Essays in Idleness

There is something called “COP28” (28th meeting of the Conference of Parties) happening in Dubai, a major tourist destination in the Middle East (more extravagant than Disneyland). It is, at centre, a gathering of the world’s leading self-appointed environmental experts (many with government posts), and their families, extended families, colleagues, servants, mistresses, and so forth, in a grand display of virtue signalling somehow in excess of all their previous gatherings. The aeroport at Dubai is congested with the traffic of the jets that fly these perfumed creatures from the rest of the world.

This is what “environmentalism” has become today: a monstrous waste of the planet’s resources. Taxpayers everywhere are on the hook not only to pay for this display, but to fund all the ruinously profligate schemes that these “green” politicians decide upon. It is all a farce, more costly than any war. For further inconveniences are imposed by the bureaucrats who serve these witless legislators, through the destruction of our industrial and agricultural arrangements, for the counter-productive purpose of eliminating carbon, the most useful material we know.

Can the “climate change” blather, as a totalitarian ideology, grind modernity to a halt? Even this hope must be abandoned. It will instead accelerate the modern solution to the imaginary problem of overpopulation, by killing off, or forbidding birth.

It would be hard to imagine a project less compromising, and more comprehensively vile, were it not for the murderous behaviour of terrorist groups like Hamas.