A few days ago, several thousand people gathered in Hamburg, Germany, to protest fossil fuels and specifically natural gas, calling for a more sustainable future.
Thank you for bringing up this aspect. Instead of fostering anxiety to facilitate a greener world, these actors that you refer to should try to increase a love/appreciation of nature - which would be facilitate a greener world and be beneficial to mental health.
Where do these anxious creatures come from? According to reports from Deutsche Welle, German state TV, there are 45 thousand artists in Berlin. These are the people that complain about rising rents driving up their cost of living and belong to various progressive causes. I wonder why Berlin needs 45,000 artists. Perhaps for all the graffiti that increasingly 'beautifies' the city. At least some of these artists are the product of Germany lowering the standards for university admission and excretion in the '60s. I suspect that some of them still reproduce leading to the bodies present at the LNG protest.
Well, artist is a broad definition, I think. But like I told mu daughter, you can always paint whenever you want and whatever else you do, but you need to study to become a vet. I might have mentioned there are thousands of other people who are good at painting...
Many wonderful points. One I will comment on is the use of “fear” to manipulate, control, influence, and create scenarios that do not exist.
We are presently, and have been for a while, experiencing large amounts of disinformation in social media, journalism and through politicians and now scientists, intellectuals that promote their truth to achieve their goals. We in the U.S. have lived through the lies of traditional reputable organizations such as CDC and FDA to enact fear (control) of populations. MDs and of course big pharma subscribing to the same lie. In sum, I am not surprised at the criminal posture taken by so-called scientists to in fact encourage mental health all for a false propaganda. IMHO
Yeah, so some psychology wonks are barking mad, what's new in that? :D
On a serious note, I don't think it's possible (or desirable) to maintain a state of fear in a society, for any kind of reasons. Either the fear will fade, together with the fear-induced measures (like shorter showers) or the fear will escalate and lead, as you noted, to mental health complications.
I can just mention one example for a society that was kept in a permanent state of existential fear - the Soviet Union under Stalin's purge. I don't really think that led to any kind of good results (apart from Stalin itself, who remained in power).
"I’ve stood away from the whole “Is there an emergency or not” debate because I’m not a scholar and I lack the knowledge to contribute to this debate in any way. "
This is why rational, nominally conservative people lose. The leftist lizard brain, progressive mindset is to use fact free rhetoric, fear, and whatever else it takes to get their way across, or gain power. While you're caring about getting it right, or carefully analyzing the issue, they are OK with children crying and fearmongering the younger population to their ends. These are sick people, and deserve to be isolated and shunned. But the leftist / enviro loon has learned that you will bend the knee if they call you a name. Pick one - it works to get you to bend the knee (proverbially).
Let’s keep calm, educate ourselves by reading intelligent articles, and develop sensible climate policies to reduce emissions as quickly as is compatible with maintaining our health, security, and sanity. A combination of renewables, hydro and nuclear power, helped along temporarily with a little natural gas, should set us in the right course—with luck new technologies like better batteries, geothermal, and Carbon capture and storage will mature to help speed things up.
Hydro is a renewable. The problem is wind & solar are only compatible with low efficiency natural gas open cycle turbines for a modern grid. Or they can work in the very rare area with lots of reservoir hydro. Or odd areas on a diesel grid. So the truth is wind and solar generally speaking do not belong on a modern efficient grid. You want to use extreme efficiency CCGT, supercritical coal, hydro & nuclear. With some OCGT for backup and peak generation. Geothermal in rare areas like Iceland. That is the efficient grid. And it is the optimal match for BEV charging which largely happens at nighttime when you have surplus baseload power. Wind & solar destroy the efficient grid, stupidly duplicate the grid. In fact Wind & Solar are the epitome of Energy Inefficiency. They do not belong on a modern grid. Nefarious actors are pushing wind & solar, knowing full well they are a total waste of money. Over $4T spent worldwide and zero results. There is zero correlation between wind/solar grid penetration and the carbon intensity of electricity generation by country.
