfort to citizens, because the Russians aren’t shy of using gas and oil on top of nuclear power.
If I were a conspiracist, I’d accuse the Biden administration of meddling and intentionally freezing the Trumpist Texans. I’d do it anyway as revenge for them blaming the corona crisis on Trump. Washington definitely didn’t try to force Texan energy suppliers to provide much needed heat for the Republican-dominated state. But Bidenists’ main crime is their declared adherence to the green projects, based on their irrational belief in the Global Warming myth.
The Warmers have dropped the term altogether. Indeed, the term “global warming” didn’t survive the impact of reality. You can’t convince a freezing man it’s too warm or frighten him that it will be warmer. So the Warmers would speak of “climate”. Climate is a playful creature; it plays havoc with weather. For sure. We should forget the very words “global warming”, as if they were never spoken; it’s Climate now.
Fine, let the Climate be! All through our long history as a species, we have lived in a constantly changing climate. We can’t do anything about it, for good and for bad, just dress according to the season. I am not afraid the Warmers will change the climate. Manmade pollution is a piss in the sea, and manmade efforts to change the climate are equally futile. But for sure they can make us miserable before making a dent on the climate.
Even the direction of the climate drift is not certain. The Warmers (like Greta) say our planet is warming up because of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by mankind. Many experts say the planet is actually enters the new Ice Age due to diminished solar activity (here), connecting it to Maunder Minimum or Gleissberg Minimum. In Israel, a popular expert Chaim Noll says the real problem is desertification, while CO2 is good for plants and prevents semi-arid areas turning into desert. Still others say the changes are perfectly normal; we have been through such changes before.
We really do not know for sure what’s going on and whether we can or should do anything about it. And now, at the time of the great freeze, Bill Gates has temerity to publish his Warmer’s Manifesto, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. The book was heavily promoted, and got fawning reviews, though it is as silly as any of these books. Gates wants us to stop travelling (unless you can afford a private jet, of the kind Gates has invested in), stop eating meat (worms should be good enough for the hoi polloi, or synthetic meat produced by the same Gates, for cows fart, and farting is warming the planet). Knowing his and his ilk’s ability to mobilise the media, I wouldn’t be amazed if he succeeds in convincing the West. And any disaster in meat-producing Texas would be grist to Gates’ mill.
Besides being silly, this guy knows too much! In 2015, Gates gave a “prescient warning about the threat of a pandemic”, says a reviewer. To what extent was it “prescient” if in the same 2015, Gates patented a coronavirus quite similar to the one that attacked mankind in 2020? Perhaps he is prescient “for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires”, as Ron Unz remarked.
The fact-checking site ‘corrects’ me:
Fine, so he had five years to bring his “weakened version” to full strength!
Now he promotes plans that would make our world uninhabitable. Blotting out the sun is one of his great ideas. Gates wants to spread some metallic powder in the air so the world will enter eternal darkness. No farting cows, no Covid-spreading beaches: a cold world, all too similar to Texas at this moment is our future if we do not stop these bastards.
I have a simple clear-cut proof that Warmers do not even believe in the nonsense they utter. (Some, like young Greta, do not understand what they say.) They speak of farting cows, but they never mention the biggest farting cow: the US Military, which is bigger than all the armies and fleets of the world put together and has the biggest carbon footprint on earth. Greta and Gates never called for its cutting down to size, let alone dismantling, though in the prism of their logic all Americans should be able to eat juicy steaks and drive gas-guzzlers for a hundred years just by scrapping their Juggernaut.
Their ideas are bonkers. In order to switch to electric cars, we would need to destroy Africa and Latin America, to get the rare earth elements (like lithium) for the batteries. Africans and Latin Americans from devastated lands would be forced to move to Europe and the US, a win-win for tycoons, but lose-lose for the people. The problem is with very rich folk, I wrote in my recent piece. They want to reshape humans, planet Earth, our future. Why? Because they can. Or they think they can.
Grandiose plans are a real danger, because now people can do more than they can calculate the consequences of. Like Hecatoncheires, mankind has more brawn than brain. People want to act like gods without having god’s intelligence. The Soviets (inspired by Marx who preferred titans to Olympic gods) made a lot of these mistakes. They dammed the rivers, destroying thousands of villages with their rich culture, and created manmade shallow seas, a breeding ground for mosquitos. The dams became obsolete quite fast; but there was no way to reverse the project: the lands were already ruined. Some of the biggest Soviet projects achieved by huge efforts of the people were handed over by Yeltsin to his pet oligarchs, and their huge yachts are the only tangible results of these efforts. Until now, the Russians could only feel happy that the greatest of all Soviet projects, turning Siberian rivers to flow southwards into Central Asia, was mercifully derailed by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Zionists, these bastard brothers of the Russian Bolsheviks, also had big plans. They decided to dry the swamp above the Sea of Galilee, and they did it. But in doing so, they destroyed the soil, and eventually were forced to restore the swamp (Lake Hula), with very unsatisfactory results.
