ANYONE who has followed the development of the windfarm industry in Scotland will have been struck by the effort which the Scottish government puts into further impoverishing both underprivileged city dwellers and all rural ones. The former suffer from artificially high power costs, and the latter from that plus the desecration of their visual environment by giant white turbines and giant grey pylons. Only affluent suburbia escapes – and that, of course, is where the government and its fellow travellers tend to live.
Beyond environmental selfishness, there is an unseemly scrum for personal benefits. Stephen Flynn, the leader of the SNP in the House of Commons, was recently asked if a donation of £30,000 which he received from Kenny MacAskill’s brother, Allan, was related to an attempt to get Gillian Martin, MSP, Acting Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy, to “fast-track” a ministerial response to an application for planning permission for a giant offshore windfarm near Aberdeen from a company of which the same Allan MacAskill was the Chief Technology Officer.
“It’s not what you know but who you know,” he might well have chuckled. That of course is the basis of “establishment” privilege in all hierarchical societies in which the rulers feel they are not bound by the rules they impose on the rest of us (like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union).
Right now, we are told we are in the midst of a “climate crisis” – note not a period of climate “change”, which is continuous, inevitable and usually unremarkable. The “establishment” learned from Covid that the easiest way for governments to crush public opposition while still retaining the façade of democracy is to declare an “emergency” or “crisis”. That allows bureaucratic supremacists the opportunity to curtail the freedom of others by threatening them with voodoo words like “tipping points”, “irreversible changes” and “population crash”.
Sadly, the general decency of British people is such that they have largely failed to see what is obvious to anyone looking from a distance – for example from the higher hills on Great Todday – namely that we are governed by cynical bullies for whom a public “crisis” is a free lunch.
Al Gore, the millionaire establishmentarian who served as President Clinton’s “Veep” for eight years was the first to use the “c” word, back in the 1980s. In 2006, he made a film describing the “crisis”, which he called An Inconvenient Truth. But his commitment to his own cause appears to have limitations. Even now, nearly twenty years later, you still cannot see his film on YouTube without paying. Gore doesn’t need the money, but he seems to want to take it from you all the same. How very Flynnish of him!
The best book I have read about how the climate “crisis” has been faked for power-grabbing purposes gives Gore a good roasting, as it does St. David of Attenborough, the BBC’s velvety Methuselah for the suburban guilt-trip sector. In connection particularly with dead walruses, he is described in terms as a liar and a fraudster. (p. 198) The book ends with this unambiguous allegation: “In the final analysis, it is the duty of highly regarded persons, such as Sir David Attenborough, to stick to the truth and not to sell their soul by making apocalyptic predictions that they know are based on falsehoods. I personally challenge Sir Attenborough [sic] to dispute the points presented herein regarding seabirds, plastic, walruses, and polar bears. I look forward to his rebuttal.” (p. 204)
The author was one of the founders of Greenpeace, a Canadian ecologist called Patrick Moore. In the past, he has fought the Japanese and Russian whale hunters, Russian gas drillers and French nuclear testers, and many of our own cynics, bullies and left-brain bores with a pension pot to fill. Indeed Moore was on board the Rainbow Warrior (built at Hall Russells in Aberdeen in 1955) when it was bombed by French government agents from the Sécurité extérieure in New Zealand in 1985. Greenpeace refused to be intimidated and, as a direct result, was able to scupper the long-running French attempt to ignore international opinion on nuclear testing.
Dr. Moore understands the way power works and is not a man to be easily deceived, so his views on the climate crisis are important. His book is called Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, and its underlying thesis is that the “crisis” is imposed on us principally by invoking threats which “are based on subjects that are either invisible, like CO2 and radiation, or extremely remote, like polar bears and coral reefs.” (p. 11)
These threats are both “fake” and “invisible”, with the latter being important from a democratic point of view since the general public cannot personally verify the terrors they are supposed to be facing. They have to leave the judgment to those paid by the new establishment to study them and perform public rituals of horrified helplessness. If they are successful in deceiving the “credulous” public they can look forward to increased grant funding for university projects, bigger bungs for “consultancy” jobs in industry and more receptive ears in the corridors of oppression, one of which is the Scottish Ministry for Net Zero.