Yes, agree, sadly. Too many oligarchs making a lot of money from WS tax credits, too many useful idiots brainwashed into accepting them. But it would be very hard to turn off the current VRE momentum, or get the general pop to understand the advantages of nuclear, so for now best to go along w the gag (after all WS components are cheap and quickly installed) while more nuclear is built. A high baseload and even load following lnuclear would reduce the need for gas backup to very small amounts. Clean energy especially if CCS can be fully developed. In 20 years either the problems w WS storage will be solved, or the multiple disadvantages of WS will become so painfully obvious that we can get rid of all those aging toxic waste panels and non-recycleable turbine blades and build more nuclear.
People spend too much time following their leaders and government instead of critical thinking. The whole climate change is to get you and I to pay to basically breathe, and nothing more. People think we are destroying our planet and cannot even fathom that the planet will be around billions of years, need I state this, when the human race is extinct. Many are too young to remember Gore's predictions for 2020 that New York, Seattle, Florida and New Orleans would be under water.
Call me whatever you like but every single Green prediction has proven false FALSE and yet here we sit again trying to scare the hell out of everyone. Just like leaders around the world scared the crap out of most over Covid that has a lesser mortality rate then the flu. The Mrna drugs they call vaccines are killing people.
The truth is the climate changes every year nothing we puny humans can do about it. What we humans can do is stop polluting this planet, but CO2 is needed for plant life. I wish I could find the newspaper article about horses in New York and real pollution instead of trying to kill half the planet off for the sake of some new green religion. Even my president tells the public lies stating this July is the hottest on record and they believe it go to the research and you will find the truth.
I know climate is complicated, with many forcers and feedbacks, both positive and negative, but if nature and orbital cycles had their way, the earth would now be cooling into the next glacial phase—in fact it began cooling after the Holocene optimum, 8000 years ago. But that natural cooling trend reversed at about the onset of the industrial revolution, when mankind started pumping significant amounts of CO2 (a proven green house gas) into the atmosphere, and is now a warming trend. Likely to get uncomfortable if this keeps up. Safest thing to do is try to stop emitting GHGs and stop the warming in some sensible way that won’t kill half of us, like switching to nuclear power. We don’t want to be so successful that we actually slide back into cooling, though—a new glacial period would be even worse.
This issue is troubling to observe (I see in plenty as I have kids 9-13). Caused me to go speak to their classrooms with an appropriately balanced message of, yes there are issues we should properly prioritize and attack, but let's weigh those against the benefits we derive from all manner of things that do have a few side effects. I was modestly encouraged by a recent Vox piece that was much more balanced: https://www.vox.com/23158406/climate-change-tell-kids-wont-destroy-world
It's more than anxiety. It's panic. And panic spreads like fire.
The genesis of this panic? Malthus's 1798 essay on human population growth and limited resources.
Malthus effectively panicked.
With his being an Anglican theologian - i.e., he was in academia - his panic gripped the minds of many other academics and it spread like an uncontrolled forest fire.
And one Charles Darwin happened upon Malthus's essay and used it as the basis for his concept of "natural selection".
It strongly appears that Paul Ehrlich, another academic, picked up on Malthus and wrote his "Population Bomb" book, which popularized Malthus's panic.
With that book and Darwin's "natural selection" deeply in mind, not only did many in academia panic, but many in the media did as well. Then that panic worked its way into government.
Their panic was expressed by a climate that they claim was deeply affected by humans. The solution? Our superiors need to control the population of humans or they'll ruin the world.
But how? Well, our superiors put the blame on hydrocarbons. Why? Notice how much humanity has prospered population-wise since the discovery of the use of hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons effectively helped rid Western societies of slavery. That's a good thing, right? Well, not in the minds of our superiors. They're panicking over population growth. Get rid of hydrocarbons and human population growth slows and then stops.
So, our superiors in government, academia, and the media are working to get rid of hydrocarbons. California is a prime example. The problem is that our superiors don't realize is that their actions will turn Western societies into another former East Germany or another North Korea.
Malthus, as a Christian, didn't read his own scriptures. If he had, he would have read the story of how millions of people - the people of Israel - lived and prospered in a wilderness for 40 years with no access to the normal sources of food and water.
The problem is that Malthus didn't trust his God. Like Peter walking toward Jesus on the stormy water, he panicked and forgot that God is very much in control AND provides in abundance.
"God blessed [Adam and Eve]: God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth ..."
