By: James Delingpole
"The global climate change industry is worth an annual $1.5 trillion, according to Climate Change Business Journal. That’s the equivalent of $4 billion a day spent on vital stuff like carbon trading, biofuels, and wind turbines. Or — as Jo Nova notes — it’s the same amount the world spends every year on online shopping.
But there’s a subtle difference between these two industries — the global warming one and the online shopping one. Can you guess what it is?
Well, it’s like this. When you go to, say, Charles Tyrwhitt to buy a nice, smart shirt, or Amazon to buy the box set of Game of Thrones, or Krazykrazysextoy.com to replace your girlfriend’s worn out rabbit, no one is holding a gun to your head. You are buying these things of your own free volition either for yourself or for someone you love. You have paid for them, out of your own money, because you have made the calculation that they will make your life that little bit better. Better than it would, say, if you’d kept the money in your bank account or spent it on something less desirable — a novelty dog poo ornament, say, or a handknitted sweater with Jimmy Savile’s face on it and “I HEART paedos” picked out in gold lamé lettering.
When, on the other hand, you buy stuff from the climate change industry, you have no choice in the matter whatsoever. It’s already priced into your taxes, your electricity bills, the cost of your petrol, the cost of your airfare, the cost of every product you buy and every service you use. It is utterly inescapable, this expenditure. Yet unlike your online shopping — which, remember, costs roughly the same as you spend each year on the climate change industry — you get precisely nothing in return.
No, it’s worse than that. You get less than nothing. You get stuff forced on you that you really don’t want: bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes looming on your horizon, keeping you awake, trashing your property values; fields of solar panels where they used to grow wheat or you used to walk your dog; prissy missives from your local council expecting you to be grateful for the fact that now you’ve got to separate your trash into seven different recycling bags rather than the previous five, and that they’re only going to collect your rubbish once a fortnight instead of once a week; teachers filling your kids’ heads with junk science propaganda; free parking slots for electric cars you don’t own but which you subsidise for richer friends who do; feel-bad nature documentaries about how it’s all your fault that this stuff “may” soon disappear; energy-saving lightbulbs that take your nocturnal home back to the kind of sepulchral gloom Western civilisation thought it had bade farewell to in the 1890s; the Prius, the car which recalls the style and comfort of the cars the fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to have ended; yawning gaps where used to grow the woods which have been chopped down and chipped to create biomass for burning in power stations which used to run more cheaply and efficiently on coal…
Then there are the people who benefit financially from this $1.5 trillion climate change industry: the carbon traders; the dodgy academics; the vulture capitalists pecking on the bloated carcass of renewable energy; the environmental NGOs; the environmental consultancies who specialise in giving “expert” testimony at planning appeals, arguing on the most spurious grounds that no the bats and birds in this area aren’t going to be affected by this new wind turbine they’re going to be happier than ever no really; the sustainability officers at every level of local government; the green advisers attached to every business who advise them how to reduce their CO2 count; the PR companies that specialise in green awareness; Dale Vince….
These people do not deserve your money. Not a penny, a cent, or a sou of it.
Look, I don’t begrudge anyone the right to earn a living — just so long as they’re providing someone, somewhere with something they actually need. Not a single person working in the climate change industry fulfils this criterion. Not one. If you scrapped Michael Mann’s job tomorrow the world would not suffer the slightest loss and science would be all the better for it.
Sure, you might argue, there’s some kind of trickledown effect as the money we’re force to pay these shysters and bludgers and charlatans and scroungers via various taxes and tariffs feeds back into the economy. But you could make the same argument were these people paid the same amount of money by the government to dig holes in the ground and fill them up again — which would be a vastly preferable use of tax payer money because then these utterly useless parasites would be reminded every day how pointless the “work” they do actually is, whereas as things are, many of them suffer under the delusion that their green non-jobs are somehow virtuous and important.
In the headline I call the climate change industry a hoax. That’s because, on any objective level it is. I don’t mean that all the scientists and businesses and politicians promoting it are abject liars — just most of them, even if it means that in order to keep earning their living they have to be dishonest with themselves about something they know in their hearts not to be true.
Alex Epstein, author of the Moral Case For Fossil Fuels, sets out the fundamental problem with the climate change industry here:
..Increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from 0.03 per cent to 0.04 per cent has not caused and is not causing catastrophic runaway global warming. Dishonest references to “97 per cent of scientists” equate a mild warming influence, which most scientists agree with and more importantly can demonstrate, with a catastrophic warming influence – which most don’t agree with and none can demonstrate.
That’s it. If you accept the validity of that statement — and how can you not: it is unimpeachably accurate and verifiable — then it follows that the $1.5 trillion global warming industry represents the most grotesque misuse of manpower and scarce resources in the history of the world."
