Serpent in the Garden II

In a previous post, I mentioned useful idiots tearing down modern society. I'd love to expand on that, so I will.

We here in the west live comfortable lives.  Those without an appreciation for history, or experience with hardships, have damn little idea how very comfortable those lives are.

That comfort comes at a cost. For the sake of brevity, let us call that cost 'Modern Civilization'.

Consider the delivery of an iPad to your door for a moment. There is an entire clockwork of cogs and gears churning, for weeks or months, to get that aluminum and glass slab of status to your door, that geegaw of geekery, that status symbol of the middle class into your hot little hands.  Most of those gears are very well hidden from you, leaving only the closest indicators of their existence, the delivery driver say, revealed.

Let me repeat that. A vast and complex clockwork of gears and cogs.

Now, clockmaking has gone out of fashion, and most people prefer digital time pieces, such as smart phones, to old style watches, so maybe the youth of today has forgotten how easy it is to wreck a clockwork device. A single gear, misaligned, can halt the entire process, a cracked cog causes things to slip, time to be lost, and the missing cog may itself jam other parts.  We still do use the phrase 'sand in the gears', do we not?

Have we forgotten what that means? I rather suspect we have, but then I suppose I am old and crotchety rather than young and hip. Alas.

Now consider the environmental movement.

Some might say that they mean well.

I'm not one of them, it goes without saying, but SOME might.

Almost universally, those concerned with the Environment have a fundamental lack of grasp on the concept of SCALE.   They, for example, worry endlessly about 'millions of trees' being cut down to make your toilet paper.

Millions of trees to make toilet paper for billions of humans. Billions. That is, at the least, an order of magnitude bigger. In purely mathematical terms, it is several orders of magnitudes bigger.

To be blunt: The world is a very fucking big place, and you, my poor deluded green friend, are a very, very small person.

That merely makes the average Green a simple idiot.  Let us discuss how they become Useful Idiots, very quickly.  Let's start with the Keystone Pipeline.

Now, if ever there was a pointless environmental fight, the pipeline fight is It.  This is not a fight over the production of oil, the refinement of oil, or even the use of oil. Its merely about the means of transportation of said oil. Somehow, forcing Canadians to ship their oil in large, fuel burning trucks, instead of simply pumping it through sealed pipes will save the planet from ecological disaster.

Because, make no mistake, Canada isn't going to NOT produce the oil just because the pipeline stalled. Once produced it will be refined, then it will be sold, and since it will be sold, it must be shipped, somehow, somewhere.  The only way to prevent this is to either stop Canada from exploiting their tar-sands or convince people to not buy Canadian Oil.

So, on the very face of it we have very stupid people protesting a very stupid and pointless part of the supply chain. Again, they are merely simple idiots at this point. Idiots who have no grasp of how the world works. No, I don't mean they fail to grasp some sort of secret knowledge of the levers of power, or some sort of conspiracy theory. They literally have no idea how things in the world actually work, and so they can be easily convinced to protest the one part of the process that simply cannot be stopped, and thus make matters worse on the simple premise that if they can stop any one thing related to 'oil' they have somehow made  difference.

For their next trick I fully expect them to start blowing up tankers carrying oil, either on the roads or at sea. Because, reasons.  If you can't see how stupid that would be, google Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizons or something.

Surely someone, somewhere, can see how pointless all this is? Protesting a pipe?

Sure. Those people have vested interests, shares in trucking companies for example. They WANT the pipe stopped because it makes them money. They know that the pipe has no impact on the environment, they don't care.

That is how simple idiots become useful idiots.

But this post is titled serpents in the garden, not 'useful idiots'.  Now, I could make it about dudes like Algore, the Manbearpig who lives in a lavish mansion, flies all over the world constantly and has made the GDP of a mid-sized European nation off of selling 'carbon-credits' to gullible companies with PR problems.  But Algore isn't really the problem.  He is, at worst, a symptom.

The average Green lives in some place like New York City, Boston, Seattle, Portland. Generally urban enclaves, and shockingly, often in cooler climates. Something about an excuse to wear all those natural fibers and generally skip personal hygiene, I suspect.  You don't find too many die-hard environmentalists in Miami, and fewer than expected in LA... places where going green might not actually kill you.

Odd.

Anyway: the modern Green has almost no experience in the broader world of 'flyover country', which is still pretty civilized, much less the facts on the ground of, say, Kyrgyzstan.   He or she (and many, many are girls. I suspect most male Greens are in it for the (hairy) pussy...), probably has an iPad, a laptop and a host of other conveniences that they consider necessities. A tiny handful do attempt to live off the grid (like, in California... which is why you find ANY in LA at all, I suspect), generally in communes around existing farm buildings, and they generally survive to any great extent by selling shitty handcrafts to people driving down nearby roads so they can buy food to supplement their generally pathetic gardening attempts.

Naturally, to these vast and morally smug urbanites, civilization is a plague upon the land, and their credo seems to be Agent Smith's rant from the Matrix.  Well, I suppose if I lived in New York City I too would find humanity to be just a little too... human. Time to thin the herd, bitches! That's what you get for cramming twenty seven million people onto a couple of small islands, forcing them to live piled on top of one another like rats, day in and day out.

What they fail to grasp is that were they to succeed in even one of their modest environmental goals (say... 10:10 cutting the electricity use of modern civilization by a mere ten percent... Which they never, ever point out is merely a 'tiny' first step!), their rather comfortable, white-guilt ridden lives would come screeching to a halt.

