A "Green Sabbath" & Climate Lockdowns/Gross Green Austerity

Karlysymon

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Our dumb animal friends often suffer for these puritanical fever dreams of pristine landscapes, too. The Danish billionaires Anders and Anne Holch Povlsen – Scotland’s largest landowners – carried out a cull of red deer in order to plant a load of trees. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s George Monbiot – a big fan of rewilding right back to his 2013 book, Feral – once proposed that Britain’s uplands should be cleared of ‘the white plague’, by which he meant the animals formerly known as sheep. Calling farming ‘the most destructive force ever to have been unleashed by humans’, Monbiot wants us to return to a time when lions stalked around Surrey. Has the clown never seen Jurassic Park?

And now this trend of ‘re-peasanting’, for that’s what all this means for ordinary folk, is about to make life especially miserable for the Welsh. This week, it was announced that all road-building projects in Wales have been scrapped. Imagine, no way to escape the doom-laden drool of Mark Drakeford! While environmentalists have called the decision ‘world-leading and brave’ (surely they missed out the ‘stunning’ bit?), those job-hoarding dinosaurs in the construction industry warn that many workers will find themselves unemployed. Employment? So terribly common to be in a trade!

I can’t help feeling that climate activists just hate any kind of mobility for the masses – be that travelling in vehicles or social mobility and meritocracy. The rich have always been friends of the Earth, because it’s been such a good friend to them. Fair enough. But it’s the hypocrisy that revolts. Think of the then Prince Charles flying to the US to collect an award for services to the environment, before making a 16,000-mile, private-plane ‘environmental tour’ of South America. Or his chum, Emma Thompson, making a 5,400-mile transatlantic flight between LA and London to join an XR picket line. XR announced grandly that Thompson’s jaunt was an ‘unfortunate cost in our bigger battle to save the planet’.

It’s easy to imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when air travel will only be for the rich – as it was until recently

– while the rest of us are made to take our humble pleasures at home. I love the British seaside – I live there – but I don’t want to be told that it’s my patriotic duty to spend every summer shivering on the Sussex shingle.

Working-class people are there to be corralled and counted in the eyes of these new feudalists, so it’s better that they don’t wander too far from where they were born. Knowing one’s place now also means knowing one’s postcode, and the limits it should set on one’s perambulations. So there will be no more roads for Wales, cameras will be set up in Oxford to divide the city into ‘15-minute neighbourhoods’ and Sadiq Khan’s destructive ULEZ dream for London marches on. Labour MP Seema Malhotra has pointed out that Khan’s tax on older, less eco-friendly cars will have a ‘disproportionate effect on lower-income families’. Still, Citizen Khan will press on with his plans to ruin the lives of thousands, while insisting that, by tackling air pollution and climate change, he is actually ‘saving’ the lives of thousands.
 

Karlysymon

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A shameless BBC correspondent also claimed that climate change (due to felling trees) leads to earthquakes after a devastating quake in Indonesia last year.

And it isn’t only earthquake faults that today’s storms and torrential rains are capable of shaking up. Volcanoes seem to be susceptible too. On the Caribbean island of Montserrat, heavy rains have been implicated in triggering eruptions of the active lava dome that dominates the Soufrière Hills volcano. Stranger still, Alaska’s Pavlof volcano appears to respond not to wind or rain, but to tiny seasonal changes in sea level. The volcano seems to prefer to erupt in the late autumn and winter, when weather patterns are such that water levels adjacent to this coastal volcano climb by a few tens of centimetres. This is enough to bend the crust beneath the volcano, allowing magma to be squeezed out, according to geophysicist Steve McNutt of the University of South Florida, “like toothpaste out of a tube”.

If today’s weather can bring forth earthquakes and magma from the Earth’s crust, it doesn’t take much to imagine how the solid Earth is likely to respond to the large-scale environmental adjustments that accompany rapid climate change. In fact, we don’t have to imagine at all. The last time our world experienced serious warming was at the end of the last ice age when, between about 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, temperatures rose by six degrees centigrade, melting the great continental ice sheets and pushing up sea levels by more than 120m.
 

Karlysymon

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France’s government is open to more concessions on its plan to raise the retirement age by two years, said spokesman Olivier Veran, hinting at a bigger work-from-home push after labor unions threatened to bring the nation to “a halt.”

President Emmanuel Macron’s government is redoubling its efforts to secure a parliamentary majority as citizens increasingly take to the streets to protest a reform to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62. The number of protesters swelled to about 1 million on Saturday, with more demonstrations planned for Feb. 16 and March 7.

By focusing on the topic of work-from-home, Veran may be seeking to shift the focus to a less divisive subject while the debate on the controversial reform continues at the National Assembly.

“People want to work from home more than ever since the Covid 19 pandemic,” Veran said. “This is an excellent thing because as part of our climate transition plan, we will need, over time, 10 million French working from home twice a week. We aren’t there yet.”
 

Karlysymon

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When i originally read this, i was left wondering how exactly Smotrich planned on enforcing that obedience. Perhaps a climate catastrophe will do.

"Israel's incoming finance minister has said his economic strategy will be infused with religious beliefs laid out in the Torah, predicting that this would help the country prosper
"They tried many economic theories, right? They tried capitalism, they tried socialism. There is one thing they didn't try: 'if you obey'," Smotrich said, referring to Jewish scripture that calls on people to follow God's will.
 

Frank Badfinger

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