'Climate' Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

Currently visiting family in England. The other day, I caught the news that the Scottish government (Scottish National Party and the Greens in coalition), with undisguised anguish, had dropped its 2030 target of reducing emissions by 75 percent compared with the baseline of 1990. The Climate Change Committee (CCC), which advises the government on these matters, said the measures that would be needed to achieve the target by the end of the decade were "beyond what is credible."

Hmm? Getting base-load power from windmills is obviously harder than it looks. Chris Stark, the chief executive of the CCC, reportedly said that the target was "too stretching" and there was no plan in place to get anywhere close to hitting it.

That is a failure of the Scottish government to bring to the Scottish people, and the Scottish Parliament, a climate change plan that is fit for purpose…It's a shame we have to give that message to the Scottish government but what's behind it is a lack of progress all round.

I saw the Scottish government’s Cabinet Secretary for contradictory affairs; namely for Wellbeing Economy, Net-Zero, and Energy, thirty-one-year-old Mairi McAllan, telling the Scottish Parliament that the government’s 2030 “climate-change” target is now "out of reach". She blamed the U.K. government of course for not providing the mendicant Scots with more money. However, she assured the Parliament that the target of net-zero by 2045, five years before the Sassenachs, still stands. It will not. And, if it did, the Scots would need an even bigger begging bowl than the one they already have.

Drop in the bucket.

I was also struck by references to Scotland tackling the “climate crisis.” It is bad enough when the Australian government has similarly deluded aspirations. Australia’s population is now approaching twenty-seven million. Close Australia down tomorrow and the carbon-dioxide invigilators at the IPCC would hardly notice, if they noticed at all. “What is that tiny blip,” Jim Skea (IPCC Chairman) asked, peering intently at the upward sloping CO2-emissions graph?” “Nothing, just noise,” the boffin replied.

Scotland’s population is less than six million. I am sorry Ms. McAllan, but Scotland does not matter one infinitesimal wit. When the planet is “boiling” because of China’s and India’s recalcitrance, net-zero-achieving impoverished Scots will finally realize that they went along with a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And, of course, the planet will, in fact, suffer no ill effects from having a little more of the life-giving gas CO2 in the atmosphere. Thus, the gall of having sacrificed so much to the climate-cult gods will be doubly insufferable.

Incidentally, never fear for present-day politicians in all of this. Who would? Well, you never know. In any event, they will have moved on, into their various versions of Martha’s Vineyard, with armed guards at the gates, before the hoi polloi know that they have been conned, fleeced, hoodwinked, and screwed.