Remember what I said about clockworks and gears?  Now I make it relevant.

See: If you merely FROZE energy output at current levels, the world would adapt. It would be ugly and painful, and eventually prices would skyrocket as the wealthiest paid premium prices to increase their allotments, leaving the rest of us in the cold, but that would take a little time to set in.  Some emergency power output would undoubtedly remain to keep basic infrastructure running.  It would also force society to shrink, mostly through die-offs, until they were no longer draining as much power.

This, by the way, is an interesting metric for tracking the health of any large group of people: As healthy groups expand and grow... even if merely in complexity... they use greater amounts of resources, such as electricity. When demand for such resources begins to shrink naturally, you may wisely presume that the community is likewise shrinking, and therefore unhealthy.  I have no doubt that modern Detroit uses less electricity than it did twenty years ago, despite the rise of big screen TVs, gaming platforms and other frivolities of the urban poor, the modern version of the Roman Circuses.

When you abruptly CUT production of electricity, shit gets real, and fast.  Remember how I said all those video games and TVs were the modern equivalent to Roman Circuses? yeah, the poor will find their opiates cut off overnight, and they will take that about as well as you expect.  Businesses will fold simply because they aren't powerful enough to demand sufficient electricity to function.

Now, I know some asshole is about to point out that 10:10, despite the creepy child-murdering, was only about 'voluntary' cuts, like using less lights and so forth.  Well, yes, that was stated often enough, but the actual goal was to cut electrical consumption nation wide, which means also cutting PRODUCTION, as one does not produce in excess of demand. And once consumption levels were reduced, they would be fixed by law, regardless of how society grew or developed.   Notice how 'voluntary' the cuts were, in the video.  Even being insufficiently pro-cuts, as Gillian Anderson was as the end, was grounds for summary execution.  She was actually in favor of the movement, and they "killed" her anyways for not being quite as active as they'd like.

In short, all those hip, wonderful, white-guilt Greens in their hip, wonderful urban enclaves, and all their wonderful modern conveniences, will be among the first people to feel the pain of success. Most of these people have very few skills, the ones they have are all tied up in decadent, civilized make-work. You know, protesting, writing 'journalism' and bad poetry, art of some form or another. Hey, I like art as much as the next dudebro, but you can't eat it. Or, most of it.

Without energy, the trucks won't deliver the latest iPad to the store, then the factories that make the iPads close down. Without energy, you can't have air conditioning to offset the heat produced by twenty million rats, and you can't run heat to escape those bitterly cold New England winters.  Good thing you have armpit hair, right?

But its actually worse than that. Modern Farming is largely predicated on turning stored energy (Petroleum) into 'food energy', meaning one man driving a tractor can feed a hundred men from the produce of one acre of land, instead of having ten men on that acre feeding twelve.  That food is generally grown... not in New York, which means shipping, by land or sea. Since we have a real shortage of draft horses and galleons, that means gas and diesel, both of which are being protested as 'evil' by the average Green.

In other words, we have a massive number of people who foolishly are attempting to knock out the pins holding society together, despite the fact that they, themselves, have no real means of surviving the barbarism that comes if they succeeded. People who are utterly welded to the toys that said society makes possible, unreflective and deeply stupid, foolish people.

I'll skip the nakedly Evil environmentalists who wish to exterminate the human race. They always claim they only want it to happen painlessly, but extinction is extinction.  These people are nihilists, who dress up their bleak philosophy in positive, hopeful messages about unspoilt nature and shit, but they are evil... and for the most part they are also deluded fools, since the prophets of their creed simply want to reduce the population drastically out of some selfish notion of having more land (plantations?) for themselves, or getting rid of the undesirables (Margret Sanger, anyone?).  I mean, at least the nihilists have a certain consistency to their plans that the average idiot green lacks.

The worst Irony is that the greens are their own worst enemies.  By impeding progress, by restricting energy in every way they can, they force us to rely on old, proven technologies that are cheap, reliable and, yes, dirty.

Roughly two hours drive from my house are two large concrete structures that almost anyone would recognize as the stacks of a nuclear power plant.  It was never completed, though the builders passed every regulatory hurdle and examination.  It wasn't completed because the Green movement engaged in a deeply evil process of law fare to drive the price of construction up, to create unnecessary and expensive delays, to drive the company out of business and stop the plant by any means necessary. They, of course, succeeded in this mission. As a result, instead of clean steam pouring from those stacks, and cheap, clean power lighting out homes, we still burn coal and oil to run our power plants.

In other places they fight the constructions of dams, preventing clean hydrodynamic power from replacing coal and oil in those areas.

So we keep burning our petrochemicals. We keep polluting, and they keep protesting. Progress stalls, halts, dies, and we remain in a perpetual twilight of our own thwarted progress.

All so a bunch of smug children with too much time and too little sense can alleviate their vague sense of worthlessness and entitlement.  All so they can dream of a Rousseau-ean Noble Savage existence for  themselves (complete with some sort of Flintstones version of the iPad, I imagine...), where they will be venerated for their holy leadership in their great crusade.

They are the serpents, despising the very garden that has provided them shelter and succor, leeching their poisonous words into it, hoping to spoil it, to tear it down.

At least the barbarians want to pillage before they burn.