Net Zero gets ripped a new one
A shockingly conservative move from the least conservative government in UK history.
IN JULY THIS YEAR, the Santa Monica branch of Soul Cycle in Los Angeles - not further than 100m from where I am writing this - hosted a ‘Swiftie’, that is, a cycling class where only Taylor Swift’s music is played, adding substance to my theory that western civilization is not so much collapsing as it is Las Vegas-ing the shit out of itself on the edge of the cliff. What was unusual about this particular class was the presence of a diminutive fellow of Hindu appearance - 5’2 if we are going there - who was surrounded by beefy guards. Fellow ‘Swiftie’ participants recall the man in an awkward sequence of introductions, handshakes and remarks. ‘Hi, I’m Rishi, hi there, Rishi, yes, hi…my father-in-law is the Bill Gates of India…hi, Rishi…yes, that’s right…killed thousands of those filthy fuckers, hi, yes, buried them….and now the Persians and Armenians want to dig up the bones…make crockery from the remains so they can hawk it to Richard Branson’s new affordable sea cruises…hahah…bastard…hahaha…hi, Rishi, yes, I’m Rishi.’
No journalist in London picked up the story, presumably because it didn’t present an opportunity to kick a sleeping vagrant, or blackmail a source to a scoop, or spike the drink of a young hunk, violate him in a train station hotel then expense the entire adventure. When I confirmed it actually happened - he was there for the class (the butchering of peasants was a joke…but) - I told one of the vanishing old guard, who spun puce, then into colorful language and violent jerking, as if he was about to ban all women from everything. Like the scene from 2008’s ‘The Bank Job’, when Lord Drysdale discovers that the bawd at his exclusive knock-shop has been taking obscene photographs of him behind a two-way mirror.
Until last night Rishi was only ever the Soul Cycle candidate, the Minister for Los Angeles County Schools, the acquaintance of Mark Zuckerberg. The kept man. Now he has done something so unexpected that I’ve had to read and reread his remarks at least 10 times. At a press conference yesterday afternoon, Rishi Sunak took the first steps toward terminating the grand torture psyop known as ‘Net Zero’, something his predecessors all popularised despite it being one of the most destructive political forces ever conceived. It isn’t the official ‘end’, but it is reassuringly familiar to how madness completes itself in Britain: first there’s the stupid - in this case fatal - idea, then it gets defended, then it gets dismantled.
We live in a time of great evils, but of all the evil occasioned upon the world - from Kiev’s cross-dressing idiot complaining in New York about the world failing ‘to reach its climate targets’, to the sexualization of the curriculum, to deputizing once-fringe scams like BLM and PRIDE - none spelled the end of the individual’s prospects like Net Zero (suggested reading here). It was to be the life without - the end of meat, all travel, the imposition of enhanced surveillance, quotas, and more and more red tape - all overseen by a blob class of sneering, pronoun-ed technocrats to whom these rules would obviously not apply, and that which upwardly thrust millions from poverty was scheduled to meet its end in what would have been remembered (if there was anyone left to do the remembering) as humanity’s greatest-ever act of self-harm. Until yesterday afternoon.
For those genuinely passionate about the environment, who will consider this an unforgivable regression, allow me to remind you that this was never about ‘reducing carbon’ - a fact now brazenly admitted by some of the shamelessly menacing policymakers involved in the legalese of the Climate Change Act (2008) and those who occupy the ultimate quango, the Climate Change Committee (CCC). It was about competition between multinational companies, people as products, and legislated acceleration toward hyper-taxation. If our beautiful natural world, with all its magic and mystery, was even on the list of priorities in the composition of this heinous, luxury-belief - and there doesn’t appear much evidence it was - then it was stone-cold last, way past ‘equity’ and ‘justice’.
The recriminations will be rapid. I measure at least one-quarter of the UK’s conservative party being under the influence of repulsive parasites such as Dale Vince, the owner of Ecotricity Energy, or Mark Carney, the former Central Bank governor, or the EU’s attack dogs. There will be more protests and the government will likely be dragged into litigation by North London’s activist lawyer militia. I anticipate the staffers at the BBC will go particularly beserk; if the police weren’t so busy enforcing mandatory gender reassignment surgeries across the nation’s capital, perhaps they would visit the homes of the corporation’s male producers, who I suspect will batter the shit out of their husbands during the course of the next week.
There is always the risk of the reverse-reverse ferret, but instinct tells me pragmatism - the Jacob Rees-Mogg and Northerner type - won out here. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour has run off squealing to Al Gore, who described the move as ‘utterly disgusting’. Already the glory.
When stuff like that is said, pay attention everywhere. Pray. Laugh harder at the Daily Moron’s ‘Our Burning Planet’ (financed by weakling offspring of European fossil fuel billionaires) and Beijing24’s George Claassen and Nick Handjob. Breathe deeply through your nostrils. We might have just found ourselves inadvertently on the right path towards being so back.