Environmentalism has turned into a creed of the elite. Its now a metanarrative of luxury ideas based on theories which, so far, have not been tested, but which are now hastening towards their dysfunctional conclusion and social upheaval.
Coincidentally, according to the poll it is people with high levels of education who mostly fulfill “bullshit jobs”; and Desmet pointed out that education is no protection from Mass Formation – in fact it seems to be a higher risk factor. Another clear thinking student of psychology from the past century, George Orwell, pointed out this propensity for extended education fixated exclusively on theory, to make the mind more gullible: “some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them” he said.
“Particularly left-wing intellectuals” the writer Paul Anderson added.
Desmet seems to have identified something which is observable throughout our society, namely that educated people seem to suffer a crisis of meaning and seem to attach themselves to meaning giving metanarratives. He puts this down to a state of disconnection from other people. The most notable thing about it is that it leads to a sense of “free floating anxiety, frustration, and aggression.”
One of the common manifestations of this modern meaning crisis is the substituting of old sense making mechanisms with various pseudo-religions which all manifest in similar ways.
Belief in this creed is a sign that you are part of a community. The type of warped and dysfunctional community affiliation that Desmet describes as mass formation.
To put it mildly, the green agenda often seems like it is bordering on insanity. Its adherents ignore reality and fixate on impossible goals which defy science, maths, material properties, and the weather. This has had little consequence until now, other than creating NIMBY policies that hollow out western production economies and inflate the cost of energy; but that has just changed.
We have, in fact, arrived at a tipping point, but not the one that the climate alarmists never stop propagandising about. We now have an energy and food crisis on our hands, and it is directly caused by the green policies of the global green ideologues and a dysfunctional marriage with geopolitical war lobby objectives.
As an example of how out of touch the elites of the global Davos entourage and the green zealots are, take the example of Germany’s Economy and Climate minister, Robert Habeck, who is also the leader of the Green party. There is nobody in Germany more hawkish on the Ukrainian war than Habeck, and yet it was Habeck and his green policies who have left Germany at the mercy of Russian energy exports.
For the past two decades Germany has been pursuing the failed Energiewende renewable policy which also included the closure of nuclear electricity generation. While Habeck and his ilk were congratulating themselves for delusional anti fossil-fuel policies encapsulated by catchphrases such as “leave it (gas and oil) in the ground”, they were simultaneously buying the gas and oil from Russia. It was all pretence; pure virtue signalling pretence.
But renewable cannot supply reliable energy to the grid because it is weather dependent. Most of the time the wind isn’t ideal and neither is the sun! Even in regions that have highly developed renewable infrastructures, the generation mix can have very little renewable sourced energy at any given time.
This snapshot is what a grid supply mix actually looks like
A bit of wind in SA but not much elsewhere. Batteries going strong though. pic.twitter.com/TAZtS8v1u0
— Jill (@JsharkJill) July 14, 2022
Europe and Germany are learning that the green proportion in their networks is as illustrated in this graph, and that it can’t substitute for gas and oil and coal. Financial ruin beckons but, ah well, at least Greta is happy!
Now that Germany is so dependent on Russian hydrocarbons, and simultaneously and inexplicably threatening to not buy the same hydrocarbons, Habeck is still determined to shut down Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants. Germany is facing energy rationing with some industries possibly closing and initiatives such as public warming halls proposed for the winter. A return to the conditions of the Weimar Republic don’t seem too unrealistic at this point.
Incidentally Habeck and his green cohort are so determined on this course that he was less than fully honest about the viability of the last few nuclear power plants in Germany. Incredibly he said that Germany’s energy problem is a gas problem not an electricity problem. In a statement that beggars belief he said “Nuclear power doesn’t help us there at all we have a heating problem or an industry problem, but not an electricity problem”
So the delusions of the Green elites are meeting the reality of fuel shortages as a consequence of the geopolitical mess in Ukraine, and the attempt to punish Russia through sanctions. The public are finally seeing that when you actually turn off the spigot, the windmills and the solar panels just can’t cut it.
They are paying for it at the pump and in their electricity and gas bills and it has heightened a clear separation between the urban yuppie type who will willingly pay extra for “green” energy, and the working class who just want to be able to afford to live.