Fear is part of the plan, whether it's COVID, Global Warming, or Russia/China. We are all victims of a psychological assault, and it is most damaging to our youth.
Extreme climate change is occurring. Drought is real. Flooding is real. These are 500+ year events, not normal occurrences. But are they caused by GHGs? Probably not, but that doesn't make the droughts/floods/fires unreal, it just begs the question: what is going on?
If you buy into to blame the Woke/blame Greta/blame Putin narrative, and deny reality, then you are just as programmed as the scared youth you mock. We are all being played, don't drink the coolaid. Follow the money, before they take what's left of yours., and our children's sanity.
Yes, there is extreme weather but no, 30+ degrees in mid-July in Europe is not extreme weather, as media are trying to tell us. This is why smart people (not me) call for adaptation, not revolution. If we're one thing, it's adaptive but no, we want to have a revolution.
Irina I do believe you hit it correctly on this discussion. The young are being deliberately brainwashed to have anxiety and to believe the world will end unless this and this happens. They’ve been brought up (IMHO) in a lazy way that they don’t investigate claims made by manipulative forces and they just believe what they are told. It is so sad. I’m 65 and I remember the first Earth day in April of 1970 when the “experts” predicted a new “ice age” by 1985 and Billions dead. That did not come true nor has any of the apocalyptic predictions that have come since then. I remember like an old elephant but the young appear to be too lazy to learn and it’s sad.
As regards the fear and guilt there was alsways a link between them since the Middle Age (see J Delumeau). To be sincere I expect that ”script” on this to bring something new, fresh. But, (un) fortunatelly there is a lack of both imagination and understanding of the social world ( and :) we can expect the same for other ”scripts”). Thank you once again for the article!
Thank you for bringing up this aspect. Instead of fostering anxiety to facilitate a greener world, these actors that you refer to should try to increase a love/appreciation of nature - which would be facilitate a greener world and be beneficial to mental health.
They very much should but I expect it pays less.
"Controversy elevates message". - Unknown
Fascinating article Irina. Thank you.
Where do these anxious creatures come from? According to reports from Deutsche Welle, German state TV, there are 45 thousand artists in Berlin. These are the people that complain about rising rents driving up their cost of living and belong to various progressive causes. I wonder why Berlin needs 45,000 artists. Perhaps for all the graffiti that increasingly 'beautifies' the city. At least some of these artists are the product of Germany lowering the standards for university admission and excretion in the '60s. I suspect that some of them still reproduce leading to the bodies present at the LNG protest.
Well, artist is a broad definition, I think. But like I told mu daughter, you can always paint whenever you want and whatever else you do, but you need to study to become a vet. I might have mentioned there are thousands of other people who are good at painting...
Many wonderful points. One I will comment on is the use of “fear” to manipulate, control, influence, and create scenarios that do not exist.
We are presently, and have been for a while, experiencing large amounts of disinformation in social media, journalism and through politicians and now scientists, intellectuals that promote their truth to achieve their goals. We in the U.S. have lived through the lies of traditional reputable organizations such as CDC and FDA to enact fear (control) of populations. MDs and of course big pharma subscribing to the same lie. In sum, I am not surprised at the criminal posture taken by so-called scientists to in fact encourage mental health all for a false propaganda. IMHO
Criminal is the way I see it, too. Take away people's minds and you take away everything.
Yeah, so some psychology wonks are barking mad, what's new in that? :D
On a serious note, I don't think it's possible (or desirable) to maintain a state of fear in a society, for any kind of reasons. Either the fear will fade, together with the fear-induced measures (like shorter showers) or the fear will escalate and lead, as you noted, to mental health complications.
I can just mention one example for a society that was kept in a permanent state of existential fear - the Soviet Union under Stalin's purge. I don't really think that led to any kind of good results (apart from Stalin itself, who remained in power).
Oh, I agree, you can't keep people afraid of something for a very long time. But you can keep them afraid of different things. Diversification.
"I’ve stood away from the whole “Is there an emergency or not” debate because I’m not a scholar and I lack the knowledge to contribute to this debate in any way. "
This is why rational, nominally conservative people lose. The leftist lizard brain, progressive mindset is to use fact free rhetoric, fear, and whatever else it takes to get their way across, or gain power. While you're caring about getting it right, or carefully analyzing the issue, they are OK with children crying and fearmongering the younger population to their ends. These are sick people, and deserve to be isolated and shunned. But the leftist / enviro loon has learned that you will bend the knee if they call you a name. Pick one - it works to get you to bend the knee (proverbially).
