The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 116
You have probably heard of “Net Zero,” the unrealistically ambitious target of having no net greenhouse gas emissions by some point in the relatively near future (2030, maybe 2050 at the latest). A report filed in 2019 by the prestigious government-funded UK organization of engineers and scientists, UK FIRES, thinks Net Zero is not enough and is pushing for an insanely aggressive program called “Absolute Zero,” absolutely zero emissions by 2050. What does it entail? Among other things, no flights, no container shipping, no red meat consumption, no cement, no new steel production, and no fossil fuel use for any reason, even plastics, by 2050. How do they expect this to be possible? Draconian governmental action combined with drastic semi-voluntary reductions in individual quality of life for all citizens. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay reads the Executive Summary of the UK FIRES “Absolute Zero” report (pdf, hosted by Cambridge University, by the way) to expose the unworkable, catastrophic insanity of their zero-emissions program in the UK and beyond, warning that it sets the stage for a Western Holodomor.
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7 comments
You think Margaret Thatcher pushed this agenda just to get rid of the striking miners, back in the eighties?
My gut feeling tells me she could not have foreseen the immense consequences of exaggerating the negative impact of British coal on the global environment.
The Geogia Guidestones expressed the wish to have a human population of 500,000,000, with means half a billion. 94% reduction in the human population. I guess this is the way to go. But one quibble: reprocessing used cars and such really does get high-grade steel at a much lower cost. That’ how Germany got up to game so quickly from 1933-1939.
A quibble. Although the whole idea about CO2 is wrong, reusing steel is how Germany got its army back up for WW2. They bought a lot of scrap iron in the form of junked cars. It does take a lot less energy to make high-grade steel from that than it does from iron ore. So that part’s probably a good idea.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn discussed how to put a stop to tyrants and their schemes in his novel “gulag Archipelago”:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
We must, each of us, take aggressive action against climate-change tyrants by causing them to exhale zero emmissions.
Otherwise, as Solzhenitsyn warns at the end of this excerpt:
“…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
To consent to comply with this Absolute Zero agenda is to consent to commit suicide.
“A World Split Apart
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn’s Commencement Address
Harvard University
June 8, 1978
A Decline in Courage
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts of boldness and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?”
Nietzsche ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ 1883
chapter 29 ‘The Tarantulas’
“Lo, this is the tarantula’s den! Wouldst thou see the tarantula itself? Here hangeth its web: touch this, so that it may tremble.
There cometh the tarantula willingly: Welcome, tarantula! Black on thy back is thy triangle and symbol; and I know also what is in thy soul.
Revenge is in thy soul: wherever thou bitest, there ariseth black scab; with revenge, thy poison maketh the soul giddy!
‘Vengeance will we use, and insult, against all who are not like us’—thus do the tarantula-hearts pledge themselves.
‘And ‘Will to Equality’—that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and against all that hath power will we raise an outcry!’
Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant-frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for ‘equality’: your most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue-words!
And when they call themselves ‘the good and just,’ forget not, that for them to be Pharisees, nothing is lacking but—power!
Verily, no cyclone or whirlwind is Zarathustra: and if he be a dancer, he is not at all a tarantula-dancer!”
“Looked into the future
There was nothing to reveal
For we were just the product
Of the ever spinning wheel…
After all it’s just the revolution I despise
The dawn of revelations and the flower power prize
And I pity those poor children with no sunshine in their eyes
Round and round we go
Round and round and round we go”
Strawbs “Round and Round” from “Hero and Heroine” album 1974
Thank you, James. Great topic of discussion. You’re on track. 👍🏻