A Fantasy Politics Based on Wishful Thinking

GWPF

When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for a time, in what may be called the “dream stage”. But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a “frustration stage” as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being. As reality presses in, it leads to a “nightmare stage” as everything goes wrong, culminating in an “explosion into reality”, when the fantasy finally falls apart.


Recent events show us two huge examples of this cycle moving to its final stages. One is the belief, which took hold 20 years ago, that the world was in the grip of runaway global warming, caused by our emissions of greenhouse gases. The planet could only be saved by abandoning fossil fuels and drawing our energy from wind and sun. For a while (the dream stage), all seemed to go according to the theory. As CO2 levels rose and the Earth continued to warm, our politicians started to propose every kind of drastic measure to reduce our emissions, such as building thousands of wind turbines. But in all sorts of ways, in the past few years, this dream and the theory behind it have begun colliding with reality.


Carbon dioxide levels continued to rise, but global temperatures failed to follow. Three times in the past 13 years – in 1998, 2006 and 2010 – they spiked upwards, thanks to periodic shifts in a major Pacific ocean current – the phenomenon known as “El Niño” – which brings warm water to the surface and boosts temperatures across the world. Each time it was trumpeted as “the hottest year ever”. But each time, as the ocean current reversed into “La Niña”, the spike was followed by an equally sharp cooling.


In 2007, temperatures fell by 0.75C, more than the entire net rise recorded through the whole of the 20th century. After they rose again to a new El Niño peak in 2010, we were told, only three months ago, by the compilers of the two chief surface-temperature records – the UK Met Office, in association with Phil Jones of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, and James Hansen of NASA – that 2010 was the “equal warmest” or “second warmest” year ever.


Last week, however, with a new La Niña, it was reported that global temperatures, as measured by satellites, had fallen by 0.65C since March 2010, making the world cooler now than its mean over the past 30 years. Yet again the computer models, predicting that, thanks to rising CO2, the world should have warmed in the past decade by 0.3C, have proved hopelessly wrong.


... the 3,168 turbines we have built, at a cost of billions of pounds, contributed on average, if very irregularly, only 1,141 megawatts to the national grid last year – less than the output of a single large coal-fired power station. From the DECC figures it is possible to work out that, for this derisory contribution, we paid through our electricity bills a subsidy of nearly £1.2 billion, on top of the price of the electricity itself.


Thus, in return for less than 3 per cent of our electricity, nearly 7 per cent of our billls were made up of hidden subsidies to the wind developers, a percentage due to treble and quadruple in coming years as the Government strives to meet EU “renewables” target by building up to 10,000 more turbines, at a cost of £100 billion. The dream of using the wind to keep our lights on is being shown by reality to be one of the most absurd fantasies of our time. _GWPF Christopher Booker

The advanced world is immersed in fantasy politics, fantasy economics, fantasy energy planning, fantasy carbon hysteria, and fantasy education. Reality has little to do with the workings of the govenments of Europe, the Anglosphere, and the other advanced nations which are caught up in the vortex of debt, demography, and delusional ideology.

That being the case, it may be time to take a less on from "Atlas Shrugged" (Atlas Shrugged The Movie Part I coming to theatres this weekend): Going Galt.

Going Galt means to find (or create) a community of competent fellow independent-thinkers who are willing and able to create a "shadow government". A shadow government is nothing more than a group of cooperating individuals and families who can provide essential services for themselves so that the government is rendered irrelevant and unnecessary.

This concept is different from conventional survivalism where individuals and families often attempt to go it alone without necessarily cooperating and trading with outsiders. Such purist forms of survivalism are essentially unworkable. A far more workable approach is the formation of nuclei (or foci) of competence which cooperate with each other on terms of mutual advantage. One individual may form the nucleus of such a nucleus of competence -- or at least the initial motive force. But such efforts are only workable to the extent that they can enlist the cooperation of ever larger numbers of competent persons, families, and groups.

We are seeing the end-stage terminal dead-end of the nanny state approach to government. It is unsustainable and doomed to collapse. Debt, demography, and delusional ideology are growing to dimensions which were unimaginable a generation or two ago. And they are accelerating -- or "doubling down".

Time to look to alternatives to the mainstream.