Happy Birthday to Us

Three years ago today, the-Pipeline.org published our first piece. Written by John O'Sullivan, it was our opening salvo in the war against the "man-made climate change" hoax currently bedeviling both policy makers and the public:

People all over the world live healthier, longer, and more prosperous lives with access to a range of physical, cultural, and environmental satisfactions unimaginable to our grandparents. These two aims go together in a more fundamental sense. Both improving people’s lives and reversing environmental damage depend upon technical and scientific progress and in particular upon the availability of cheap and reliable energy that powers it. It would be environmentally regressive to return to a recent world of smokestack pollution, acid rain, and wasteful energy usage; but it would be socially regressive to return to an older world of untreatable epidemics, rural backwardness, widespread malnutrition and regular famines.

Two important things have occurred in recent years to make that possible. First, environmentalism has mutated from a rational movement for prudent regulation that reconciles growth with ecology into an almost religious cult that believes all development is damaging to the environment. There are more moderate and sensible environmentalists still around, of course. Increasingly, however, extremist Greens call the shots to which politicians, governments, and activists respond.

Their leading figures predict at frequent intervals that unless their policies are adopted, the world will come to an end shortly. They are never embarrassed when the world continues and even registers improvements in environmental standards such as air quality and wider human well-being. To avert catastrophes that never arrive on schedule, they propose extreme measures on a range of matters: eradicating the use of fossil fuels on an accelerated schedule, phasing out nuclear energy production, switching to “renewable” energy sources before their reliability is established, prohibiting the building of dams that might disturb local species, and raising energy prices substantially to subsidize such changes.

History to earth: the sky is not falling.

"Catastrophes that never arrive on schedule," of course, have been with us for literally thousands of years. They pop up repeatedly in European history, generally religiously inspired; the End, it seems, is always Near. The poor deluded child known as Greta Thunberg, shamelessly exploited by malevolent Cloward-Piven regressives who want to impose both their lunacy and their privations on the rest of us, is just the latest in a long line of numinous crackpots who have afflicted the planet with their fantastic fears and punitive solutions.

What once was viewed as God's anger at having his commandments disobeyed has today molted into Gaia's anger at having her virginity defiled. Reversionary paganism has replace waning Christianity as the animating factor, but the principle is the same, as is the villain: us. And so I followed O'Sullivan's piece that same day with one of my own:

Today, we have the New Luddites, political "progressives" except that instead of being against the future, they are against the past, and seek to return what used to be called the First World to Third World standards of technological backwardness. Fittingly, the public face of this Green movement is that of an angry Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, who has turned playing hooky from school into a career. Issuing dire warnings of geological calamity with the certainty that comes from invincible ignorance married to an unwonted sense of entitlement blended with an inherited self-loathing of her culture, she seems everywhere at once, a grim prophetess of incipient doom that would put Cassandra to shame.  The doomed Trojan princess, however, was hated not because she foretold calamity, but because she was always right. Thunberg is celebrated precisely because she espies calamity, and yet is always wrong.

What has to go? Well, pretty much everything.  Automobiles and airplanes, to start; they burn "fossil fuels" and therefore are contributing to the chimerical phenomenon of, alternately, global warming, global cooling, or the catch-all term, "climate change." Private cars, even those powered by electricity once the sale of petrol and diesel automobiles is banned; eventually they will have to go, too, and citizens forced into public transportation for the good of Gaia.  The entire system of light and heavy manufacturing, henceforth to be powered electrically by windmills and solar panels. Homes will no longer be heated by fuel oil, but by other means -- including, presumably, heavy jackets indoors during the dead of winter, since in order to "save the planet" we will not long be burning wood, coal, or even turf. Diets will undergo drastic change, as the cattle and dairy industries come under attack. Indeed, even childbirth will be restricted.

That all of this is merely harum-scarum is self-evident. "Climate change" has been going on for centuries, with no help from mankind.  The real goal of the "Extinction Rebellion" is not to rescue a anthropomorphic damsel in distress -- Mother Earth -- but to control you: where you work, what you eat, where you go (you will essentially be a prisoner in self-driving electric vehicles), how or even whether you will keep from freezing to death in the winter. Imagine a hell created by fascist vegans and you will have an idea of what Planet Thunberg will be like.

"At long last, do something about the climate catastrophe."

Where all of this is leading was clear to us from the start. The modern Left has long been a suicide cult, ready to bare its throats to the barbarian knives of a weaponized Islamic death cult as long as we rational creatures go with them. The problem was, not enough westerners were being killed fast enough by religious fanatics. But in "climate change," the Left has found something even better: a reason for wholesale depopulation of the planet:

A Cambridge academic has proposed a radical new way to solve climate change – letting humanity become extinct. Patricia MacCormack, a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, has just released her new book The Ahuman Manifesto. The book argues that due to the damage done to other living creatures on Earth, we should start gradually phasing out reproduction. But rather than offering a bleak look at the future of humanity, it has generated discussion due to its joyful and optimistic tone, as it sets out a positive view for the future of Earth - without mankind.

“I arrived at this idea from a couple of directions. I was introduced to philosophy due to my interest in feminism and queer theory, so reproductive rights have long been an interest to me – this led me to learn more about animal rights, which is when I became vegan... humanity has caused mass problems and one of them is creating this hierarchical world where white, male, heterosexual and able-bodied people are succeeding, and people of different races, genders, sexualities and those with disabilities are struggling to get that.

“The book also argues that we need to dismantle religion, and other overriding powers like the church of capitalism or the cult of self, as it makes people act upon enforced rules rather than respond thoughtfully to the situations in front of them.”

Molon labe, nutbags.

As I noted in response: "So the next time you're tempted to swallow the myth of "man-made climate change" that's going to kill us all, remember that the queer-theory atheist feminist vegans want you dead anyway, so why bother to indulge their lunacy? Them first -- the rest of us are happy to take our chances, just as mankind has been doing for thousands of years and will continue to do so for thousands more."

In short, we stand by our opening statements.