View from the gutter.....

I'm sorry to keep going on like this (Not), but I get terribly frustrated with the whole business of climate change. Not so much the physics as the politics. The physics are pretty simple, but it's the politics that gives me cause for concern. Why the smegging hades are we as a culture bothering with trying to control the weather by taxation? What is going to happen to all the extra tax levied? Give it away in a pointless redistributive potlach of Brobdingnagian proportions? In the middle of the deepest economic crisis to hit the Western nations since the 1930's? To quote John Le Mesurier in his performance as the upper class Sergeant Wilson in the UK TV comedy Dad's Army; "Is that really wise?"

Well I don't think so. Anyone promulgating the view that civilisation has to be ended because we had a few warmer years (although it hasn't felt that way for a while) has to be several light years over the delusion event horizon and accelerating. The bit that really scrolls my knurd is that some of the organisations pushing this agenda get taxpayer Dollars, Pounds and Euro's. Not just a little, but millions. That massively pisses me off because we're being conned with our own flaming money.

Well this is going to be a Pyhrric victory for environmentalism as a whole if the sums proposed are actually spent in the manner outlined. Why? Because the money supply will dry up that's why. We'll all be too blasted poor to even afford environmentalism if these idiots get their way. Environmentalism only occurs when people are rich enough not to have to worry where your next meal is coming from. The economic strangulation of the western economies will have to be so great to achieve the proposed lowered carbon emissions that the infrastructure cannot be properly maintained. People will starve and die unnecessarily because of such policies. However, if they're not part of a tiny 'enlightened' elite, hey who cares? They're only peasants. Plenty more where they came from, huh?

I have a terrible vision, and it is not a pretty one; Britain (For one) will become, in the words of one of my characters from (Shameless plug coming up) 'The Sky Full of Stars'; "That wretched little poverty trap" and don't ask me about other western nations. From over here it's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You can see events unraveling and although you want to, you just can't look away.

Sometimes I ask myself; is this whole business some form of political Götterdämmerung that taxpayers are unconsciously funding. Certain democratically elected leaders appear to have basically given up trying to be leaders and are basically saying "If we can't have it all our own way, then we'll completely screw it up for everyone else". Gordon Brown for example comes across as a completely delusional example of this mindset, possibly intoxicated. There's a thought. Can you be arrested and imprisoned for running a country whilst impaired by intoxicating drugs? Oh I wish because I've got a little list of complaints, and it's a doozy.

We in the western world should be looking upwards and outwards, or we will have failed as a species. I will expand this argument by example; look at any species of creature, from Mycoplasma genitalium to Balaenoptera musculus almost without exception, all creatures expand their territory. They need space to move, to grow, to reproduce. Humans are no different. To restrict our range and limit our population is to stagnate, and to stagnate is to reserve a premature place on the list of Earth's extinct species. We must expand as a species or die. All other courses lead to dissolution and genetic demise.

There are those who will say that this is a good thing, however, I believe them to be clinically insane if, like me, you think that future generations of humanity should actually have a future, both physical and economic. I have the luxury of light and warmth because previous generations contributed to the infrastructure of the western world. I would like the next few thousand generations of humanity to have expanded out towards the stars, not wasted our resources navel gazing in a poverty of our own making. To expound upon the theme of this quote from Isaac Newton; we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and should seek to raise future generations higher, not throw them into the turgid guilt-fest of a slough of environmental and economic despond.

Excuse the slightly unhinged tone of this rant, but I've just had to shell out for an air ticket for Mrs S to visit the UK, and almost half the cost of travel was in environmental bloody taxes.

Grr.