The Insanity of Environmentalism By James Reed

As noted by Brendan O’Neill, the present environmentalist campaigns such as Just Stop Oil, are like the climate change activists, campaigners for the end of industrial civilisation. If they did get what they wanted, tomorrow, the end of fossil fuels, tens of thousands of people would be out of work, with disastrous kick-on effects for the economy, crashing it on just that basis alone. That is the optimistic scenario, for as has already been seen with the Ukraine War, and fossil fuel restrictions from Russia, there will be a drop in the fossil fuels needed in all aspects of food production, from fertilisers, to the plough, and finally to transport of the finished product. Hence a food shortage, if not a famine.

Yet, as noted, the environment list crowd are urban New Class, who do not have to dirty their hands getting food. It is thus easy to jump on the protest bandwagon, as there is no personal cost. Yet, if there was the ban on fossil fuels, these weaklings would be the first to perish.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/10/environmentalism-is-austerity-on-steroids/

“It is hard to know what to say to this, except: ‘The gall.’ It requires industrial levels of chutzpah for a member of Just Stop Oil, or one of its media cheerleaders, like Owen Jones, to bemoan top-down attacks on living standards. For if JSO were to get its way, if its Malthusian dream of leaving fossil fuels in the ground were ever to be realised, it would make Osborne’s post-2008 austerity programme look like an era of milk and honey. The impact of JSO’s Anti-Industrial Revolution, its misanthropic urge to wind back modernity itself, would be truly dire – especially for the working classes.

Environmentalism is austerity on steroids. Consider one of JSO’s key demands: ‘No new oil or gas.’ This would be – there’s no other word for it – psychotic. Not only would such a crazed policy instantly throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, by decommissioning the rigs and mines where they make their living – it would also make it all but impossible to keep society going. The infantile moralism of modern greens would have us believe that vile oil and gas are only used to propel 4x4s and airplanes packed with the rich and other ‘bad things’. In truth, every facet of our lives requires energy from oil and gas. The delivery of foodstuffs, house-building, schools, hospitals, life-support machines, heaters to protect the elderly from death in winter – all need energy derived from fossil fuels. Or consider libraries. The left wept when Osborne’s cuts led to library closures, but you try running a library in your post-fossil-fuel dystopia. Without oil, gas, electricity and trees torn down to make books, libraries would cease to exist.

As Alex Epstein argues, to ‘rapidly eliminate fossil-fuel use’ would make the world ‘an impoverished, dangerous and miserable place for most people’. Fossil fuels provide 80 per cent of the world’s energy. Just three per cent comes from solar and wind power, so beloved of green anti-modernists. And even that measly slice of global energy production is, in Epstein’s words, ‘totally dependent on fossil fuels, especially natural gas, for 24/7 back-up’. That is, if the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, we have to crank up the fossil fuels. Ours is a world in which three billion people still use less electricity than your average American fridge. Agitating for less energy production in such a time is callous beyond belief. It would issue a death sentence on the world’s poor. George Osborne is Father Christmas in comparison with these crusaders against the gains and wonders of modernity.

We are already getting daily tasters of how destructive eco-austerity can be. The Net Zero ideology, embraced by governments across the West, aims to do in slow-motion what JSO would do overnight: wean mankind off fossil fuels. And its consequences are awful. Farms closed down, farmers losing their jobs, truckers’ lives being made more difficult, driving being made more expensive, air travel once again becoming the preserve of the rich, power stations going unbuilt… the elites’ unhinged hostility towards fossil fuels has already birthed all of this. Imagine how much worse it would get if JSO’s vision of a fossil-free world came to fruition.”