Holidays In The Sun
In the Barbieland of carbon emissions, Britain is Ken. Irrelevant. Simping, and pointless.
Kalimera! I’ve just returned from spending a lovely week in a classy Greek hotel. We didn’t plan it this way, but we were the only Brits there. Pretty much everyone else around the pool was Greek or Italian.
I’m not exactly Phileas Fogg/Michael Palin/a comedian you’ve never heard of plus their fish-out-of-water mum/dad, though I have travelled to some reasonably exotic, even dangerous, locations over the years. US. Africa. Thailand. Brazil. Argentina. Scotland.
But this was a culture shock.
For a start people were smoking at breakfast.
It was so refreshing.
I don’t usually enjoy cigarette smoke while I am eating. It stinks, and puts me off my food. But somehow, the transgressive thrill of watching someone light up a Marlboro Red with their buffet bacon and pancakes made it all worth it.
Having said that, cigarettes are meant to be an appetite suppressant. Well maybe. But they clearly don’t work in close proximity to the Agean Sea.
In my brief experience the Greeks/Italians seem to come in two sizes. Winsome debutante. And, extra from the Sopranos.
Greece certainly has is its problems, but Ozempic addiction is clearly not one of them.
There were other novel differences to being at home in Camden. Like people riding scooters with no helmet. Which is obviously illegal everywhere in London. Well, everywhere except for Somers Town, where it is practically mandatory.
Also, the hotel pool wasn’t filled with more chemicals than a Glastonbury toilet. I remember, a few years ago, sending my kids for swimming lessons at Cally Pool. The adorable little buttons emerged from the noxious soup with eyes so red, it looked like they had been learning to doggy paddle, while staring at the Sun.
Sure, maybe we’ll all contract polio or something. But you know. Trade offs.
I even saw one lady doubling down, and smoking while taking a dip.
Mind blown.
No one told her not to. And she seemed to be having a nice time. When she finished her fag she paddled to the side and put it out in one of the abundant poolside ash trays. It seemed like a workable system.
There were even little tortoises running around. (I say running. You know what I mean. Though they do go surprisingly fast). At first I thought there was just one. A rogue. But they were everywhere. Slowly, but diligently, going about their tortoise business.
I saw a little kid pick one up. There was no signage telling her not to, and the tortoise didn’t seem to mind. No one told the kid to put it down ‘in case it got frightened’, or because ‘they might have a disease’. And when I last looked, both tortoise and kid seemed to be doing fine.
All these transgressions. All these people doing stuff which would not, on any level, be acceptable in the UK. And you know what? The World didn’t end.
No one suddenly contracted cancer from the second hand smoke. No scooterist, at least of the ones I saw, suffered a catastrophic head injury. And no tortoises were harmed in the writing of this article. It was an absolute delight.
The other thing I noticed about Greece, which I travelled to on my £5 million eco yacht to avoid the carbon emissions (Although there wasn’t enough room on board for my family so they sadly had to follow behind on Pleb Air), is that it is hot. Really hot. 36 degrees most days we were there.
That’s over 90 degrees in American. Or old money.
That’s a lot. Though to put it into perspective, it’s only around half as hot as climate scientists say Aberdeen will be, by 2028.
I’m exaggerating. But only by a little bit. So we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss their dire warnings.
After all climate experts have a pretty good track record. At making predictions certainly. At getting them right, not so much. (A genuinely hilarious list here.)
But not every Brit is cock-a-hoop at the prospect of spending February lounging around in a bikini. Old people especially, better watch out.
Because according to the Resolution Foundation one in five homes currently occupied by the elderly is in danger of overheating in the coming years. Which could lead to
‘potentially fatal heat exhaustion and heat stroke, cardiovascular and respiratory issues, sleep disturbance and mental health problems’.
Admittedly it sounds bad. But on the upside, it might be a great way to finally cut the cost of the Triple Lock Pension. It was seeming unsustainable. But as always, Nature finds a way.
Plus, great news!
From now on our old folk can look forward to being cremated in the comfort of their own homes. Which will save our hard pressed seniors, both time and money.