Taking just the four issues mentioned above, polar bear numbers are increasing, not decreasing. In 1973, the main Arctic nations signed a joint agreement to conserve the species, with the result that the population has risen from about 8,000 then to over 30,000 today. On the territory of the Canadian Inuit, “there are now so many bears they have become a safety hazard.” (p. 80) Licenses to shoot them in self-defence have been introduced. But polar bears have survived for 350,000 years, including periods which were much warmer than today and others that were much colder. They are not going away any time soon. Pace “Sir Attenborough”, we can all dry our eyes on that score.
Next there is “coral alarmism”, another “remote” issue since it concerns the Great Barrier Reef. Coral is even older than the polar bear, having “emerged 535 million years ago.” (p. 25) Coral has survived temperatures far higher and far lower than anything likely in the lifetime of Al Gore, Gillian Martin or any of their heirs and successors, even unto the seventh generation. But post-matey Australia has started to impose compulsory mind management on itself by persecuting scientists who say that the coral is fine, indeed flourishing.
One such academic is Dr Peter Ridd, who has disputed the official line that the Barrier Reef is “practically dead”. That is not allowed in the James Cook University of Queensland, so it fired Ridd. As Moore puts it, he was “not being ‘collegial’; in other words, he was fired for disagreeing with other scientists, which is supposed to be part of the scientific process, called academic freedom.” (p. 29) You can assess Dr. Ridd’s argument for yourself in this video. It seems that we can dry our eyes on that score too.
Next, in reverse order, is “radiation”, by which Moore (below) means nuclear radiation. That turns out on closer inspection to be another “dry hanky” issue. Obviously, accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are extremely harmful, but properly managed and cautiously sited reactors have proved to be far safer than any other form of industrial-scale power generation.
The 2,259 deaths at Fukushima were all caused, directly or indirectly, by the tsunami resulting from an earthquake as the nuclear discharges were triggered only when the generators that ran the reactors’ cooling systems failed after they were flooded. Some of the newer reactors at Fukushima were built on higher ground, which the tsunami could not reach, and they killed nobody, despite being foolishly situated near a geological fault line.
In fact, nuclear power is one of the safest ways of generating “clean” energy, something which we all want, Moore included. Over 70% of France’s electrical power is generated by nuclear, without accidents of any significance. Moore comments, “The key to reducing fossil fuel consumption, if that is the goal, is to electrify our economies with nuclear energy.” (p. 158)
Finally: the headline subject of “carbon”. Moore says, “This issue was at the centre of Al Gore’s most effective piece of misinformation in his film An Inconvenient Truth.” Essentially, the climate record when considered over the last half a million years shows that global temperatures rise before carbon levels increase, not the other way round, as the crisis fakirs want us to believe (see Fig. 36, p. 73). In other words, increases in CO2 are the result, not the cause, of global warming.
The attempt to create a countryside blighted by monster wind turbines and pylons (and endless solar panels) is based on cynical exploitation of public ignorance of carbon, despite its being the basis of all life on earth. The controversy over carbon is so important that to summarise it here would be to brutalise it, but one unarguable fact is that with the recent rise in CO2 in the atmosphere the earth is getting greener and more productive agriculturally. But it would be better to read what Dr. Moore says about all this in his clear-headed and clearly-written book or, failing that, in this video (which also discusses his own history as an environmentalist).
Scotland rose from being a poor, backward and miserably factious semi-tribal society before the seventeenth century to being one of the intellectual powerhouses of the Western world by developing the capacity to think critically and not take opinions from “authority”. It suits our lazy-minded leaders to take us back to unthinking tribalism. Once it was the Campbells versus the Macdonalds; now it is windfarms versus the environment.
Since we know which option these leaders will profit from, the outcome is predictable. Our only hope is an intelligent electorate in an informed democracy. For those with an active critical faculty, Moore’s book will be an invaluable help in de-mystifying this important topic.
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Hamish Gobson is the author of Living the Green Dream (forthcoming). It is a lightly humorous account of the immigration crisis – for once, a genuine one – on the remote Scottish island, Great Todday, where Gobson lives and films seaweed for the Hebridean Centre for Marine Meditation. Windmills loom there too, disturbing the peace by bringing discord where there was harmony, error where there was truth and despair where there was hope.
