A neo-Jacobin

Monday, November 13, 2006

'War' on climate change? Looks just as 'bogus' as the 'war on terror'

According to Michael Meacher, the former environment minister, the British state is now apparently 'at war' over climate change, just like back 'in 1939'. The ex-minister added that 'I think we are at war over climate change and I think we [New Labour] can lead the country'. In case we didn't quite understand what Meacher was saying, he noted that global warming was a challenge to the very 'future of the human species on the planet'. Ok, message received.

Is Meacher really calling for the re-militarisation of our society, with his ideal image of WWII and wartime rationing? Even back then in 1930s, wartime rationing was only achievable by terrifying the British public into believing that Britain was about to be invaded, hence the need for militarising society and austerity measures.

More to the point, Meacher's bogus call to arms against climate change is totally unconvincing - the idea that the future of the whole of humanity somehow hangs in the balance because of climate change, is risible. This is not science speaking, Meacher's doom and gloom predictions are based on pure speculation.

Meacher once took the British government to task for its role in the bogus 'war on terror'. He bemoaned the fact that Britain had launched a full-scale war against Iraq based solely on dodgy information about WMD. Yet, Meacher's theories about the 'end of humanity' are just as 'bogus' as the original reasons why Britain went to war with Iraq. Indeed, Meacher’s theory has failed a basic test, Karl Popper's test of falsifiability. Meacher's dire warning says far more about him, than it does about the future of humanity.

Labels: Environmental austerity, Environmental determinism, New Labour

Friday, August 04, 2006

Climate change in Africa? Fight against malaria instead

Environmentalists current obsession with the hypothetical problems relating to climate change, threatens to marginalize and overlook more pressing problems for humanity in the here and now – like, for example, the fight against malaria in Africa, and other Third World countries.

Environmentalists constantly bang on and on about forcing the most powerful leaders of the Western world to do this, that or the other, in order to ‘save us all from global warming’, but meanwhile in the real world, the body count for malaria in Africa alone is a million per year, and rising. What makes me really angry is that these deaths need not have occurred. In fact, all those death lead right back to earlier environmentalists political obsessions – the banning of pesticides.

Malaria, extinct in the Western world, is still killing Africans by the millions. But in the West, we’ve had the pleasure of using the miraculous life-saving pesticide known as DDT, which has all but eradicated malaria from the advanced world. Then came the World Wildlife Fund and the rest of the Green Gang calling for a worldwide ban on the use of DDT. They got their ban, now surprise, surprise, malaria; a once nearly defeated disease is killing more people globally than ever before. But who would have ever related environmentalist anti-DDT policy with millions of malaria related deaths and illnesses?

For all their talk about the dire urgency of spending billions, upon billions of dollars reducing carbon emissions in order to ‘stabilise the climate’ by one or two measly degrees, it seems that the life of human beings is in fact far, far less important than advancing the politics of their latest green obsession – climate change, like nothing else really matters.

Picture: Unicef file photo

Labels: Environmental determinism