If the Resolution Foundation is right (they’re not), and old people really are facing, what I expect the sanguine and balanced BBC will soon be calling, a ‘potential Heat Genocide’ then surely it makes sense to abandon all normal economic activity, immediately cease whatever we’re doing, and instead focus the country’s entire financial and civil resources, on providing everyone over sixty five with their very own air conditioning unit.
And we should probably keep supplying them with ‘booster’ air conditioners until global warming is solved. Of course we should also close the schools, and send the kids home to sit next to an open fridge. Just to be on the safe side.
After all, heat doesn’t discriminate, and everyone is equally in danger of feeling ‘a bit hot’.
At first blush my plan might seem expensive, foolish and wasteful. But don’t forget we just destroyed our economy, locked up every adult, and wrecked our kids’ eduction, to protect our nanas from Covid. And while Covid killed a lot of old people. I’m pretty sure it didn’t kill one in five. So I guess overheating, sorry the impending Heat Genocide, is even more of a threat.
Just to be clear. Trying to shield our most vulnerable old people during Covid wasn’t a waste of time. But that’s not what we did. Instead we corralled them into care homes so they could infect each other anyway-at least that’s what happened to my dad-and an awful lot of other peoples mums and dads too. So thanks for that Matt Hancock. You can eat as much camel cock as you like. We will never forgive you.
And I’m not saying climate change isn’t real either, any more than I’m claiming Covid wasn’t real. I’m just suggesting that, like with Covid, our government’s response to it is wildly disproportionate, and catastrophically off target.
No. Old people aren’t going to boil to death in their skins. However they do risk freezing to death in their beds. Because despite our abundant natural resources, our incompetent government has failed to deliver basic energy security at an unsubsidised cost, that most people can afford.
The idea that heat from climate change is of greater risk to the elderly than the cold from old fashioned winter is wilfully disingenuous.
And talking of wilfully disingenuous, check out this chart. It’s from The Lancet. The oldest peer reviewed medical journal in the world. So it should be trustworthy.
It shows how many Europeans currently die from cold, mapped against how many die from overheating.
Seems pretty evenly spread doesn’t it? Sure cold wins at the top. But heat is catching up fast. Especially towards the bottom. In the hotter countries. Croatia looks about 50/50.
OK. It appears a slam dunk. We better get on with it. Ban those gas boilers, scrap our patio heaters, and stop poor people going on holiday.
But that’s until you realise that they’ve fiddled (sorry, adjusted to provide greater clarity) the graph. Look at the bottom axis and you’ll see that the units they are using to measure the heat and cold are not the same. In fact the cold deaths touch 250 excess deaths per 100,000, (In Bulgaria) while at worst, the excess heat deaths barely reach 40 per 100,000. (In Croatia)
Here’s how it should look.
Those excess heat deaths don’t look quite so scary now right? I didn’t do this research myself. So thanks to the brilliant Bjorn Lomberg for pointing this out on his Twtter.
(Also. Hey BBC Verify!! I got one for you! Not interested? Oh. Ok. Sorry to bother you.)
The fact is, despite the scaremongering, cold kills many more old people in the UK, and around the world, than overheating ever will.
But, of course you say, the world is already on fire. Just look at Rhodes, Hawaii, and now Tenerife, each spontaneously combusting, with all the spooky mystery, of an old drunk man smoking a cigarette, next to an open coal fire in the 60s. (Shout out to Fortean Times) And if these fires aren’t the result of climate change. What other possible explanation could there be?
What? Apart from arsonists? Poor forest management? Poorly thought out environmental policies?
Or not letting firefighters have any water, to you know, put them out?
The EU keeps data on wildfires which seems to show that the Earth is not experiencing some kind of Promethian temper tantrum. In fact the number of wildfires seems pretty average. But I’m no expert. See what you think.
But OK, let’s take the climate catastrophisers at their word and accept that the Earth is on fire and the sea is literally boiling. (I’ve just been in it, and it wasn’t).
