Opinion Funny little creatures, politicians. While wielding an awful lot of power, deep down inside, they just wanna be loved. ‘Cos if you don’t love ’em, you’re not gonna vote for them.
Today, 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders fly from around the world to gather in Copenhagen and put on their concerned, serious faces in a bid to save the planet. Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles will also jet in and join the circle jerk. 140 private jets and 1,200 limos will be used. In fact, little Denmark has actually run out of limos, so extra ones have been driven up from Germany to ferry the great and the good around.
Setting aside the estimated 41,000 tons of greenhouse gases produced in getting all these people to Denmark – presumably none of them has heard of videoconferencing – what will actually result from the talks?
What will result from the Copenhagen angst-fest is that you, me, and everyone else in the world will pay more tax and have fewer freedoms. At a time when the global economy is bumping along the bottom, our esteemed leaders will choose not to get the world back on its financial feet, but to exacerbate the situation by taxing us back into the Stone Age.
Holidays in the sun
While you and I will be forbidden to hop on a plane for a couple of weeks in the sun, or even Copenhagen, next year – or at least made to pay a shitload more for the privilege – politicians will bask in the warmth of knowing they have done the right thing. Of course, the right thing for a politician is looking after Number One and you ain’t even Number Two.
The main problem I have with the mad rush to be seen to be doing the right thing isn’t the scientific basis for anthropogenic global warming, or even the way that proper scientific rigor seems to have been thrown out of the window in a bid to secure research grants – it is the horrifying spectre of religion and politics joining forces.
Let’s set aside the fact that even if everyone on the planet turns off their electricity today and shivers miserably in the dark, eating nuts and berries, it will make no damned difference to the climate; and let’s set aside the fact that the only real answer to the problem of people consuming too many resources is for there to be fewer damned people.
We must act
Politicians are on to a winner here: everyone ‘knows’ that global warming is bad and ‘something must be done’. Politicians have to be seen to be doing something, even if they don’t have a bloody clue what that is – look at the invasion of Iraq on the basis of non-existent WMDs, for example.
What is very dangerous indeed here is that the unstoppable tsunami of what has become the AGW religion – it’s not a science any more – means that politicians have done what they always do, jump on a vote-winning bandwagon. And as no politician is prepared to point out that perhaps the climate change emperor has no clothes – and let’s remember that the emperor’s new clothes story was based in Copenhagen – this means that there is no proper political debate about climate change. All politicians are on the same, vote-winning side, queuing up to kiss baby polar bears in exchange for votes. Call it PGW – politicogenic global warming.
As thousands of them (politicians, not polar bears) and the high priests of what has become the most dangerous cult on the planet fly to Denmark to basically screw up your future and to prevent developing countries from developing any more, ask yourself if the politicians have your interest or theirs at heart.
An inconvenient truth
That politicians have been given carte blanche to increase taxes on the basis of saving the planet is a very inconvenient truth indeed.
Do you really expect any of the trillions raised to be used to help the environment apart from building a few economically unviable wind farms?
No. It’ll be spent on the same old crap tax money always goes on – building guns and bombs and better ways to keep tabs on a population still quaking in fear in a hangover from the last great global lie – the war against terror.
And if you’re not convinced that was a lie, consider how many US and British citizens have died in Iraq and Afghanistan compared with how many would have died in terror attacks back home if we hadn’t sent the troops in.
Politicians have got you where they want you, bent over with your wallet open. If you look like stepping out of line, they’ll wheel out another bogeyman to keep you under control. First it was terrorism, right now it’s global warming. What next? My money’s on booze, then eating meat. And that ‘right to keep and bear arms’ thing isn’t long for this world either.
