Who calls Net Zero nonsense, accuses world leaders of pushing in the wrong direction and has already decreed COP26 a useless failure?
No, these are not just the positions of the smaller-by-the-day tribe of climate change sceptics, but of the COP26 climate change protestors too.
The crowds who marched through Glasgow holding signs decrying COP26 as ‘CRAP26’ are becoming more and more indistinguishable from those who deny anthropogenic climate change is happening at all.
After all, why else write off every reasonable attempt to limit CO2 emissions?
These are the sort of activists who oppose carbon pricing because it’s a market-based solution. Who oppose nuclear power because the Soviet Union managed it poorly. Who oppose carbon capture and storage because it doesn’t plunge us back to the dark ages.
Almost every pathway to cutting greenhouse gas emissions without destroying the progress of the industrial revolution can find a passionate opponent amongst the modern hard core of the international environmentalist movement.
It all begs the question: is Greta Thunberg a secret climate change denier?
What else would be the use in declaring days ago that ‘COP26 is a failure’, that it’s just ‘blah, blah, blah’, and that ‘the world is literally burning’?
It’s hard to think of a less motivating argument than claiming that somehow even 90% of the global economy signing up to net zero by the middle of this century is an outright ‘failure’. That despite unprecedented action, the planet is effectively doomed. That there is no hope.
This is the kind of language that is not only divorced from reality, but promotes a feeling of helplessness.
If all this effort really is futile, if the industrial revolution really was one big doomsday machine, if we really are all heading for annihilation in short order anyway, then what’s the point in even trying to turn things around?
The world might as well live out the last few good years we have before the disaster movie-style tidal waves, new Sahara desertification, global civil wars and ultimate extinction arrive in just a couple of decades’ time.
It does genuinely make a small part of me wonder if these anti-COP protests are secretly funded by Big Oil. After all, if fans of CO2 wanted to deploy a dark campaign to keep their interests thriving, a narrative of end-of-the-word hopelessness would fit the bill nicely.
Flight bans, junking fossil fuels overnight, abandoning mod cons and an end to economic growth: it’s a cocktail of demands so ridiculous that they will obviously never be reached. It’s almost as if the list of demands is designed explicitly never to be achieved, to perpetuate a cycle of protest and pretend persecution – one that in turn enables activists to merrily go on claiming politicians are doing nothing, allowing their sense of self-worth through righteous protest to inflate ever further.
And all the while serving to switch moderate people off.
At what point will the climate activists realise the whole developed world is already signed up to their agenda? The biggest billionaires, political leaders, the people they wish they could hate – all are actually now doing just about everything they asked for.
And the Greta Thunbergs of this world can’t stand it.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
