One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta woke up to a perfect world, one where there were no petroleum products ruining the earth. She tossed aside her cotton sheet and wool blanket and stepped out onto a dirt floor covered with willow bark that had been pulverized with rocks. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Pulverized willow bark,” replied her fairy godmother.
“What happened to the carpet?” she asked.
“The carpet was nylon, which is made from butadiene and hydrogen cyanide, both made from petroleum,” came the response.
Greta smiled, acknowledging that adjustments are necessary to save the planet, and moved to the sink to brush her teeth where instead of a toothbrush, she found a willow, mangled on one end to expose wood fibre bristles.
“Your old toothbrush?” noted her godmother, “Also nylon.”
“Where’s the water?” asked Greta.
“Down the road in the canal,” replied her godmother, ‘Just make sure you avoid water with cholera in it”
“Why’s there no running water?” Greta asked, becoming a little peevish.
“Well,” said her godmother, who happened to teach engineering at MIT, “Where do we begin?” There followed a long monologue about how sink valves need elastomer seats and how copper pipes contain copper, which has to be mined and how it’s impossible to make all-electric earth-moving equipment with no gear lubrication or tires and how ore has to be smelted to a make metal, and that’s tough to do with only electricity as a source of heat, and even if you use only electricity, the wires need insulation, which is petroleum-based, and though most of Sweden’s energy is produced in an environmentally friendly way because of hydro and nuclear, if you do a mass and energy balance around the whole system, you still need lots of petroleum products like lubricants and nylon and rubber for tires and asphalt for filling potholes and wax and iPhone plastic and elastic to hold your underwear up while operating a copper smelting furnace and . . .
“What’s for breakfast?” interjected Greta, whose head was hurting.
“Fresh, range-fed chicken eggs,” replied her godmother. “Raw.”
“How so, raw?” inquired Greta.
“Well, . . .” And once again, Greta was told about the need for petroleum products like transformer oil and scores of petroleum products essential for producing metals for frying pans and in the end was educated about how you can’t have a petroleum-free world and then cook eggs. Unless you rip your front fence up and start a fire and carefully cook your egg in an orange peel like you do in Boy Scouts. Not that you can find oranges in Sweden anymore.
“But I want poached eggs like my Aunt Tilda makes,” lamented Greta.
“Tilda died this morning,” the godmother explained. “Bacterial pneumonia.”
“What?!” interjected Greta. “No one dies of bacterial pneumonia! We have penicillin.”
“Not anymore,” explained godmother “The production of penicillin requires chemical extraction using isobutyl acetate, which, if you know your organic chemistry, is petroleum-based. Lots of people are dying, which is problematic because there’s not any easy way of disposing of the bodies since backhoes need hydraulic oil and crematoriums can’t really burn many bodies using as fuel Swedish fences and furniture, which are rapidly disappearing – being used on the black market for roasting eggs and staying warm.”
This represents only a fraction of Greta’s day, a day without microphones to exclaim into and a day without much food, and a day without carbon-fibre boats to sail in, but a day that will save the planet.
Tune in tomorrow when Greta needs a root canal and learns how Novocain is synthesized.
In August 2019, I had researched the allegedly “green” 60-foot racing yacht owned by the Prince of Monaco, The Maliza made from carbon-fibre in which Greta crossed the Atlantic as a “carbon neutral” publicity stunt on her way to speak at the UN in New York City.
Just in case you missed it, I am compelled to share one of the excellent articles which revealed the truth of the lies of Greta’s 2019 Atlantic crossing.
LAST Wednesday, in a blaze of unremittingly fawning publicity and uncritical adulation of which even Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments would have been envious, the good ship Mazilia – or, as I prefer to call it in view of its almost quasi-religious mission, ‘Greta’s Ark’ – set sail from Plymouth bound for New York, carrying no less a personage, if you believe the Green hype, than putative Saviour of the World, diminutive, pigtailed ‘climate activist’ Greta Thunberg, aged 16.
There’s much about this stunt and its main protagonist to mock. But just for the purposes of this article, ignore for a moment both the grotesque cynicism of egregiously exploiting a clearly troubled and vulnerable child to advance an eco-totalitarian political agenda, and the incongruity that few of us can whistle up a $4million, 18-metre (60ft) yacht from Prince Albert of Monaco to cross the Atlantic to assuage our enviro-guilt, and consider just one question.
Precisely how green is the Blessed Greta’s planet-saving maritime odyssey?
Initially, let’s hopefully forestall any potential criticism for mixing up the terminology. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is an invisible, colourless, odourless 0.04 per cent trace gas essential to all plant life on Earth – though that, apparently, has not stopped Greta’s mother, a well-known Left-‘Liberal’ activist called Marlena Ernman, from saying her daughter can see it. Truly do the righteous have bestowed upon them gifts denied to the rest of us.
Carbon (C) on the other hand, is the predominant element in coal. Which is why the Green movement always uses the language of ‘carbon’-footprint or ‘carbon’-free, when they actually mean CO2. Because in the public mind, carbon is nasty black stuff, isn’t it, while wanting, on spurious scientific grounds, to reduce the Earth’s capacity for plant and crop growth perhaps isn’t a good look.
First, how did Greta get to Plymouth? On foot? By bike? On a magic carpet borne aloft by unicorns? Or perhaps, more prosaically, not by ‘carbon’-free means at all, but by using the same fossil-fuel powered transport that we’re enjoined to eschew on pain of eternal eco-damnation?
