Via Mr E, this truly nasty little piece by Madeline Bunting:
This is the kind of politics no mainstream politician dares address. It requires abandoning a half-century of political assumptions: your children will not be better off than you – in fact, in many significant material ways they will be worse off; car use will have to be dramatically curtailed, as will flights; working hours will have to be reordered to share employment; foreign holidays will be rarer; cheap food, a thing of the past. And along with these unpalatable home truths will be the need for intervention in the minutiae of people’s lives: how much you heat your home or use water; how you move and eat.
The role of state intervention will be huge; people’s choices will have to be “edited”, admits Anthony Giddens in his recent book, The Politics of Climate Change. Leaving individuals to find the moral strength to resist the cultural pressures will simply not be effective (the MPs’ expenses saga would seem to justify this conclusion). Our lives will have to be regulated in ways that we can’t imagine. Consumer advertising will have to be curbed to prevent it exploiting insecurity and anxiety to create new markets. The fact that the Australian government has banned all light bulbs that are not low energy is a glimpse of what is required.
What will be difficult is the governance of these changes: what kind of state will be required to push these changes through and what powers will it need to do so? Giddens suggests that there will have to be a return to small self-reliant communities and perhaps they will have to have a role in the distribution and monitoring of carbon allocations. Crucially, how will we weigh the loss of personal freedoms against the hope of survival of human beings?
There, in three paragraphs, is the evil of the eco-loony position; total totalitarianism, absolute subjugation of free will, assimilation by the collective, the kind of ideology we went to war against in 1939, the ideology that caused us to endure a cold war for four decades; the ideology of the gulag, genocide (Mr E draws a useful parallel with the Khmer Rouge) and the concentration camp. And, no, I am not over reacting, this really is the most remarkably nasty, wicked piece of writing I’ve seen for some while and given the stiff competition in the guise of the usual sanctimonious lecturing, self-righteous hectoring and control freakery drivel that dribbles from the keyboards of Guardian hacks, that really is something.
I do not presume for one moment that the concentration camp or genocide is what Bunting is advocating, but history tells us that this type of state intervention in our lives leads inevitably to these events – what to do, after all, with the dissenters (and they will be legion)? Those who, like me, will respond to being “edited” with; “over my dead body”? How will refusniks be forced to bend to the will of this totalitarian state if there is not some form of sanction? A sanction that will need to cope with many rather than few?
There is no justification whatsoever for the minutiae of our lives to be subject to regulation, for the state to pry and poke about, telling us what to eat, where we may go on holiday and whether we may travel where we want, when we desire.
The answer to Bunting’s implied question; “what type of government?” is; a truly evil one, one run by the likes of Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler. Of course Bunting isn’t bothered by the evil she proposes; after all, people like Bunting always assume that they will be the ones “editing people’s choices”. My God, if ever there was a sinister euphemism, that, surely, is it.
Once again, the Guardian demonstrates that it is a repository for wickedness of the highest order. The Guardianista really are quite the most hateful misanthropes.
She’s nuts, they are all completely nuts, they pre-suppose that there is such a thing as ‘global warming’, oops, ‘climate change’; that if there is, it is man-made; that if it is man-made that there is something we can do about it; and that if there is something we can do about it that people wouldn’t adjust to the changing conditions of their own accord; and that if they didn’t, that ‘the government’ could do something about it etc etc (continued page 94).
I mean, if we agreed that we should be using less fossil fuels (and to be honest, I can see arguments that say we should use less), all we have to do is hike the tax on it, cut other taxes accordingly and leave people to their own devices.
It’s simpler even than that. As it becomes more scarce, prices will rise and the oil industry will be motivated to find alternatives or go bust.
And, yes, we should be looking at using it less – not least to release ourselves from dependence on the Middle East.
