Net Zero = Year Zero

The Great Reset project, or whatever the reality behind the slogans is, plans its machinations in secret – kind of. In fact, as I’ve sometimes outlined here, much of it is published openly in books and websites, and yet is carefully kept out of public awareness through distraction and obfuscation. Hiding things in plain sight and calling them “misinformation” is good propaganda, evidently. Even so, one’s focus tends to become sharper over time, as is shown by the very fact that so many ordinary people now have some grasp of a Great Reset and rightly perceive it as a threat, rather than a promise.

The Net Zero agenda is one prime example of this. As originally sold, the story ran along the lines that dirty old human industry is imminently going to destroy the planet, but fortunately modern efficient technologies will save the day… if we all pull together. But for several years many of us have realised that this narrative hides what is more a religious conception than a scientific one, and one which is more about a return to a fictitious Eden than progress to a bright new future.

But as time goes by even that interpretation doesn’t really work. The religious basis is right, but the purpose turns out to be less a return to Paradise than a penitential self-judgement ending up in a voluntary hell. In other words the religion is centred on asceticism, not as a means to an end (self abnegation now leads to Nirvana or glorification), but as an end in itself. Gaia is displeased, and must have human sacricifices.

The divorce of the story from actual science in the diagnosis of anthropogenic climate change has been well-rehearsed, so I needn’t dwell on it too much. In brief, the cultic nature of the “theory” is shown by its imperviousness to new science modifying the simplistic old greenhouse dogma, its ignoring data showing stasis or even cooling over several years, the universally failed predictions of “The Settled Science,” and a “Flannelgraph religion” approach to overheated and mutually contradictory climate models, treating them as holy writ prioritised over real life.

In terms of remedy the disjunction between science and praxis became obvious early on: plentiful low-emission energy could readily be obtained by a serious nuclear energy program. But instead nuclear reactors have been progressively closed, even (in Germany) in the teeth of an acute energy crisis. One explanation for that is the origin of the Green Movement in Ban the Bomb protest groups, but that seems to place excessive weight on the influence of one political wing. The whole political class has gone hell-for-leather after wind and solar: even hydro-electric power, admittedly of limited application in many countries, has been subjected to bad publicity. And nobody cares if biofuels are worse than coal for the environment.

So we reach the the matter of the inadequacy of those wind and solar sources to replace, entirely, the use of fossil fuels. Here we see the sidelining of good energy economists from government advisory groups (a fact itself wanting explanation). But in the last couple of years there has been enough mainstream publicity about the impossibility of meeting even current energy needs from renewables, let alone the electrification of transport and the levelling up of developing nations, for the elites to be fully aware of the issue. And this year we have had the mother of all energy crises, demonstrating starkly the real, rather than the rose-tinted, effects of “divesting from fossil fuels.” Yet the COP27 Synod of Sharm-El-Sheikh simply reiterated the old Creeds and made new Canon Laws based on them, oblivious to these realities. Even the obvious schism of the West from BRICS – and hence its separation from most of the materials and manufacturing capacity it needs for Net Zero – hasn’t changed the plans one jot.

Now, think about that, because it’s odd: even the most politically biased governments have some access to realistic advisers, who will have pointed out the multiple failure-points of the Net Zero agenda. Yet Europe is de-industrialising precipitously, as a result of sanctions over the Ukraine war, it is true, but exhibiting a suicidal ideation too deadly to be explained by devotion to Zelensky, or even to pathological Putinoia. Moloch must have blood!

It looks increasingly as if those conspiracy theorists who thought the demolition of Western economies was deliberate were right all along. As a series of cock-ups the West’s political actions over the last three years seem implausibly stupid. Who would waste literally hundreds of billions on ineffective and harmful COVID strategies without even doing a cost-benefit analysis? Who would persist with energy sanctions nine months after it became obvious they strengthened Russia and its allies and damaged us lethally?

