Death by Green Energy: it’s not just for endangered bird species like eagles anymore.
Despite calls for a halt to the development of offshore wind energy projects following a series of unexplained whale deaths, Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy says the state will not interfere with the projects.
The death reported last week of the seventh whale in a little over a month alarmed Cindy Zipf, executive director of the group Clean Ocean Action, according to NJ.com.
“This is devastating and shows even more urgency to our call to action for [President Joe] Biden and Gov. Phil Murphy to call for a stop to all activity. Don’t add any more projects and get a comprehensive investigation underway with experts and full transparency with oversight,” she said.
“Is it an omen? Is it an alarm?” Zipf said in comments made before the seventh whale was found, according to The Associated Press. “Never before have we had six whales wash up in 33 days.”
“We should suspend all work related to offshore wind development until we can determine the cause of death of these whales, some of which are endangered,” Republican state Sen. Vince Polistina said, adding, “it’s hard to believe that the death of [seven] whales on our beaches is just a coincidence.”
Aw, come on, it’s GOTTA be. After all, CC religious activists are the good people, you know. Or perhaps the BORED people, at any rate.
The downfall of capitalism will not come from the uprising of an impoverished working class but from the sabotage of a bored upper class. This was the view of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter believed that at some point in the future, an educated elite would have nothing left to struggle for and will instead start to struggle against the very system that they themselves live in.
Nothing makes me think Schumpeter was right like the contemporary climate movement and its acolytes. The Green movement is not a reflection of planetary crisis as so many in media and culture like to depict it, but rather, a crisis of meaning for the affluent.
Take for example a recent interview with Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich on CBS‘s 60 Minutes. Ehrlich is most famous for his career as a professional doom monger. His first major book, The Population Bomb, gave us timelessly wrong predictions, including that by the 1980s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death and it went downhill from there. Ehrlich assured us that England would no longer exist in the year 2000, that even modern fertilizers would not enable us to feed the world, and that thermonuclear power was just around the corner.
Like the prophet of any religion, Ehrlich is not there to explain the world but to reinforce the upper class’s favorite worldview of the imminent end of the world, something that can only be prevented if we fundamentally change the way we live. Of course, by “we,” they actually mean “you.”
Even supposed grass-roots movements like “Just Stop Oil” or “Last Generation” (of “tomato soup on paintings” fame) are in fact funded by millionaires, like Aileen Getty, the granddaughter of legendary oil-tycoon Jean Paul Getty, and the Climate Emergency Fund.
Just like Kerry, Ehrlich, and these other groups are not really interested in solving the problem of climate change—for example, promoting research in technologies like nuclear energy, carbon capture technologies, and means of adaptation. Instead, they (wish) to elevate their struggle to an ersatz-religion that allows them to simultaneously enjoy their wealth and lecture the rest of the world from a position of moral superiority.
This isn’t about the planet. It’s about the boredom of the bourgeoisie. And they don’t care who has to pay to alleviate it.
More than just that, as I said last night, it’s all about their presumed right to harass, to command, to ban, and above all else, to rule.
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