The Moonshine Memoranda: THE MADNESS OF DOMINIC LAWSON

The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured in the 29th revised edition of Malleus Maleficus The Moonshine Memorandum. If you wish to report libel or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .

In truth, it was a tribute to Dominic’s powers of dissimulation that he also felt able to redeem the coming glut of oil. It heralded, he claimed, an “escape”from the global recession.[1] By 2020 the

world’s oil production capacity could show an increase of almost 20%...and still represent, in his own quote, “less than 40% of the new oil production under development globally.” Perhaps it is unfair to deride Dominic, the Lawson filius, who’s never listened to the voices of birds or seen a lark ascending on the wing. And before you view this as an attack on the man, let me assure you that it is not. He is not a man. He is the very prototype of a Mutant; a being with a precocious mind, but a fundamentally ‘dysfunctional’ human with no experience of life outside the prefrontal cortex. Scholarly, knowledgeable, articulate, and a compulsive journalist with a flair for making intricate points, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better man than Dominic Lawson to explain why a species with a runaway demographic deathwish should spend its remaining years performing like Tannhäuser in the Venusberg:“We should … raise our glasses to the arrival of the 7 billionth human living among us. Haven’t we done well?”[2]

Rendered with brilliant incomprehension by someone who happens to be the elder son of Nigel Lawson, former Secretary of State for Energy and confirmed climate change skeptic, the filius delivered his breathtaking assessment of the obvious thus: “The planet is doing just fine, actually over the past three decades the Earth's vegetation has expanded by 14%. About 70% of this welcome "greening" of the planet is thought to be the result of the rise in manmade CO₂ emissions.”[3] Yikes! Dominic Lawson is plainly the most aberrant, cantankerous, self-deceiving Climate-Change denier who ever drew a toxic breath, but while some folks have claimed that a flair for paternal mimicry is the sign of an undeveloped personality, or that he is set on a path towards infantilism, I still refuse to accept Dominic’s intellect has abandoned him. I prefer to think that the problem is fidelity. That he wanted to make an impact on a father whose words were summons from Olympus. Perhaps, at least in retrospect, that was his filial mission.

I will, moreover, explain my own point of view. To begin with, I may not be the latest in a

long line of undistinguished writers never to have received The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Needless to say. But I do claim to be the very latest to resent very emphatically any demographic pundit who writes from an ivory tower. Admittedly, it is a remote possibility, and one that cannot be entirely overlooked, that anthropocentric production of CO₂ is making no measurable contribution to the warming trend. And I hate to call anyone a liar. Fact is, I also humbly acknowledge the intriguing scientific case that the world may be in a global thaw after the last Ice Age, rather than warming to 7 billion people putting out 7 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

That’s fine by me. That and the filth!

Nor am I about to embark on yet another harangue about the world’s energy demands being set to increase by about 40% by 2040, including a 15% rise in coal consumption and a 50% upsurge in the burning of gas. I really couldn’t give a monkey’s. And I don’t care tuppence about either

anthropogenic chlorofluorocarbons or impending ozone depletion. That’s clean over my head, if you don’t mind the pun. But what I do care about - the joy of sex apart - is not getting mugged, stabbed, run over, abused, asphyxiated, buggered, or urinated on, the moment I step out of doors.

Frankly, you don’t need chlorofluorocarbon-science to capture the true chaotic horror of the Biblical admonition “go forth and multiply.” The countryside is humanity’s scrap yard. We are in

each other’s faces as never before. Humans are compressing the Earth’s Lebensraum with every hint of the horrors to come. “We are literally wading through shit to get home at night,” says Abishek Sethi, an Indian human-rights campaigner commenting on the fact that some 560,000,000 Indians defecate in the open. It’s the human equivalent of cows’ flatulence – which produces millions of tons of damaging greenhouse gases every year. China’s capital Beijing, meanwhile, has been experiencing such persistent smog that millions had to wear face masks venturing out into streets where it was darkness at noon. So far as Britain is concerned, an investigation by The Sunday Times revealed that your regular cosmetic product alone is polluting the British coastline with an annual 86 tons of micro-plastic residue, while hormone-disrupting contaminants, located in plastic and mimicking the female sex hormone oestrogen, can also be found in some 80% of teenagers’ blood and urine. The big questions are, can this be linked to a significant rise in gender dysphoria? Does exposure to certain chemicals found in plastic toys, cosmetics and PVC impair male fertility? Are fashionable Newspeak terms such as “gender-fluidity” and “gender-neutrality” symptoms of the degeneration of humanity in the post-modern world? Questions which are arising in tandem with social conventions that promote the right to self-determine your gender as a matter of civil liberty – i.e., against the progressive collapse of political and moral authority. It’s worth pointing out, moreover, that these developments are occurring against the backdrop of the world’s largest and most deadly earthquakes, not “natural” disasters at all, but caused instead by human activities such as mining, reservoir construction and oil and gas extraction. Not to mention a recent string of hurricanes devastating the Caribbean and Americas. Gaia’s demographic bounty, certainly no less than every bit of contaminated, tarmac-fouled, urbanised, poisonous, gasoline-and-pesticide polluted countryside, richly attests to that. National emissions of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) from cars, trains or industry exceed up to six times the permitted average. And what are we doing? We featurein a comedy that aims to remind people that there is still plenty of oil….