It’s clearly time to take this stuff seriously. And make no mistake. The choices we each make everyday, in jolly old England have a real and lasting effect on the health of the planet.
I came a cross this fascinating graph the other day on the Spectator’s excellent data tracker.
Look, I know there’s a lot of graphs today, and I know graphs, like maths, and listening to your partner tell you about their day, are super boring. (Also included in that list. Listening to someone tell you about their recent holiday. So, soz about that.)
But bear with me on this one, because it manages in one image to sum up the entire idiocy of the ‘climate crisis’, at least from a British perspective.
I’ve actually become so obsessed with this graph I’ve taken showing it to my friends (Sorry friends!) and asking them
‘If the UK’s carbon emissions were on that graph where do you think we would be?’
And they roll their eyes for a minute. Then realising I’m serious, they take a closer look and invariably say.
‘Well much less than the US and China obviously, and a bit less than the EU, probably.’
And that’s when, like a less creepy David Copperfield, one you might actually trust around your kids, I announce with a flourish
‘Well the UK is on that graph already’.
And reveal the original version of the graph. Which points out that the almost imperceptible red line, bumping unseen along the bottom, about as close to zero as you can get, represents the UK’s climate emissions over the last 120 years.
We hardly make any difference. In fact our climate emissions are so piddly, so absolutely irrelevant, so inconsequential, that even though they were there all along, they barely registered.
And make no mistake this, this is what we are impoverishing ourselves for.
Every Net Zero diktat. Every green levy. Every ripped out gas boiler and mandated heat pump. Every scrapyard full of perfectly functional petrol cars. Every forecourt full of inadequate electric replacements. Every 300 ft windmill. Every power cut. Every soaring energy bill. Every off-shored job. Every dead whale. Every shivering blue veined nana. All are working together. To reduce the height of this already almost imperceptibly thin line, to nothing.
It’s pointless. Utterly self defeating and ultimately suicidal.
Mandating Net Zero by 2050 in a world where in the last eight years China has emitted more CO2 than the UK has since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, seems, to me at least, utterly senseless.
The truth is, that in the Barbieland of carbon emissions Britain is Ken. Completely extraneous. Inconsequential. Trifling and immaterial.
What’s more, like Ken, we are utterly cockless. Powerless. Emasculated. Wallowing in our eunuch state. Proudly simping for Greta.
So if our contribution to the world’s carbon emissions is so tiny, and the effects of pursuing a Net Zero strategy so catastrophic for our people and our economy. Why are we doing it?
Well, apparently, we are leading by example. Inspiring the world.
But that doesn’t make sense. It’s like if in the 1980s the UK had not only adopted a policy of Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament. But had used the nukes we already had, to bomb our own cities, just to remind the rest of the world that nuclear weapons were, you know, bad.
And hang on a minute, I thought you hated it when Britain led by example, or tried to inspire the world with concepts like fair play, self sacrifice, decency and democracy.
The last time we tried that, you called it ‘colonialism’ and pulled down all our statues.
The Net Zero policy seems little more than another example of the hair shirted self flagellation that is already endemic in the realms of race, gay rights, and tolerance.
Britain is demonstrably one of the most liberal, most welcoming, and most generous countries in the world. We boast a plethora of equality laws, and anti hate legalisation. With each grim faced decree backed up by the unforgiving shocktroops of social stigma, heavy handed online policing, heavy handed actual policing, and cancel culture.
We are a country which has managed, in the space of a few short years, to squeeze everyday discrimination to the very margins of our society. We should be proud of that.
Yet our elites are eager, no desperate, to describe Britain generally, and England particularly, as the most racist, the most intolerant, the most venal of all nations.
And in the terms dictated by the new, joy sapping, religion of identity politics, probably the most unclean country not only in the World, but in World History.
It is preposterous, destructive and false.
We seem desperate to depict ourselves as sinners. Whether it’s in the field of environmentalism or race, minority rights, or equality.
The very same graph above could be used, more or less, to chart the UK’s position in the world’s grim hierarchy of racism, homophobia, sexism, intolerance and exploitation.
Compared to most other countries, we would barely register.
