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As of this morning, it will cost you appreciably more to fill your car with diesel or petrol. This is not because of the profiteering of big oil companies, or because of the Russian war in Ukraine, or because of some manuevering by OPEC countries in the middle east: It is a direct decision of the Government.
It has been widely publicised in recent weeks that the Irish Government is running an enormous, unprecedented, budget surplus: By 2026, on current trends, the Government will take in 26billion euro more than it spends. That is more than the total cost of the Irish health service, meaning we have so much money in the national coffers that we could have a second health service running in parallel to the one we have, and still have a budget surplus.
Therefore it can safely be said that the reason for the tax increase on fuel is not because the Government needs the money. Instead, the reason for the tax increase is deliberately and consciously and intentionally to make you slightly poorer than you currently are.
The Government is publicly committed to a “net zero” target for climate change. To understand that this is foolish in and of itself, you need only know that basically no major global economy is doing the same thing: China is not. The USA is not. Brazil is not. Even if Ireland achieved “net zero” tomorrow, global emissions of greenhouse gasses would continue to rise for the foreseeable future, meaning that in climate terms, nothing would be achieved. In fact, by culling Irish cattle on sustainable farmland, the Government is making the global situation worse: The global number of cattle will rise, but they will end up being on Brazilian land where there is rainforest today. Chop Chop.
Nevertheless, it is important to understand what net zero means: To achieve net zero, you have to be poorer.
You have to consume less, and emit fewer pollutants. The quickest way to achieve this is to reduce your standard of living to force you to consume less.
And so, here are three ways the Government is very deliberately, and very consciously, doing just that. With the support and acquiescence, it must be said, of most of the media and almost all of the opposition:
The reason that fuel prices are going up is, very simply, to make driving more expensive so that people drive less. It is not to make money for the Government. The Green Party in Government is on record as wanting to make private transport a thing of the past – remember Eamon Ryan’s dream of one car per village, or per every ten homes?
Indeed, the Government is committed to an entirely unachievable promise to ban new diesel and petrol cars completely by 2030, and is heavily subsidising electric cars instead. But there’s a hidden dagger in that plan: Increased demand for electric cars will drive the global extraction of lithium, which powers their batteries, driving up their prices inexorably. People often assume the plan is to change car ownership from diesel to electric, but this is not actually true: The objective is to replace the vast majority of cars with nothing, with electric cars for those who can afford them. This year alone, the price of electric cars is up 13% year over year.
There’s also the fact that more electric cars feeds more demand for electricity, which drives up prices for everyone. All of this is deliberate: Making you poorer makes you greener. Which leads us to point two:
The overt policy of the Irish Government is to drive up the demand for electricity, while driving down the supply of it. The Government is spending billions, for example, on retrofitting homes and installing electric heat pumps. It is expanding the offering to data centres to become employers here, consuming electricity. As mentioned in point one, it is shifting the vehicle fleet to electricity.
At the same time, it has shuttered over its lifetime four Irish electricity plants and replaced them with wind energy which, while cleaner, is less reliable and sustainable. Note too that the Government is replacing traditional electricity meters with smart meters, which are designed to reduce household consumption, and monitor it. At the same time, electricity prices have never been higher.
All of this is deliberate state policy. We are exchanging secure sources of electricity for insecure sources, while driving up the price and pressuring people to consume more electricity to manage their everyday living. The net effect will be, and is intended to be, a reduction in your standard of living which leads to fewer emissions.
Inflation is not accidental: It is the result of the European Central Bank printing endless amounts of extra money over the past decade which was in turn used to purchase Government debt. This has flooded the market with money, reducing the value of money. In turn, this erodes the value of your savings and drives up the price of your purchases.
And again, it is an entirely deliberate policy. It is making people poorer for the simple reason that money is no longer holding its value in banks, driving people to invest in property and other assets, and fueling the house inflation boom that we are seeing across Europe. Those with large amounts of money to invest – pension funds, for example – are no longer buying Government bonds, but instead whole estates of private housing, which will hold their value better than cash.
The objective here is to fund the massive expansion of Government spending, and to balance out the inflationary effect by making you relatively poorer, and less able to spend.
The net effect of these three policies – and there are others – is a kind of global economic reset which is designed to reduce the standard of living of people in order to save the climate. It is accompanied by many other existing and emerging policies, like efforts to reduce access to air travel, or bans on eating meat, and an economic system that incentivises immigration over domestic birth rates in order to attempt to manage the population.
None of this is a conspiracy theory. It is all happening in plain sight.
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