Members of Extinction Rebellion called on African leaders to end the production of natural gas in Cape Town, South Africa on October 4, 2022. (Photo by Brenton Geach/Gallo Images via Getty)
"Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
— Alfred Pennyworth
In Europe, they’re burning garbage to stay warm. “It’s so bad this season that you can smell trash burning every day, which is completely new,” said the 35-year-old mother of three from Jablonna, Poland, near Warsaw. “Rarely can you smell a regular fuel. It’s scary to think what happens when it really gets cold.” The Polish government suspended quality regulations on coal burning for those who can still afford it; 60% of households no longer can. Because of all the garbage burning, the government may soon hand out masks so its residents don’t inhale toxic fumes. Said one of Poland’s most powerful politicians last month, “one needs to burn almost everything, except for tires and similarly harmful things.” The government estimates that 40,000 people died annually from premature deaths from air pollution before the current crisis.
Forests are being hammered. In Estonia and Finland, forests that had been set aside to capture carbon dioxide to reduce climate change are now being so heavily logged that they are net emitters. Hungary lifted conservation regulations so old-growth forests could be logged; it then banned the export of wood pellets. “People buy wood pellets thinking they’re the sustainable choice, but in reality, they’re driving the destruction of Europe’s last wild forests,” said one conservationist. Wood pellets prices have doubled even in nuclear-heavy France which, under pressure from Germany, and in the grip of renewable energy mania, had been shutting down its nuclear plants so rapidly that it had stopped properly maintaining them. Romania has been forced to cap the price of firewood, which had skyrocketed. Burning wood releases more greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal, something most experts finally acknowledge.
And Europe is returning to coal as quickly as it can. This year it increased thermal coal imports more than any other region. Coal imports increased by 36% more during the first eight months of 2022 than of 2021. Europe’s coal imports are today 10% of the global total. Germany is importing coal from South Africa, which is ironic because, just one year ago, Germany gave South Africa $810 million in exchange for an agreement that South Africa not use coal. And at the United Nations climate change talks in Scotland less one year ago this month, the UN created a special CGI dinosaur to warn all nations, but particularly Africans, that they must not use fossil fuels, and instead do what Europe was doing and, supposedly, transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewables.
In response to this unfolding ecological horror show, Greta Thunberg, Greenpeace, WWF, Extinction Rebellion, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have mobilized millions of people to take to the streets across the Western world to demand the building, continued operation, and re-start of shuttered nuclear plants; the expedited building of liquefied natural gas (LNG) import and export terminals in Europe and North America; and expanded natural gas production in North America; and the beginning of fracking in Europe. “The energy crisis and the climate crisis have the same solution!” shouted Thunberg to a cheering audience in Germany, many of whom had glued themselves to a nuclear plant at risk of premature closure. “We need to immediately expand the use of nuclear power and natural gas to prevent the burning of garbage, wood, and coal!” In response, Germany and Belgium announced the continued operation of nuclear plants and the re-starting of closed ones, and President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the expedited production of natural gas and LNG.
I’m kidding, of course. No, what climate activists have actually done is the exact opposite.
Biden, Trudeau, Thunberg, Greenpeace, WWF, Extinction Rebellion, AOC, Sierra Club, and NRDC are all doubling down on their efforts to shut down nuclear power plants and natural gas production. Biden has leased less land for oil and gas production than any president since World War II. Trudeau has claimed, absurdly, that “there has never been a strong business case” for LNG, even though natural gas is 18 times more expensive in Europe than Canada. AOC and other Democrats deny they’re waging war on natural gas, spread misinformation, and demand Big Tech censor their political opponents. Extinction Rebellion is trying to stop Africans from producing natural gas. Greenpeace in August quietly signed off on the burning of coal in Germany and has sued the European Union to disallow public financing of nuclear and natural gas. Thunberg denounces natural gas in her forthcoming book. And Sierra Club and NRDC are fighting to shut down nuclear plants and block more natural gas production.
Green groups aren’t the only reason Europe is in an energy crisis, but they are actively blocking the main solutions for fixing it. The proximate reason for the crisis is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and Putin’s manipulation of natural gas flows into Europe. But that was already starting to occur last fall, many months before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and many people, including me, warned that the world desperately needed to increase the production of natural gas, in response. And green leaders and groups are the main obstacle to politicians like Biden and Trudeau, who are controlled by green interest groups, from taking action.
