The green plague
This article, here in a slightly revised version, was published in La Verità on September 24, 2019.
In an old article I coined the motto "ubi puer ibi mendacio" to denounce how the unjustified use of testimonials at an early age often serves to convey political messages with opaque motives. The case of Greta Thunberg , the very young Swede "who makes the powerful of the earth tremble", vaticinating environmental catastrophes and therefore (!) Collects the applause of the powerful of the earth, does not seem to make an exception. The latest news was given on board a 4 million euro boat governed by a royal scion to reach the United States of America. There she would have scrambled Senate members, but not before she was received in great pomp by former President Barack Obama. Now it would be raging from the United Nations podium, in front of hundreds of contrite and dumb heads of state, raised in the air by half Hollywood. In short, normal things for those who are on the boxes to the system.
However, this is not the only contradiction, nor is it the most serious, of the resurrected "green" rhetoric that is sweeping the West. From the point of view of the method, the climatic one is only the latest in an already long list of "emergencies" daily served on all fronts, from the "hurry up!" of the economy to the "terrorism emergency", from the conditions of those who knock on our borders that "fall by the hour", to the childhood diseases that have turned into "epidemics" to contain by militarizing the kindergartens, to the digital innovations on which "Train" you have to jump with your eyes closed in order not to miss opportunities, ça va sans dire , unrepeatable. The result is a state of perennial exception that does not tolerate the uncertainties of reflection, confrontation and criticism, an incessant task where those who dissent are an enemy to be repressed because they are attentive to the safety of the pack.
If the general orientation is clear – to weaken democratic practice by putting it before the most colorful and irreproachable urgencies – on the merits it is difficult not to recognize that there is a problem of sustainability of our production and consumption models . We do not know how long the fossil energy reserves on which everything we call "progress" will last will last, but we are sure that a) they are not infinite and b) their consumption also involves damage to man and the environment. In the wake of these right premises are grafted the modern green crusades, whose fruits, however, bring far, far from the solution.
The pattern is classic. In order not to have to question the distortions that are consubstantial with it – and therefore to question itself – modern civilization takes possession of it and makes it spectacular with a dual objective: on the one hand, to unload the consciences of its members by setting up saving liturgies and penitential (Greta lamb who discounts the sins of humanity, an icon to bow down to, an apostle among the nations, a Ioannis figure flogging the Herods of the world, etc.); on the other, to standardize the discourse and deliver its management to the dominant social actors , so that they can direct it to their advantage. It goes without saying that in doing so the underlying problems will not be solved, rather they will be perpetuated by consolidating the pretext of increasingly daring extraordinary measures and by way of derogation from everything.
Whoever dominates the discourse sets the themes, selects the actors, exposes a part to the detriment of others. Among the many iatrogenic effects of our energy styles, almost exclusive visibility has been given to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and to the related hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), contested by several scientists. The fiction of an "expert consensus" is another unmistakable marker of these operations, from which the effect of forcing the scientific community to homologate in order not to be stained with "negationism" derives. Without going into the merits of the controversy, we record that CO2 is a harmless gas for those who inhale it, naturally produced by all living beings and indispensable for photosynthesis of plants. And that in the Gretina-branded campaigns there is no trace of references to sulfur and nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, benzene, lead, particulates and other combustion products whose toxicity is instead certified beyond any doubt, nor to wars and to the interference for the control of the fields on whose devastation no scientific diatribe hangs.
Whoever dominates the speech dictates the hierarchy of causes and solutions. The "Green New Deal", conceived by American liberals and about to be replicated by our government as well, preaches a zero-impact industrial conversion of CO2 impact whose details remain more than vague, except insisting on the need to promote electric mobility. If some economists predict that this would involve a massacre of medium and small companies to the benefit of the few multinational groups able to bear the costs of the conversion, in our small way we have already experimented with the previous government's unfortunate eco-tax as the penalization of thermal engines affects our automotive industry and therefore our jobs. A public money incentive for electric locomotion would make this lethal blow by opening up markets to foreign producers. And the environment? It would benefit to the extent that many of us would move on foot, not being able to afford the luxury of an electric car that, for the rest, between production, disposal and thermoelectric generation, would pollute like those before. If it's okay .
Whoever dominates the speech establishes the responsibilities and shares the burdens. For example, climate strikers would be expected to report the activities of the US military, which according to a study by the Watson Institute would be "the largest institutional consumer of oil and, together, the first single greenhouse gas producer in the world. ». But no, quite the contrary. While the gendarme of the country that preaches the ecological conversion (of others) is officially exempted from compliance with the Kyoto protocols and any other climate agreement, we discover that we, the anonymous ants exhalers of CO2, are the problem . That we have to travel less, enlighten ourselves less, warm up less, eat less steaks and, to help us not to fall into temptation, pay new taxes on everything that has been decided to raise the thermometer in the world. In other words, we must convince ourselves to live worse , to give up our crumbs to leave the cake of those who burn kerosene rivers whole to fly between a meeting and a conference on the climate, between a private island and a "peace mission". Better still would not be to live , as suggested by Anglo-Saxon activists who refuse to bring children into the world so as not to overheat the planet. To be even clearer, the Democrat Bernie Sanders, answering a viewer who asked him if it was useful to educate the population to control birth control to curb climate change, argued the need … to extend the right to abortion .
From this brief anthology of contradictions, disproportions and omissions, the suspicion is strengthened that the battle for the climate has little to do with heating, nothing with pollution and much with the more classic domination of man over man . If for many it is a fashion to feel better, for those who dictate the script of these hooligans it is a tool with which to increase their advantage by instilling panic and feelings of guilt in the population. Some clues, however, portend even worse, that in accusing the exhaust gases of living things (not those of the engines), the styles of ordinary people and their reproduction, someone intends to point the cannons not already against human activities, but against man himself . I repeat, it is true, it is urgent that our civilization find a point of equilibrium with nature and its resources, but since it pretends that this must happen by excluding human beings from the equation – with the Malthiusian exception of the usual few – then it becomes much more urgent to defend oneself and not be enchanted, as the cows on the way to abattoir , by the green clover of propaganda.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/la-piaga-verde on Tue, 24 Sep 2019 17:22:00 PDT.