The climate-change crowd seem to be testing the bounds of sanity and, pardon the pun, good taste. A Swedish professor, a certain Magnus Söderlund has suggested that one way to fight climate change – reducing our dependence on carbon-heavy meat products – is to develop a taste for human flesh, that is, cannibalism. Macabre as this already is, I presume he means eating the flesh of those who have already died, and that we don’t start intentional ‘human farms’, for would they not end up being just as carbon-heavy, if not more so, than the cows and pigs which so exercise the brains of such profs? The 1973 dystopic film Soylent Green is proving problematically prophetic. In the inimitable tones of a scandalized Charlton Heston when he discovers what ‘they’ have been feeding people in a world-wide famine, ‘It’s people!!!
And what are we to say of presidential-hopeful Bernie Sanders, a multi-millionaire with a carbon footprint the size of whole regions of Africa, who says he would support U.S. funding of abortion and contraception to ‘fight climate change’. The fewer people, the better, in the not-so sympathetic socialist view of Mr. Sanders. There is no mention that he, a late septuagenarian who has largely lived out his three score and ten, is ready for the chopping block, or, for that matter, Dr. Soderlund’s wok.
Meanwhile, back in the land of just simple insidious greed, there is much evidence that the prophet-moppet Greta Thurnberg, fresh off her transatlantic voyage on a billionaire’s sailing yacht, is a shill – how witting is unclear – for profit-driven ‘clean-energy’ companies, ready to cash in on all the government’s legislative enforcement for said green technologies. This reminds me of the rather convenient truth that all the while Al Gore was propounding the end-of-the-world message with his ‘Inconvenient Truth’, he was investing millions in green technologies – windfarms and the rest – and was soon rolling in the green stuff. Look up his ‘estate’, and his own Brontosaurus-sized emissions.
With the likes of Mr. Gore getting a bit long of tooth and wide of girth, the snake-oil salesmen seem to need fresh, innocent faces to sell their dubious wares. And, lo and behold, along comes Pippi Longstocking redivivus, ponytails and all, ready to lecture the ‘truth’ to her benighted adult lessers.
Is this the company the Holy Father would like to seen keeping, in his repeated advocacy of global warming, climate change, even now his own version of apocalyptic ‘climate emergencies’?
What, pray tell, is the end point of all this? An elite feasting and carousing in vast, luxurious gated compounds, with the rest of us hoi polloi eking out our bland, paelolithic days – after all, any technology has some sort of carbon footprint – existing as we might on herbs and roots out there in the tundra? Or, better yet, not existing at all?
I will repeat – like Cato the Elder obsessed with Carthage, itself an anti-life, Godless city, which murdered its own children – the whole anthropogenic climate change thing is so wrapped up with the ‘evil’ of human existence, at least any sort of full human flourishing, that, even philosophically and theologically prescinding from its scientific dubiousness, I cannot buy it. God made the Earth, and all the creatures thereupon, indeed the entire cosmos, for Man, and not Man for the Earth. And the purpose of our pilgrimage on this Earth – whose climate will fluctuate until it is wrapped up like a mantle in God’s good time – is to go to heaven, where and when only we will truly begin to live.
Beware anyone selling you a different message.