According to Simon Jenkins, a columnist for The Guardian, six million households in Britain face the possibility of morning and evening blackouts this winter due to sanctions against Russia, and the same for the European population. Frans Timmermens, the vice-president of the European Commission and the main person responsible for European climate policy, recommends that people heat less, shower less often, and air out their clothes instead of washing them regularly, because this can also reduce energy imports from Russia and thus the financing of Putin's war.
If all this comes to pass, the once bright and elegant Western Europe will become dark, cold and smelly.
But how is all this connected to Putin's war? Not much. In several countries of Western Europe, long before the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, they tried to prepare the population for a possible interruption of the energy supply with short educational videos. In Germany, for example, people are taught how to heat with candles and flower pots and how to insulate windows. This latest hysteria is not related to the war and sanctions against Russia, but to other rather dark ideologies.
Doomsday ideologies have arisen many times throughout history, the first one we are aware of is related to the Romans. The end of the world in the 120th year after the foundation of the city, BC. It would have occurred in 634. After that, beliefs about the coming of the end of the world were already connected to the Christian faith. The end of the world was expected on the anniversaries of Jesus' birth, i.e. 500 and 1000, and when I was a child, I myself heard from my mother, who was a very religious and church-going woman, that "2000 years will not pass", which she must have heard during some holy mass .
In the secular world, doomsday predictions were then put on a scientific basis, such as the famous book of the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, in which it was predicted that humanity would run out of basic energy and raw material resources by 2030. (…..) Although the exhaustion of raw material and energy reserves was already refuted by the counter-study of the University of Essex, the limits of growth determined our thinking for a long time. That study was undoubtedly right that the Earth's population, material and energy consumption cannot increase indefinitely, but the question is, where is the limit?
The latest apocalypse is linked to the climate effect of carbon dioxide emissions, and claims that unless the increase in carbon dioxide emissions is stopped and then reduced to zero, it will result in climate change that dwarfs the visions of the book of Revelation. The idea is not new, Svante Arrhenius wrote about it for the first time in 1896, that is, more than a century and a quarter ago.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which deals with the climate impact of carbon dioxide, although it has written about twenty-seven thousand pages of studies in the past three decades, it has not gone further than Arrhenius's twenty-two-page thesis. The only difference is that while Arrhenius considered global warming a good thing, the IPCC considered it a disaster. (…..)
.... The role of climate, gender, woke and other similar ideologies is actually not to provide answers to any social, economic or natural questions, but to enable the group representing the ideology to rule over others and impose its will on others , and thereby satisfy his desire for domination. Many people look for material interest behind such ideologies, which may exist, but that is not the decisive factor, but the satisfaction of the desire for power. An iconic scene of this was that when Hungary was condemned in the European Parliament in a false legal case, the initiator of the motion, Sargentini , cried tears of joy....
...The rational use of the Earth's resources, which protects natural values, is of course a good goal and should be pursued, but this is not what green and similar movements are about. For example , if it were really important for them to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, they would turn to nuclear power plants , because with their help, carbon dioxide emissions can really be significantly reduced. However, the Greens don't even want to hear about nuclear power plants , and even want to close the existing ones.
For these movements, it is also important that the goals are unsatisfiable, because the movement can last if they can always show some achievable goal, for which they can demonstrate, lobby - and ask for support. If the goals were met, the foundation of the movement would cease to exist and, of course, the support they receive from a foundation would cease to exist. A good example of this is the already mentioned 2030 climate goal. When the parliament said a forty percent reduction and the commission (and the council) accepted it, the target was raised to 55 percent. When Ursula von der Leyen accepted this in order to be elected Commission President, the target was raised to 60 percent. No one has yet accepted this, but if they had, the goal would already be 65 percent, while the original 40 percent cannot be met - at least not without the collapse of the European economy.
Whether we will sit in the dark in our smelly shirts in the cold room will not depend on the availability of energy carriers (because there is no shortage of energy), but on whether we will be able to free ourselves from the influence of various irrational pressure groups.
Hungary undertakes a missionary task by taking a stand in favor of sobriety. Let us hope that we will have enough endurance until the follies of today's European leadership become so obvious that a small child suddenly cries out: "The king is naked."
The full article can be read here.
Source: Magyar Hírlap
Author: economist Károly Lóránt
(Cover photo: MTI/Zoltán Balogh)
