How many posh yachts will we need? Environmentalism is now just a millinarian doom cult.

Raedwald observes:

With a ten day passage time to New York, the new J-class yachts that will need to be built to carry the current 3m passengers a year who currently fly from LHR to JFK will give business to Europe's shipyards for years ahead. Suggestions that this is all just money-grabbing virtue signalling by Saint Greta's parents were strongly denied.

I'm not any sort of climate change denier just a tad sceptical about some of the scarier claims. And when the Jeanne d'Arc of environmental extremists sets sail on a billionaire's yacht because she won't fly, I realise that we're being played here.

As I pointed out the other day the extremists need to be run out of town on rail. They are at best misguided and at worst - that other great saint of environmental extremism springs to mind here - deeply unpleasant misanthropes. They pretend that crashing the west's economy will somehow help the billion folk still in absolute poverty. Present an endless string of petty gimmicks like banning straws and cultish fads like veganism all aimed to make us guilty about 21st century life and culture. What we have isn't science but a millinarian doom cult little different to those people who climb hills on an appointed day to await the second coming.

John Locke warned us about 'enthusiasm', what he called an 'eruption' of the 'ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain'. Environmentalists are feeding us a faith based on creating a fear of ever more imminent planetary doom - "14 months" is the latest of these doom cultists warnings. They invoke the future in the most polemic of terms intended to stir up those ungrounded fancies - "think of the children"

The deadline for protecting our children from a ruined climate is close at hand

And so it goes - worst case is piled on worst case and environmentalists point to their desired apocalyptic horse riders - extinction, famine, carbon, death - and cry to the heavens. It has become the politics of chicken-licken as those captured by the cult's message of doom cry, scream and wail at those they claim are "doing nothing about the climate emergency". Politicians - left, right and centre - all line up behind the cultists, a tear in their eye, fine words in their mouths, and call for action, for bans, for taxes, for factories to be closed, oil wells capped and mines shut. "We must listen to the young people", they cry (while counting the votes and power they'll get as a result of indulging the doom cult).

Right now the world is largely doing exactly the right thing - moving slowly away from a resource-extractive economy - and there is no need to accelerate this or change the sorts of strategies agreed two decades ago. A marginal change in climate (the most likely scenario) means that current generations are accepting a similarly marginal reduction in the betterment of their lives as a precaution against that climate change becoming less marginal and more problematic. It isn't an emergency, we are not doomed, we don't need to stop flying, become vegan or eschew the convenience of plastic. And we definitely don't need to allow the environmentalist doom cult to dictate our policy responses to environmental challenges.

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