Just remove some of the fringe waffle and a whole lot of conspiracy theories are sounding and proving evermore credible.
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
This essay echoes an oft-repeated contrast between two possible theories – either the idea that everything continues as normal in a sane way or that things follow ‘loony’ ideas of government conspiracies.
As always, the middle ground tends to be more likely – the governments want to push something forward and use fear to persuade the public to go along with them. This is not so much a conspiracy as oiling things to help them to move more easily.
I have always believed that the British government wanted to get away from dependence on Russia and The Middle East for its future energy requirements and had conveniently latched on to global warming to help things along. Although people seem convinced that AGW is a fact, this has been done by means of teaching programmes in primary schools and removing funding from deniers. It is definitely not crystal clear.
Margaret Thatcher seemed to fall for the AGW fraud, and some say she used it to close our coal mines. If this is true, she put the UK at greater dependence on other countries for energy.
My father and his father were coal miners, and he did everything possible to ensure that I did not follow them into the mines. No amount of money would get me into any mine, so I have some sympathy with Arthur Scargill, but we live in a global economy and if we had paid our miners a higher wage, we would have become far less competitive.
Thatcher’s policies allowed gas to be used in power stations and so we did have a period of lower energy prices, but now the gas is running out and any coal looks to be in the ground for ever. Renewable energy is completely useless without storage, and we have not developed a cheap storage system, and that is before the huge cost of renewables is considered and the as yet unmentioned problems of recycling it all at the end of its short life.
Our nuclear industry has been disaster with safe, but expensive and unreliable designs which we had to abandon in the end. New nuclear stations are complex and extremely expensive. It will be interesting to see how Hinkley turns out.
We now have the ridiculous situation where Bill Gates has become an expert on vaccines and nuclear power stations. This is the man who could not prevent his computers being infected with viruses.
Well, on the bright side, we still have hundreds of years reserves of quality coal left, so if “push comes to shove” in terms of us being able to produce or buy in enough energy, we can always start mining it again.
Alan Thorpe
2 years ago
All the people who lecture us on change, from Meghan Markel to Schwab, have one thing in common. They want to force change on us but will never accept that it applies to them.
However, we have seen governments forcing a new and untested vaccine on healthy populations which has succeeded by generating fear about a virus that has a death risk on slightly higher than influenza. It normally takes several years for a new vaccine to go through rigorous animal testing before human trials and this has been completely ignored with the coronavirus vaccines. Who knows what the long-term effects will be?
Fran Martinez
2 years ago
It would be quite sad if by rushing vaccine testing it ended up having some unitended long term reproductive side effects. The Japanese have taken a look at the bio-distribution in rats of the vaccine over time and they see that it accumulates in the ovaries and the bone marrow. Will that cause infertility? We hope not, but we do not know…. https://trialsitenews.com/should-you-get-vaccinated/
Cheryl Jones
2 years ago
It’s not capitalism per se that’s the problem, it’s globalised, technocratic, neoliberalism. Big brother is watching and wants it all. And it’s all for our benefit of course…
jonathan carter-meggs
2 years ago
The likes of the WEDF should be disbanded. The liberal intellectuals are disconnected from the real world lives of the global population and yet sit in judgement on us all. Their solutions are always interventionist and top down originating from a position of arrogant superiority. Capitalism is not broken and does immense good, but the purchasing of influence it enables (eg Bezos, Zuckerberg) in governments and over all of our lives is where its value to humanity is corrupted. Solutions to real world problems are rarely discovered by group initiatives or governments but come from a near infinite number of people trying something different. Let people get on with it unhindered by government, taxes, activists, do-gooders, billionaires, and everyone else who thinks they know best how I should live my life.
Christian Filli
2 years ago
“Like the world’s dullest Bond villain, ‘Davos Man’ is forever trying to remake the world in his image.” – what a great line. The only problem, however, is that villains are usually anything but dull. Some are quite charming and charismatic, and they are surrounded by incredibly skilled enablers who ensure their vision is realized.