But of course that is not the story we tell our children, or what we teach them in school. According to the narrative, we are a uniquely sinful nation.
The stain of our crimes seeping through history, passed down to the current generation through the magical transference of ‘colonialism’. A fantastical mechanism, by which the guilt of our nation’s past misdeeds, somehow transcends time, and is bestowed upon our wicked children, in the present.
And no level of contrition will ever be enough to wipe away those sins.
It’s increasingly clear that for some, the pain of Net Zero represents nothing less than rightful reparations, which we must render unto Gaia. It appears that for them the inevitable suffering of the de-growth policies they demand, is not a side effect, it’s the whole point.
It is a destructive fairy story. A morality tale built on little more than nonsense. A Malthusian fantasy.
Yes. The climate seems to be changing. Yes. Humans are probably responsible for that fact. Yes. We should do something about it. But. No. The world is not on fire, nor will it be any time soon.
And No. Whatever environmental calamities might befall the planet in the future, real or imagined. They will not be some form of divine punishment, a fair penance for humanity’s sins. And certainly not you, or your children’s fault.
You can’t ‘save the planet’ by consigning the 8 billion people who live on it, to poverty.
If you can currently sense a change in the wind. A softening in the rhetoric, a tempering of the language, a slight rowing back on the zealotry, then don’t be fooled.
Next year there will be an election to be won, and with Starmer expressing reservations about ULEZ zones and Sunak claiming not to be anti-car, it’s clear our political masters are getting spooked.
That’s why they are currently dropping unpopular environmental policies faster than Hollywood dumps a dodgy Duchess
It is a cynical move. Right now now there are votes to be garnered, constituencies to win over, horses, not to be scared. So for once they check themselves, pay lip service to inconvenient concepts like ‘democracy’ and ‘public opinion’ and pretend to listen to the voters.
But rest assured, majority secured, it will be back to full speed ahead (that’s 20 mph for most of us these days) for this nonsense.
And the self inflicted carnage of Net Zero by 2050 shall help ensure that Britain will sink further into the quagmire of penury and irrelevance.
If it were an American state. Britain would already be the poorest. And soon, it is said, we’ll be worse off than Poland.
This isn’t a quirk of fate. The fault only of a mismanaged, squandered Brexit. The inevitable ups and downs of history. The ebb and flow of Empires. Our politicians did this, through the choices they have made, the interests they have served, and issues they have prioritised.
Net Zero by 2050 is an economic suicide note, an anti human act of catastrophic self harm. A senseless, happy clappy self destruct button.
In its current form, it would make each and every regular British voter poorer, colder, and more miserable. While making no discernible difference to the health of the planet. None. Whatsoever.
Whichever party wins the election doesn’t really matter. Our next government, whoever it is, seems determined to sacrifice Britain’s prosperity on the altar of The Climate Apocalypse, even if it has to freeze every grandparent, close every business, scrap every car, and empty every bank account- ours of course, not theirs- to do it.
Now excuse me. I’ve got to go and unpack my tortoise.
******************************************
Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.
If you’ve enjoyed this article please share it, and consider subscribing. It’s free and I promise I won’t clog up your inbox with junk.
Please feel free to comment. I’ll endeavour to respond in kind to all good faith messages.
I’m back from my holidays now. Obvs. I didn’t intend to post until September to be honest. But I find Substack quite addictive. Despite it being a lot of hard work. Thanks so much for being here, your support genuinely makes this worth doing.
If you’re up for more, I wrote about some practical ways we can genuinely reduce our carbon emissions here.
And describe why electric cars will probably never replace the ICE car here
But that’s definitely enough from me for now.
See you next time.
Please remove this wrong think from the internet
"Yet our elites are eager, no desperate, to describe Britain generally, and England particularly, as the most racist, the most intolerant, the most venal of all nations."
Outrageous queue jumping. But Canada will not yield first place as the most horrible country in the world to washed out Britain. Yes, you had your colonialism but in Canada genocide is still happening every day. I'm writing this from the traditional and unceded territories of the xwməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.