Unfortunately the entire political class usually serves only the luxury ideas of the well off and doesn’t care much for the realities facing working people who have to be careful with their money. The luxury ideas of environmental self flagellation and identity politics embraced by the entire political class is a bourbon-isation of the political realm.
‘Let them eat cake’, our political masters figuratively say as they command Dutch farmers to cull their herds and cut back on output by 30% in some sort of 2030 nitrogen reduction goal driven by eschatological climate lunacy. They are driven by a fanatical, apocalyptic certainty that isn’t borne out by the facts.
Dutch farmers are highly productive and ecologically non-polluting, so it’s perplexing that the Dutch government took this unscientific decision to sabotage their livelihoods. Michael Shellenberger, always a reasonable, humane, and scientific analyst, explains it all in detail here.
It is likely that the political class looked around and noted there was nobody to politically represent the interests of farmers, and also that being a relatively small “identity group” they could be abused anyway with no political cost.
But the problem with this is that farmers produce the most essential commodity for all society, and if they are inhibited from doing this by regulatory burden, it will destabilise society at the most fundamental level. The peasants will get hungry.
And when you tell the hungry peasantry to eat cake, they sometimes find some other form of representation. This is what happened in Sri Lanka, and it is likely only the beginning of a worldwide backlash against green elites and their punitive policies.
Sri Lanka give us a glimpse of what happens when elite environmental fanatics who set government policy are let loose.
Sri Lanka embraced the corporate racket of ESG (Environmental Social Governance – an investors score which determines access to credit based on how environmentally conscious the company is) and other green utopian ideas to their hearts, and invested heavily in them at the political level. Sri Lanka has a near perfect ESG score of 98, higher than the US or Sweden (51 and 96 respectively). So far so great!
Not really actually. Last year Sri Lanka decided to go full organic and banned chemical fertilizers.
The cost of farming became exorbitant and many farmers didn’t use any fertilizer. Crop yields plummeted. The yield of the staple crop for most of the poor, rice, fell by 20%. Its price rose by 50%. The price of many fresh vegetables rose five-fold.
Read that again. Fresh vegetables are five times dearer than they were just a few months ago.
At a time of international crisis, Shellenberger says that the cost of transporting food increased by 128%.
But it wasn’t just food. Export cash crops like tea also crashed. Sri Lanka’s tea export netted approximately €1.3Bn annually, which traditionally was used to pay for food imports. Last winter tea production and exports fell by 18%.
So Sri Lanka is out of fertiliser, is out of food, has defaulted on loans, is accelerating towards hyperinflation (in May inflation was at 30%) is out of oil, is out of cash, and is bankrupt. For all this they have the utopian ideas of the globalist green racket to blame.
And yet the green lobby seems impervious to their own failures. Right now Germany’s foreign policy is driven by the twin dementing fixation on zero carbon and the Ukraine. It’s not just the German public who will have their gas and electricity shut off this winter, some industrial sectors are being warned that they will have to close this winter.
So who is to blame? Many of the well-off who are blindly pushing Green policies with the religious zeal of climate prophets must take some of the blame. Eamon Ryan is obviously at fault for our stupid insistence on renewable and the determination for zero carbon. Fianna Fáil and FG have to accept the blame for being led around by the nose by the ignorant elitist green fanatics.
When Fine Gael staged a children’s protest – the young people in the Dáil hand picked to tell us to save the planet – and Richard Bruton promised to listen and do better or something, he likely thought this idol-pandering was money in the bank. When the same Bruton mealy-mouthedly promised in a debate before the last election to stop exploration licences and to leave it in the ground he was setting us on a crash course for €2.20/L prices at the pumps and electric and gas bills doubling and still rising.
And the costs of this elite policy fad is not finished yet. When the harvest comes in this winter, and we see the effect of having no fertilizer in January-March, expect food prices to rise by a crazy amount. Then, this writer predicts that Russia may demand grain for roubles this time.
The political elites will wail impotently that Putin is “weaponising food.” Expect them to cave and pay just like they did for the gas. Expect them to continue ignoring reality regardless. Expect them to say it’s a price worth paying.
People will be cold. People will be hungry. “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”.