LORD ADAIR TURNER = A Study in Schizophrenia

"Office workers should be allowed to shed their suits and ties and adopt lightweight informal clothing to help cut carbon dioxide emissions, according to Lord Adair Turner, the new climate czar."

The media must have wondered if Lord Turner was a buffoon and if this was a jest. His Lordship, apparently, believes that the convention of men in suits and women in smart skirts, is directly responsible for an increased demand for air-conditioning and, according to seasonal requirements, encourages “light sleeveless summer clothes.”

And I suppose it is okay to wear g-strings as long as you're tanned.

The Global Warming show is now an international contest, much like the Booker prize (though without any of its literacy), in which the aim, apparently, is to be the biggest buffoon. It's like an alternative, ecological boy-scout competition. There are a dozen varieties of global saviours, and representatives from every ecological youth gang and gardening show in the world. And there is always another one of those gimmicks that makes you kick yourself for not having thought of it first. Like the issue of ties. For Lord Adair also believes a closed collar unduly raises people’s temperature.

“I do think in the summer we should stop wearing ties.”

It is all that the most virulent green campaigners could possibly have wished for. Here ambitious politicians can indulge their leaning for competence, their need for change and also their intellectual and moral cowardice by ranting about low-energy light bulbs rather than the need for drastic demographic devolution. In fact, the self-perpetuating rant about wind-turbines on motorways, solar panels to heat swimming pools, and civil servants’ personal dress-code needn't detain us.

“We have installed solar panels to heat the swimming pool at our country home “

There you have it. Chairing the new Climate Change Committee did not alter Lord Adair’s way of life. Indeed, these are the people who will brazenly predict a cut in emissions “by at least 60% and possibly as much as 90% by 2050.“ At first with studied certainty, subsequently, as the unforgiving years go by, with ever more desperate self-deception. And those who need an additional sedative can always persuaded themselves that one day carbon trading will make an end of the whole global warming sham.

Another illusion for the undoing of mankind!

Some forms of idiocy are circumstantial perhaps, but considerable nevertheless. In fact, political schizophrenia towards global warming is never more apparent than in the tendency of national governments to offer bigger tax incentives for larger families, while at the same time paying lip service to UN inducements for reducing the world’s populations. When all is said and done, though, family tax incentives are the origin of the problem, not the basis for a solution. For whatever the truth of global warming, this isn’t about taxes on cars or low-energy light-bulbs, it’s about the fundamentally synonymous roles of economic growth and demographic escalation. Precisely because growth and productivity are linked to the volume of consumer population, the only answer to long-term economic decline, is more humans and plenty of them. The headcount, in other words, is fundamental to economic expansion. And the future, never so much as today, is in the hands of monetary requirements.

The fact of the matter is, that random population growth impacts directly on everything, including the invasion of a personal boundary and the denial of primary needs, while attempts to encourage a mature debate about rising population levels are almost universally met with ever more desperate self-deception. No one mentions estimates of potential demographic growth, figures describing the world’s economic ability to support a hypothetical 25 billion by the end of the century, infrastructure and housing requirements, or energy calculations. How exactly is the world economy going to defray a demographic behemoth like runaway humanity?

The simple truth of the matter is that as the world grows, so does the cost of running it. And carbon reduction without demographic cutback is nothing if not a staggering falsehood!

Dreamy