The conspiracy theorists, of course, did not conjure up their ideas out of thin air, unlike the climatologists of the 1980s. They simply read the official websites of the UN, the WEF and so on to discover that the plan for the brave new world saw the idea of “equity” in terms of levelling down the developed world, more than of levelling up the poorer nations. There was always a deeply superstitious substrate of guilt behind the proposed new world order, in which those in the more prosperous nations must be punished for that very prosperity.

This has become overt with COP27, in the ludicrous idea of already bankrupt Western nations paying compensation to China or Mali for the industrial revolution that enabled them to develop even as much as they have (in China’s case to producing more CO2 in the last eight years than Britain has since the eighteenth century). But the pathological guilt is also seen in many other ideological struggles from the decolonisation of mathematics to pretending that Britain has always had a black majority, if TV drama and advertising is anything to go by.

On GB News last night someone had found a recent House of Lords report stating, as a matter of fact, that renewables will never be able to replace the energy supply we have, and hence outlining how (not if) the people will have to reduce their consumption of energy. It’s not just that they will have to pay to install heat pumps instead of gas boilers – they will have to get used to colder houses, because the inadequacy of the latter is already assumed. Foreign travel will not just be too expensive – it will be restricted (in line, of course, with the G20’s recent support for digital vaccine passports, despite their demonstrated uselessness as a public health measure). Local travel, too, will be limited by the inability of most to buy, or charge, electric cars.

None of this appears to be intended as belt-tightening necessary to get us through all the threatened climate tipping points until the new clean energy system is up and running. Rather, the future is all permanent sackcloth, ashes and low energy consumption by design.

Now that makes some kind of religious sense if you buy into the idea that we are guilty of raping Mother Earth by our greedy consumption of fossil fuels. I wrote about that myth here, and it’s surprising how even many Christians accept what is actually a thoroughly pagan idea, and an irrational one at that. Earth’s bounty, including fossil fuels, was given to us by God to use. But like so much of the Great Reset the myth seems purpose-made to impoverish the poor, especially, and reduce them to servitude. Why does Satan hate the poor so much (perhaps it’s just making people poor he enjoys)?

As I have said before, fossil fuels were a major factor in ending not only slavery, but the grind of mundane physical labour and early death for an increasing number of people across the world. Men could be decently rewarded for skilled labour, rather than a majority being condemned to subsistence digging. Women had mechanical slaves to free them from the drudgery of domestic chores and broaden the possibilities for living. Children were released from labouring to augment the family income, and so could be educated. One might also add that for parents of middling incomes, they could commit more time to child-care rather than sending children away to boarding schools or cruel maiden aunts.

The converse, though, is also true. Not only will energy poverty reverse these trends for very many, but it will recreate a market for humans to be used by the better-off for the tasks there is no longer sufficient energy, or industrially manufactured goods, to do by machine. If people cannot afford cars or tractors, not all of them will walk – they will harness animals once more, and feed them with leftovers.

Laurence Fox recently interviewed a financial guy, who pointed out that the invention of money, too, was a great liberator of the poor. Think about it: if you are no longer tied to a rich man giving you food and sustenance in return for work, but are instead paid in cash, then you have the freedom to lay it out as you wish. You can drink it away at the ale-house, but you can also use even a small surplus to educate yourself and improve your station in life. Even the poor widow in the gospel could choose to give her last two lepta to God without some bureaucrat telling her she should buy a turnip instead.

Hence the looming spectre of a programmable digital currency, monitoring and even policing every transaction, is a direct attack on the poor labourer, tending to keep him as a poor labourer, as much as it is on the dissident intellectual. Isn’t it odd how the sociological effect is much the same as that of Net Zero?

And so, just as Year Zero was (I suppose) conceived by Pol Pot as a Utopian plan for some Arcadian world of equality and simplicity, Net Zero is likely to be prompted by the same idealistic notions, but will equally inevitably end in universal poverty, servitude – and oppression. Well, perhaps not universal: somebody has to lead, and that requires being able to travel freely, being warm, well-fed and having routine tasks handled by underlings. You know it makes sense.

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
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1 Response to Net Zero = Year Zero

  1. Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

    I see I’m not the only one thinking along these lines.

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