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Time for a coup

24 Apr 2019 | OP ED Watch

Climate Change News praises Extinction Rebellion for its plan to bypass democracy to get what it wants. They concede that the stunt in London, UK of “disrupting traffic at five busy intersections since Monday, to demand action on the “climate and ecological emergency”… was “not immediately popular, with a YouGov poll finding 52% of people opposed to the tactics, against 36% in support. But the movement has a plan to build consensus for radical emissions cuts” by creating a “citizens’ assembly” instead of going through boring old Parliament. Yeah. And why not a Committee of Public Safety while you’re at it, to silence “enemies” in this crisis?

One of the strangest things about the whole climate alarmist movement is that it doesn’t seem to know what to do with victory or even be able to recognize it. There’s a kind of self-conceit that they’re like, say, civil rights marchers in 1955, brutalized by police, scorned by polite society, ignored by those in power. Thus teen icon Greta Thunberg goes about claiming nothing whatever is being done or even said about climate; in one TED talk she managed to assert both that “Everyone keeps saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all and yet they just carry on like before” and that “You would think the media and every one of our leaders would be talking about nothing else, but they never even mention it.”

Never even mention it? Politicians never mention climate change? Media never mention it? On what planet?

Instead of marginalizing herself with this sort of paranoid fantasy, she becomes a huge hero, addressing the Davos forum and the UN Climate Conference, having more Twitter followers than Green Party leaders, getting nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize to Establishment applause and getting into a David Attenborough film. (Go ahead. Google her… and see how far down any negative results are.) But she’s just babbling. And it’s revealing that her babble makes her a star to rival AOC instead of earning her a trip to the side of the stage. Having won, especially having stormed the “commanding heights” of Western society, the alarmists don’t know what to do with their victory so they storm the ramparts again except from within.

The result is absurd not inspiring. It doesn’t even make sense that Thunberg would say, in the course of a single speech to the elite TED forum, that “Everyone keeps saying that climate change is an existential threat” and that the press and politicians “never even mention it.” Pick one thing to gibber and stick with it, please.

In point of fact there’s hardly an establishment politician in the West who dares question climate change, including Doug Ford, Jason Kenney or Andrew Scheer. And just try getting them to shut up about it. But when it comes to action, because the science is shaky and the economics worse, you get something tepid like Justin Trudeau’s feeble carbon tax piled on top of wasteful regulations instead of replacing them, or something crazy like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s madcap Green New Deal, or a combination from some sober supposedly conservative individual like Angela Merkel that manages to devastate Germany’s energy industry without doing a bit of good. Or someone waving their buttocks or gluing them to something. Or a retreat into fantasy. But we repeat ourselves.

What you don’t get is a workable plan that would do more good than harm. Or an honest discussion of the complexities of climate science and the difficulties in knowing what’s happening let alone what to do, coupled with harsh rhetoric and excitement about discarding normal decision-making procedures and just smashing and grabbing… they don’t even know what.

When you see the enthusiasm with which outlets like Climate Change News hail so-called “direct action” stunts that annoy people to usurp power despite not convincing people, on the basis that “’everybody agrees that our democracy is broken’” because we demand the world today and don’t get it with a suitably groveling apology for not handing it over sooner (Extinction Rebellion wants “net zero emissions by 2025” or your traffic gets it), one gets the feeling they are far more invested in a sense of victimhood than in a desire to make the world better in practice.

As we’ve noted before, Extinction Rebellion is a bait-and-switch; it’s not really about climate, it’s about going “straight to the heart of capitalism to overthrow it”, smashing reality and things of that sort. And such people are not less dangerous for being silly. So why are they so popular with “reputable” climate alarmists?

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