The Biden presidency was supposed to be a restoration of liberal globalism, the operation of foreign and economic policy on a global basis, and a rejection of the kind of provincialism and nationalism that Brexit and Donald Trump supposedly represented. But Biden has managed to isolate the United States far more than Trump, first by refusing to expand natural gas production for Europe, and now by pushing the Saudis further into the arms of Russia. And it was Trump who, at the very moment he was accused of being a patsy of Putin, gravely and repeatedly warned the Germans and Europeans that they were becoming dangerously dependent on Russia for energy.
Saudi Arabia’s rejection of Biden’s pleas to produce more oil is game-changing. It shatters the 70-year-long military protection-for-oil alliance between Saudi Arabia and the US. There are multiple reasons for this but the bottom line is that, by not producing enough oil, the US needs Saudi Arabia more than Saudi Arabia needs the U.S. “US officials have been late to recognize that intimidation isn’t working,” notesBloomberg, “and that Washington needs to live with a new order based on mutual interests, according to a person familiar with deliberations inside OPEC+, who asked not to be named discussing sensitive diplomatic topics.”
Climate fanaticism, in other words, has real-world consequences. Climate change is real but it has never threatened human civilization. Fertilizers, irrigation, and tractors will allow Africa and other poor nations to produce more food in a hotter world. Natural disasters are declining because human resilience to extreme weather has risen. And carbon emissions, thanks to the shift from coal to natural gas, had been declining, until last year, when the world started reverting back to coal due to shortages of natural gas. Climate fanaticism is now the main reason that heads of state of the U.S., Canada, and many European nations are failing to do what they must to end the energy crisis. The fact that climate activists target zero-carbon nuclear power plants, and endorse coal burning, is all the proof anyone should need that their concern is not reducing emissions.
In many ways, what is happening appears utterly new. At no other moment in human history have people in the grip of a religious fervor created worldwide energy and food shortages. The highly-integrated nature of the global economy means that natural gas shortages in Europe can cause in blackouts in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. The instantaneous and highly emotional quality of social media means that a schoolgirl in Sweden can create a worldwide moral panic that helps once-fringe Green Party candidates control energy policy in Germany, France, and Belgium. And the centuries-long trend toward rising secularism, atheism, and nihilism has turned apocalyptic environmentalism into the dominant religion of global elites, and much of the population as well, with close to half of all humans gripped by the belief that climate change will result in human extinction.
But in other ways, we are witnessing a deeply familiar pattern. Catholics and Protestants in Europe killed each other from the 16th to 18th Centuries, ostensibly over disagreements about obscure theological matters. The wars of religion culminated in the Thirty Years' War, which is estimated to have killed one out of every three Germans. British leaders caused famines in Ireland between 1845 and 1849, in India between 1876 and 1880, and again in 1942 and 1943, while in the grip of the ideas of the British economist Robert Thomas Malthus. But below the theological disputes, and ideological justifications, there were always, also, of course, material motivations, including competition over the land and political control.
Such political and material demands underpin the fanaticism of climate activists today. They are people who are, on the one hand, in the grip of a deeply irrational religion, one that imagines humans fell from grace through the industrial revolution and are headed for environmental apocalypse unless we radically reduce our energy consumption and re-harmonize with the victim-god Nature through renewables and organics. But they are also narcissists desperate for personal, cultural, and political power. Their apocalyptic efforts worked. Hardened Green Party radicals are energy ministers in Belgium, which shut down a nuclear plant at the end of last month, and Germany, which still intends to shut down its last three nuclear plants next spring. Even otherwise powerless school children suffering from anxiety disorders can gain power over their parents, teachers, and heads of state through temper tantrums about the end of the world and demands for more black-and-white moral reasoning.
The global energy and food crisis is proof-positive that the will-to-power can, at times, trump the will-to-life. Climate activists who oppose nuclear and natural gas will effectively create hundreds of millions of unnecessary deaths from cold, food shortages, and pollution. Many have shown they are willing to die for their cause. It’s not correct to say that people prioritize life above everything else. Many prioritize their own feelings of power. If that means that whole forests of old-growth trees must be logged; that Poles must inhale toxic fumes from burning garbage in their homes; and that humankind will burn record amounts of coal, then so be it. The thinking is not that one must break some eggs to make an omelet. It’s, “Forget the omelet. Let’s just break eggs.” Or, as a wise man once said, “Some men just want to watch the whole world burn.”
Thanks for the repost. It's a good article, but I do not feel obliged to pay Michael for telling me that I can no longer afford to heat my house due to these lunatics.
Thanks for the repost. It's a good article, but I do not feel obliged to pay Michael for telling me that I can no longer afford to heat my house due to these lunatics.