Their attempt to eradicate coronavirus is another grandiose project doomed to fail. Israel leads the world in corona vaccinations; vaccines are forced on people; the unvaccinated aren’t even allowed to shop for food. Airports are closed down; nobody can enter or leave the Promised Land. But the virus is smart; it finds its way around the vaccine. The old non-vaccinated virus could kill some old people well into their eighties or nineties. The new virus attacks children. Vaccinated people also can get Covid, as did my mother-in law, despite two jabs she duly received. Masks remain in force, schools remain shut, the new round of elections is due very soon, probably leading to no better result than the previous three rounds.
Just compare this ambitious folk with Sweden, which took practically no special steps to fight the virus, AND has a much better outcome. The Danes (no friends of Swedes) admit
or, in plain English, new figures show that Sweden’s corona deaths are among the lowest in Europe and the country is one of the countries in Europe that has done best during the pandemic. Yes, the Swedes were eventually forced last December into taking some quite unnecessary measures, but not due to any medical emergency. Medically, there was no need, but the political pressures became so great, that the government had to give in. Sweden came very close to having its borders closed from the outside, unless the government locked down its populace or forced masks or did something.
Nature has its own ways. It is insistent and persistent. Coronavirus was successful (on its own terms) where flu was eradicated. These two viruses occupy the same evolutionary cell. Anti-flu vaccines saved many people from flu and prepared the ground for Covid. In Lombardy, Italy Covid came down hard on the old people who were vaccinated against flu; ditto in Israel, where flu vaccination was offered to all. I await with horror the next threat that will creep out of the abyss if coronavirus is defeated. Meanwhile, in Israel, it fights back with great vigour.
The fight against carbon dioxide may yet succeed, and it would turn our planet into a frozen desert. While staying out of this fight is no effort. We have heard so many doom-sayers prophesying apocalypse, and nothing has happened yet. Here you can read a litany of doom prophecies that failed; and here is advice to Warmers on how to deal with these failures. Al Gore said in 2006 that within ten years we should perish unless we followed his orders. The advice to a Warmer on how to deal with it is “Attacks should be ignored or sidestepped, not engaged”. This response is very similar to one practiced by scientologists or Jehovah Witnesses, for a good reason: the Warmers are indeed a sect, albeit a powerful one.
Our problem is not so much bad will (and here I disagree with my esteemed colleague Mike Whitney) but the noble and quixotic desire to save mankind from some perceived peril. P.G. Wodehouse tells us of four scouts who, in their quest for a good deed, helped an old lady to cross the street, and reported to their guide. All four of you were needed for that, asked an amazed guide. Well, she put up quite a strong resistance, they replied. Until recently, only governments played God and that was bad enough. But now every Tom, Dick and Harry with an extra billion dollars in his pocket wants to save mankind.
We wouldn’t have this obsession with gay rights but for people like Jon Stryker who isn’t satisfied with shacking up with his boy-lover (as many Roman emperors did) but has to save us from our homophobia and has some billions of dollars to spend on this. We wouldn’t have corona, if Gates were busy earning his daily bread instead of manhandling Chinese bats. What’s more, we would live better if these guys were usefully employed.
Here is a graph to look at. It depicts the share of the US national wealth owned by 0.1% of families, that is 160 thousand families with more than $20 million per head. They had it wonderfully good in the years leading to the Great Depression; or rather, their wonderful life brought on the Great Depression. As their share dropped, ordinary Americans got a chance to fulfill the American dream. Life was good for ordinary guys until the late Seventies; then Thatcher and Reagan succeeded in turning the tide, and since then the fat cats’ share has increased and your share has dropped, until we have arrived at the present miserable state.
This graph is taken from this work by two young Berkeley economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who updated it here last year. True Left (I aspire to this lot) aren’t politically correct diversity lovers, but people who think that the wealthy should be reined in. The very rich hog resources; they distort democracy by their lobbying and their NGOs; and now they want to save mankind, while mankind should be saved from them. Naturally the rich guys do not relish the idea of being taxed, let alone expropriated Lenin style; that’s why they invented the faux-Left of radical feminists and race equality activists. A good Christian would approve of bridling the rich: it would be better for their souls. What is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul, asked Christ. But this graph proves that keeping their share down isn’t only good for their souls, but is good for our wellbeing, too. The crazy idea of trickle-down wealth may be safely discarded as not working.
Enough of playing God. Let us live peacefully on our beautiful planet Earth, and do nothing drastic until the last moment. Let us demolish all labs producing bioweapons and pour concrete on top of them. Let bats live unmolested. Cut the US army down to the size of any other army. Tax the very rich until their share of national wealth is down to 5 per cent. Ostracize Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Open the churches and museums. And soon things will come back to normal.
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
This article was first published at The Unz Review.