Just remove some of the fringe waffle and a whole lot of conspiracy theories are sounding and proving evermore credible.
This essay echoes an oft-repeated contrast between two possible theories – either the idea that everything continues as normal in a sane way or that things follow ‘loony’ ideas of government conspiracies.
As always, the middle ground tends to be more likely – the governments want to push something forward and use fear to persuade the public to go along with them. This is not so much a conspiracy as oiling things to help them to move more easily.
I have always believed that the British government wanted to get away from dependence on Russia and The Middle East for its future energy requirements and had conveniently latched on to global warming to help things along. Although people seem convinced that AGW is a fact, this has been done by means of teaching programmes in primary schools and removing funding from deniers. It is definitely not crystal clear.
Margaret Thatcher seemed to fall for the AGW fraud, and some say she used it to close our coal mines. If this is true, she put the UK at greater dependence on other countries for energy.
My father and his father were coal miners, and he did everything possible to ensure that I did not follow them into the mines. No amount of money would get me into any mine, so I have some sympathy with Arthur Scargill, but we live in a global economy and if we had paid our miners a higher wage, we would have become far less competitive.
Thatcher’s policies allowed gas to be used in power stations and so we did have a period of lower energy prices, but now the gas is running out and any coal looks to be in the ground for ever. Renewable energy is completely useless without storage, and we have not developed a cheap storage system, and that is before the huge cost of renewables is considered and the as yet unmentioned problems of recycling it all at the end of its short life.
Our nuclear industry has been disaster with safe, but expensive and unreliable designs which we had to abandon in the end. New nuclear stations are complex and extremely expensive. It will be interesting to see how Hinkley turns out.
We now have the ridiculous situation where Bill Gates has become an expert on vaccines and nuclear power stations. This is the man who could not prevent his computers being infected with viruses.
Gas is not running out.
Well, on the bright side, we still have hundreds of years reserves of quality coal left, so if “push comes to shove” in terms of us being able to produce or buy in enough energy, we can always start mining it again.
All the people who lecture us on change, from Meghan Markel to Schwab, have one thing in common. They want to force change on us but will never accept that it applies to them.
However, we have seen governments forcing a new and untested vaccine on healthy populations which has succeeded by generating fear about a virus that has a death risk on slightly higher than influenza. It normally takes several years for a new vaccine to go through rigorous animal testing before human trials and this has been completely ignored with the coronavirus vaccines. Who knows what the long-term effects will be?
It would be quite sad if by rushing vaccine testing it ended up having some unitended long term reproductive side effects. The Japanese have taken a look at the bio-distribution in rats of the vaccine over time and they see that it accumulates in the ovaries and the bone marrow. Will that cause infertility? We hope not, but we do not know….
https://trialsitenews.com/should-you-get-vaccinated/
It’s not capitalism per se that’s the problem, it’s globalised, technocratic, neoliberalism. Big brother is watching and wants it all. And it’s all for our benefit of course…
The likes of the WEDF should be disbanded. The liberal intellectuals are disconnected from the real world lives of the global population and yet sit in judgement on us all. Their solutions are always interventionist and top down originating from a position of arrogant superiority. Capitalism is not broken and does immense good, but the purchasing of influence it enables (eg Bezos, Zuckerberg) in governments and over all of our lives is where its value to humanity is corrupted. Solutions to real world problems are rarely discovered by group initiatives or governments but come from a near infinite number of people trying something different. Let people get on with it unhindered by government, taxes, activists, do-gooders, billionaires, and everyone else who thinks they know best how I should live my life.
“Like the world’s dullest Bond villain, ‘Davos Man’ is forever trying to remake the world in his image.” – what a great line. The only problem, however, is that villains are usually anything but dull. Some are quite charming and charismatic, and they are surrounded by incredibly skilled enablers who ensure their vision is realized.
.