Next, Greta’s Ark required the assistance of other vessels to undock her and tow her out of Plymouth. Oddly, this was not accomplished by several longboats manned by brawny matelots lustily belting out a traditional sea-shanty, but by a couple of RIBs. They may have electric engines, but ‘carbon’-free their production ain’t.
Let’s look at the supposedly ‘zero-emissions’, ‘carbon’-free yacht itself. It’s built of carbon fibre. (Remember, we sceptics aren’t the ones who started the misuse of scientific terminology for political effect.) Now, the production process for building a carbon-fibre yacht is estimated to be around 14 times as energy-intensive, and thus in ‘carbon’, i.e. CO2, emissions, as that for building one of equivalent length in steel. Not only that. The epoxy resins used in the construction of Greta’s Ark are different and are all organic materials made from petroleum and significant amounts of natural gas.
Some intriguing revelations about the crewing arrangements emerged soon after departure. It turns out that the three westbound crossing crew will be flying back from New York to Europe, while the replacement crew of five will be flying from Europe to New York for the return passage.
So that’s three transatlantic flights for Greta’s Ark westbound crew to return from New York, plus five more for its replacement eastbound crew to get to New York. I’m guessing those flights won’t be in Economy, either. What’s their ‘carbon’-footprint? Why can’t she just fly to New York with her father? Or even address the United Nations via Skype?
Even though this eco-boondoggle has its own website on which the yacht’s progress can be tracked, some of us prefer to access more independent sources of information. So it was some surprise to see that, last Friday, on the Marine Traffic website, it appeared that the yacht’s position had stopped being reported at 0132 BST on Thursday morning, a mere 9½ hours after leaving Plymouth, and still identifiably in the English Channel Western Approaches.
Which at the time struck me as slightly odd; as did the fact that, as far as I know – and I’ll happily stand corrected if wrong – there were no news broadcasts from the air filming the yacht at sea. Given the obsequious near-24/7 coverage pre-departure, I mused, wouldn’t one have expected at least Sky News and the BBC to have arranged that, when the yacht was still only about 1½ to 2 hours flying time at most from either Cornwall or Brittany?
Fast forward to Saturday, and a possible answer, with a picture transmitted from Greta’s Ark itself. Look closely at the right-hand image.
So yesterday Greta Thunberg shared her boat's position (first pic) and tweeted a photo (second pic). Given the position, what is that in the background? There have been unproven rumours of a powered chase boat. Any thoughts? Seems rather close. pic.twitter.com/sd2cGMy48W
Add all these up – the construction, the crew flights, the possibility, though denied, of a chase boat – and suddenly this venture doesn’t look anything like as green as it’s made out to be. But in this inversion of the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, we aren’t allowed to say so.
This entire eco-stunt, the sacerdotal reverence with which it’s being treated, and the invective heaped on those who dare challenge it, is in many ways an ideal metaphor for how deep-Green ideology has now acquired all the characteristics of a religious cult.
Like other pre-Enlightenment belief systems, it posits a prelapsarian state of grace, a pristine, innocent, nature-harmonious Rousseau-ean past which has been corrupted by modernity, industrialisation and capitalism, notwithstanding their having wrought in just 250 years an improvement in the human condition unprecedented in previous millennia.
It holds that the restoration of environmental equilibrium, the reversal of Man’s Fall from the Garden of Eden, requires above all sacrifice and submission to an elite, who will dispense indulgences – aka ‘carbon’-credits – while intolerantly silencing and excommunicating the heretics.
If the contradictions behind the Odyssey of the Greta’s Ark help more people to see that more clearly, then it may yet prove beneficial. Though mercifully not in the way it intends.
Meanwhile back in the present day United States of America…
Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) ripped into the entire Biden Administration for economic mismanagement. “Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — who was also captain of ‘Team Transitory Inflation’ — announced she’s really sorry but inflation’s not gonna [sic] be transitory, it’s gonna [sic] be with us for a long while,” Kennedy recounted. “In other words, she does not have a solution to inflation but she really admires the problem — in other words, get used to it.” This comes shortly after Yellen admitted she was wrong on her stance on inflation after assuring the public for years that prices would cool.
President Biden actually admitted there was nothing he could do – or think of doing – to lower the cost of goods. “There’s a lot going on right now but the idea we’re going to be able to click a switch, bring down the cost of gasoline, is not likely in the near term. Nor is it with regard to food,”Biden said at the White House. “We can’t take immediate action that I’m aware of yet to figure out how we’re bringing down the prices of gasoline back to $3 a gallon. And we can’t do that immediately with regard to food prices either,” he said. This is why action needs to be taken before a problem becomes a crisis. Biden went on to yet again blame Putin for rising inflation, dismissing any blame, and shrugging his shoulders as if there is nothing he can do as the president of the world’s largest economy.
Garnering laughter, Kennedy jokingly said that gas is so expensive it would “be cheaper to buy cocaine and just run everywhere.” The price comparison may be something for Hunter to weigh in on.
Kennedy’s humorous outburst was truthful. “Meanwhile her [Yellen’s] boss, President Biden, continues to campaign for more economic chaos by trying to convince us in Congress to raise taxes by $3.5 trillion by expanding an already generous welfare state and by turning cops into social workers,” he said. He went on to mock Vice President Harris for having an “epiphany” and realizing that illegal immigration was a problem. “She wants American companies to invest $3 billion — not in America — but in Central American countries,” he said. “Many of which hate us,” Kennedy said, while also noting some of that money would be stolen.
The Biden Administration has no solution for inflation or the immigration crisis. They currently are throwing money everywhere and worsening every situation they pretend to be solving.
Love it. (How DARE you!!! lol)
Brilliant. Thank you.