LR, that’s one good argument, the others are:
a) Demand is price inelastic, so the tax doesn’t actually change behaviour much (the hallmark of a less-bad tax)
b) If we slap a tax of £1 per litre on it, then we are insulated against future price rises, i.e. if the raw materials currently cost 30p per litre then the pump price is £1.30 – even if oil price trebles, the pump price only goes up by half, to £1.90, which is a bummer in the short term but not the end of the world.
c) It’s a lot simpler than road pricing and achieves the same end but without the spy cameras.
Disclaimer – I own a car and I don’t believe in MMGW.
MadBunty has been gaga for years. I don’t bother reading her stuff any more.
Just to pick one sentence out of so many, this one is quite stupid, in addition to it’s manifest evil :
“… intervention in the minutiae of people’s lives: how much you heat your home or use water; how you move and eat.”
Lets pick the bones out of it a bit. I mean, even say we were to accept, in extremis, that MMGW were a reality and so dire that some kind of heavy regulation were needed (I don’t, but just theoretically), Bunting would _still_ be batshit crazy _and_ wrong.
Firstly, how much I heat my house is not necessarily directly related to my damaging emissions. I could be using renewable electricity from the wind, or harnessing the power of the sun to run a solar furnace and rendering dolphins from sustainable fisheries into bio diesel to run my carbon capturing generator.
How much I use water is also entirely irrelevant. There is no shortage of water in the UK. Parts of the country have a problem with supply infrastructure, no doubt, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with climate change of any stripe. The part of the country where I live, come the summer, will be shipping water south by the convoy load while we are wondering if we need to leave our lawn sprinklers going overnight again just to keep the path clean.
Again, Batshit Bunty makes no actual connection between the use of the resource and it’s potential to damage the environment (e.g. emissions caused by burning fuel to purify water)
I’m going to skip past the “how you move” part, because I can’t come up with a response for that any less vehement than wondering where I’d hide her corpse.
This has nothing to do with the environment, and everything to do with puritanism. By proxy of course, because I’m sure her 2.4 kids, London suburb, SUV to school but I recycle and buy organic produce from Covent Garden lifestyle is deemed sustainable.
It is the terror of the future, of change, of being lost and, I daresay, completely forgotten that is at work here. All of the glorious phantasies of a Rescuer God, and then of Humanism and, now, State Liberal Credentiallism and ‘taking action now’ above all in other people’s lives…it is so that ‘we’ will somehow have even a tiny bit of say about the shape of existence in a century. It is the most dread-full heartbreaking wishful thinking. People calling for this sort of stuff probably actually believe that ‘we’ are somehow way ahead of Nature. And, I imagine that they figure also that they’ll get into the history books ‘just like Churchill’. Or something. And, meanwhile, there is the inside shot as a Trained Liberal & State Professionalist, living the snug, smug life with blind steve’s 2.4 kids, SUV and a bit of recycling whilst quaffing fair trade coffee from Covent Garden…. These people’s intentions are as pure as the (acid free!) blowing snow, just ask them, they’ll tell you so. But their shadows are blacker than Hell. When I am really on a roll I seriously think, too, that nine out of ten would be better off dead — and I just happen to have the finest and most ghandean character of anyone I know. So…I /know/ what these other skunks are really like, too. And so do you. It comes from common ordinary down-to-earth self-knowledge. Which, if these barely disguised tyrants had any at all, means they would shut up and not reveal their real plans with every syrupy bland sneer about the life-ways of ordinary people. Fortunately, thanks to the general unconsciousness of elites as of all human groups, it is all out in the open and so we as individual moral beings do stand a chance.
Likewise, Gordon Brown’s call for an ‘independent regulatory body’ of the Parliament is another faeculent load of this continuously overwrought ‘governance’ phantasy of aetiolated stringy complexity, complexity everywhere and all around, and not a drop of honesty anywhere.
You have over there unlike us here in this WalMart sewer, where we are lumbered with these thieves for no less than two years at a go, a remedy.
It is a general election.
Now.
Why so?
The electorate are the governors of the Parliament, I do believe.