Name-calling only works on the impressionable. Or those who can be manipulated for some reason or another.
Let’s keep calm, educate ourselves by reading intelligent articles, and develop sensible climate policies to reduce emissions as quickly as is compatible with maintaining our health, security, and sanity. A combination of renewables, hydro and nuclear power, helped along temporarily with a little natural gas, should set us in the right course—with luck new technologies like better batteries, geothermal, and Carbon capture and storage will mature to help speed things up.
Hydro is a renewable. The problem is wind & solar are only compatible with low efficiency natural gas open cycle turbines for a modern grid. Or they can work in the very rare area with lots of reservoir hydro. Or odd areas on a diesel grid. So the truth is wind and solar generally speaking do not belong on a modern efficient grid. You want to use extreme efficiency CCGT, supercritical coal, hydro & nuclear. With some OCGT for backup and peak generation. Geothermal in rare areas like Iceland. That is the efficient grid. And it is the optimal match for BEV charging which largely happens at nighttime when you have surplus baseload power. Wind & solar destroy the efficient grid, stupidly duplicate the grid. In fact Wind & Solar are the epitome of Energy Inefficiency. They do not belong on a modern grid. Nefarious actors are pushing wind & solar, knowing full well they are a total waste of money. Over $4T spent worldwide and zero results. There is zero correlation between wind/solar grid penetration and the carbon intensity of electricity generation by country.
Yes, agree, sadly. Too many oligarchs making a lot of money from WS tax credits, too many useful idiots brainwashed into accepting them. But it would be very hard to turn off the current VRE momentum, or get the general pop to understand the advantages of nuclear, so for now best to go along w the gag (after all WS components are cheap and quickly installed) while more nuclear is built. A high baseload and even load following lnuclear would reduce the need for gas backup to very small amounts. Clean energy especially if CCS can be fully developed. In 20 years either the problems w WS storage will be solved, or the multiple disadvantages of WS will become so painfully obvious that we can get rid of all those aging toxic waste panels and non-recycleable turbine blades and build more nuclear.
Sure, hydro is a renewable—my bad—I should have said variable renewables or wind/solar.
Keeping calm is definitely a good start.
People spend too much time following their leaders and government instead of critical thinking. The whole climate change is to get you and I to pay to basically breathe, and nothing more. People think we are destroying our planet and cannot even fathom that the planet will be around billions of years, need I state this, when the human race is extinct. Many are too young to remember Gore's predictions for 2020 that New York, Seattle, Florida and New Orleans would be under water.
Call me whatever you like but every single Green prediction has proven false FALSE and yet here we sit again trying to scare the hell out of everyone. Just like leaders around the world scared the crap out of most over Covid that has a lesser mortality rate then the flu. The Mrna drugs they call vaccines are killing people.
The truth is the climate changes every year nothing we puny humans can do about it. What we humans can do is stop polluting this planet, but CO2 is needed for plant life. I wish I could find the newspaper article about horses in New York and real pollution instead of trying to kill half the planet off for the sake of some new green religion. Even my president tells the public lies stating this July is the hottest on record and they believe it go to the research and you will find the truth.
I know climate is complicated, with many forcers and feedbacks, both positive and negative, but if nature and orbital cycles had their way, the earth would now be cooling into the next glacial phase—in fact it began cooling after the Holocene optimum, 8000 years ago. But that natural cooling trend reversed at about the onset of the industrial revolution, when mankind started pumping significant amounts of CO2 (a proven green house gas) into the atmosphere, and is now a warming trend. Likely to get uncomfortable if this keeps up. Safest thing to do is try to stop emitting GHGs and stop the warming in some sensible way that won’t kill half of us, like switching to nuclear power. We don’t want to be so successful that we actually slide back into cooling, though—a new glacial period would be even worse.
