Thames Tap news editor Alan Bunce asks whether environmentalists will still follow Bill Gates now he seems to have changed his views.
Just before this year’s COP30 could get under way, the green lobby’s very own Santa Claus dropped something of a truth bomb.
All the usual activity you’d expect ahead of a climate conference has been taking place: Amazonian rainforests have been destroyed for a four-lane highway so delegates can get from their private jets to the venue, the UK Government is sneaking through plans to destroy woodlands for wind turbines and solar panels in England via the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and a study has warned the green blob’s bright idea to dim the Sun might just wreak havoc with the weather.
Smothering the countryside in solar panels and then dimming the sun. Where do you even start?
But none of this should surprise anyone – the environment is always the biggest casualty of the environmentalists – but what did raise eyebrows was when Bill Gates, the Father Christmas of the movement, did a 180 on all his climate catastrophising.
I searched the BBC News Climate page for a report on what he said but strangely, news of his U-turn, reported elsewhere, was nowhere to be found on our state broadcaster’s dedicated climate section. It’s almost as though balance and fairness isn’t a priority. Apparently, bosses (presumably those left after the latest bias scandal) are going to assess bias in the BBC’s climate change coverage. So they are going to mark their own homework again. What could possibly go wrong?
Gates said climate change will not lead to humanity’s demise and we should focus on health, agriculture and development of areas of the world that need it. Well, for me, there are plenty of red flags in that statement alone, coming from a billionaire landowner with interests in big pharma.
But what makes this interesting is where it leaves the rest of the green industrial complex, where many earn a living by carrying the message on behalf of elites, like him, that the world is ending.
Our industry has no shortage of voices claiming allegiance to the only opinion allowed on climate change. Whenever I’m at a conference and someone talks about ‘our journey towards net zero’ it always puts me in mind of a hostage video. Perhaps, now that Gates has found better things to do, those people might ask questions, rather than following the crowd first and thinking about where this is taking the country later.
Their Archangel Greta has long since given up on climate change, now that Gaza is top of her agenda. So without two of the leading doom-mongers, how will the many people following them convince the world that the apocalypse, which has been just around the corner for the last 50 years, is still just around the corner?
Well it seems they are intent on frightening the very youngest into joining their religion with their plan to tell five year olds the world is ending.
What five year old is going to know that politically-driven alarmists have been predicting doom and gloom since before their grandparents were born? When in reality extreme weather has always occurred.
When I grew up in the 1960s I was shown many pictures of the street I lived in under water when the Thames burst its banks in 1947. I wonder what caused that. But I know what will be blamed if it happens this winter.
Of course reality is quite incompatible with our deranged Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. Someone could invent the perfect solution to his ‘climate crisis’ tomorrow and you absolutely know it would be the last thing he and his ilk would want.
It seems last month we found an additional 1.1 billion barrels of oil and gas in the North Sea. Yet Miliband has barred new licences so we continue to buy oil and gas from Norway. Brilliant.
Someone explain to me how that makes sense. And while you’re about it, tell me how shutting the steelworks at Port Talbot makes sense, since we just import it instead so the emissions are from someone else. Well done us.
Similarly, the soulless empty suit that is our Prime Minister will not be deterred by anything as trivial as reality. For him, climate change is the ticket to the global government he dreams of and the destruction of the country and our way of life is the price he is willing for us to pay.
He cares so much about our planet he flew 9,000 miles to Rio to lecture us on how to save it. Earlier this year, he also took a private jet to watch the Women’s Euros. At least that might suggest he knows what one of those is now.
And while these are student politicians trying to act like adults, what of the adults? Two years ago the previous Government’s Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho said in a speech: “Nothing will distract us from achieving net zero or driving forward renewables.”
But now in opposition she tweets: “Net zero has become a religion and anyone who dares question it is deemed a heretic. But we have to be honest – it’s making us all poorer and it’s making climate change worse.”
The political winds are more predictable than those which are meant to power our homes.
And once Rachel Reeves has delivered her Autumn Statement later this month, how many will be left cheering on net zero when, on top of the world’s highest energy bills, they have extra tax to pay?
Reality is going to leave a lot more people and organisations faced with a choice of cheering on their own destruction or believing the evidence of their own eyes. Now that every institution would rather tell you about its climate credentials than its original purpose, how will they go forward when they no longer have the backing of Billionaire Bill – the man who led them there?
How many people can’t get appointments, operations or anything else the NHS was actually meant to provide while it tries and fails to tackle the ‘climate emergency’?
Nonsense like this – and there’s a lot more – came about through following the likes of Bill Gates 1.0. Will they follow him in his new direction? Or wait to see which way the wind blows?
Views at ukpropertyforums.com are those of individual contributors.
Image: Jan.boedeker, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
© Thames Tap (powered by ukpropertyforums.com).
Sign up to receive our weekly free journal, The Forum here.
