By Itxu Díaz
Thursday, April 07, 2022
The 2,913 pages of the United Nations’ “Climate
Change 2022” report make clear only that nothing is clear. Written in the
incomprehensible language of climate science, there are only two things
that are easily understood: the word taxes, which appears 270
times, and the word costs, which appears 1,585 times.
The entire report, full of technicalities, cross-references,
and incomprehensible tables, generates more headaches than alarm. This is not
for public consumption, quite obviously. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change keeps the taxes and the costs confined to the report — but it reserves
the artillery of apocalyptic words for the press release. The headline reads,
“The evidence is clear: the time for action is now.” (The “evidence” is the
2,913 pages that no one will read.)
In short, the apostles of the climate apocalypse are once
again summarizing their strategy with the “now or never” war cry, the same one
they screamed nearly 30 years ago in 1995 at the first climate summit in
Berlin. “We are at a crossroads,” IPCC chair Hoesung Lee says in the press
release. “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C
(2.7°F). Without immediate and profound emission reduction across all sectors,
it will be impossible,” Jim Skea, IPCC Working Group III co-chair, adds, building
tension.
Here we go again. In 2007, another
IPCC report assured that the irreversible climate apocalypse would
come within eight years and demanded action “now or never.” We did not act
enough, I suspect; there was no reduction in emissions, yet temperatures
were stubbornly
stable between 1997 and 2012, leaving the scientists behind those
models in a very bad light. Yes, the temperatures rose again later, but the
climate is as fickle and capricious as Joe Biden’s political opinions.
Given the IPCC’s track record of inaccurate predictions,
and considering that the world has not yet ended, I think, my assessment is
that it is just as likely that their models are right this time as it is that
they are wrong. But their solutions to something as uncertain as climate have
serious consequences for humanity before they have serious consequences for the
planet. In fact, they are already having them: Just look at the West right now,
on the brink of a cataclysm because of dependence
on Putin’s dirty energy, after having managed to eradicate much of its own
dirty energy thanks to pressure from the climate lobby. By the way: That dirty
energy now so reviled has considerably improved our quality of life, has lifted
thousands of people out of poverty, and has enabled a succession of
technological revolutions; perhaps we should be a little less contemptuous of
it. But, as my grandmother would say about vegan environmentalists, it is
difficult to ask for respect for coal from those who are incapable of
respecting grilled meat.
No matter the costs, progressive globalism has decided to
bet everything on alarmism and the persuasive power of language, following the
model popularized by the environmentalist associations of the ’90s. What turned
out to be a kind of fringe circus created to attract the attention of the media
(you know, all those people chained to nuclear power plants) has now been turned
into parliaments, and the result is that the highest climate authority is Greta
Thunberg, who shouts at world leaders: “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams
and my childhood with your empty words.” In the end, everything seems to be a
struggle to attain childhood dreams: I dreamed of a world with government
reduced to a minimum and mask-optional Mass. Oh well.
The alarmist language is crucial to the warmologists’
plan. Without climate hysteria resonating in all corners of the media, no one
would accept green taxes and the levels of ecological interventionism that the
EU suffers, for example, without first storming the European Parliament in
Brussels. It is a suspicious coincidence that since the 19th century all the
ecological apocalypses announced offer a single recipe for salvation that
coincides exactly with the economic programs of the Left; that is, more taxes,
more interventionism, less capitalism, and less freedom. Thus, in the
“Strengthening the response” section of the latest IPCC report, you will not be
surprised to see that scientists call for “economic instruments which consider
economic and social equity and distributional impacts; gender-responsive and
women-empowerment programs as well as enhanced access to finance for local
communities and Indigenous Peoples and small landowners.” Evo Morales likes
this.
For the rest of it, environmentalism has become an
extraordinary marketing tool. Most of the big corporations that boast about
making “small gestures that change the world” when it comes to global warming
know that their small gestures are irrelevant to something as immense and
complex as climate, but they are quite relevant to their profits. Between them,
they’ve managed to make you feel like you’re saving the planet by drinking your
coffee through a nasty cardboard straw.
The scheme envisioned by the U.N. panel, however, is
hardly a small gesture. The coronavirus pandemic should have taught us two
things — that science is neither exact nor infallible, and that institutional
fearmongering can lead the masses down a desired path without actually solving
any problems. This one happens to lead to a hell full of high taxes,
skyrocketing government spending, inflation spirals, and electric everything.
So let’s go. It’s now or never.
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