This issue is troubling to observe (I see in plenty as I have kids 9-13). Caused me to go speak to their classrooms with an appropriately balanced message of, yes there are issues we should properly prioritize and attack, but let's weigh those against the benefits we derive from all manner of things that do have a few side effects. I was modestly encouraged by a recent Vox piece that was much more balanced: https://www.vox.com/23158406/climate-change-tell-kids-wont-destroy-world
Same here. I've been trying to educate my 11-year-old about the realities of energy and the tradeoffs that are an unavoidable part of these realities.
I am shocked that such an article appeared in Vox. Amazingly sane.
It's more than anxiety. It's panic. And panic spreads like fire.
The genesis of this panic? Malthus's 1798 essay on human population growth and limited resources.
Malthus effectively panicked.
With his being an Anglican theologian - i.e., he was in academia - his panic gripped the minds of many other academics and it spread like an uncontrolled forest fire.
And one Charles Darwin happened upon Malthus's essay and used it as the basis for his concept of "natural selection".
It strongly appears that Paul Ehrlich, another academic, picked up on Malthus and wrote his "Population Bomb" book, which popularized Malthus's panic.
With that book and Darwin's "natural selection" deeply in mind, not only did many in academia panic, but many in the media did as well. Then that panic worked its way into government.
Their panic was expressed by a climate that they claim was deeply affected by humans. The solution? Our superiors need to control the population of humans or they'll ruin the world.
But how? Well, our superiors put the blame on hydrocarbons. Why? Notice how much humanity has prospered population-wise since the discovery of the use of hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons effectively helped rid Western societies of slavery. That's a good thing, right? Well, not in the minds of our superiors. They're panicking over population growth. Get rid of hydrocarbons and human population growth slows and then stops.
So, our superiors in government, academia, and the media are working to get rid of hydrocarbons. California is a prime example. The problem is that our superiors don't realize is that their actions will turn Western societies into another former East Germany or another North Korea.
Malthus, as a Christian, didn't read his own scriptures. If he had, he would have read the story of how millions of people - the people of Israel - lived and prospered in a wilderness for 40 years with no access to the normal sources of food and water.
The problem is that Malthus didn't trust his God. Like Peter walking toward Jesus on the stormy water, he panicked and forgot that God is very much in control AND provides in abundance.
"God blessed [Adam and Eve]: God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth ..."
- Genesis 1 (CJB)
Fear is part of the plan, whether it's COVID, Global Warming, or Russia/China. We are all victims of a psychological assault, and it is most damaging to our youth.
Extreme climate change is occurring. Drought is real. Flooding is real. These are 500+ year events, not normal occurrences. But are they caused by GHGs? Probably not, but that doesn't make the droughts/floods/fires unreal, it just begs the question: what is going on?
If you buy into to blame the Woke/blame Greta/blame Putin narrative, and deny reality, then you are just as programmed as the scared youth you mock. We are all being played, don't drink the coolaid. Follow the money, before they take what's left of yours., and our children's sanity.
Yes, there is extreme weather but no, 30+ degrees in mid-July in Europe is not extreme weather, as media are trying to tell us. This is why smart people (not me) call for adaptation, not revolution. If we're one thing, it's adaptive but no, we want to have a revolution.
Irina I do believe you hit it correctly on this discussion. The young are being deliberately brainwashed to have anxiety and to believe the world will end unless this and this happens. They’ve been brought up (IMHO) in a lazy way that they don’t investigate claims made by manipulative forces and they just believe what they are told. It is so sad. I’m 65 and I remember the first Earth day in April of 1970 when the “experts” predicted a new “ice age” by 1985 and Billions dead. That did not come true nor has any of the apocalyptic predictions that have come since then. I remember like an old elephant but the young appear to be too lazy to learn and it’s sad.
Some have made the good point that young people in wealthy countries have no real problems to deal with, so they are making up problems to deal with.
Here it is a fresh new media product on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79bzxxMYMWw
It was posted on the Youtube today.
As regards the fear and guilt there was alsways a link between them since the Middle Age (see J Delumeau). To be sincere I expect that ”script” on this to bring something new, fresh. But, (un) fortunatelly there is a lack of both imagination and understanding of the social world ( and :) we can expect the same for other ”scripts”). Thank you once again for the article!
Originality is dead, alas... And why use a new script if the old one works so well? Thanks for the video!