Category: Climate Emergency

Article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I have made a slight change in spelling to the title. View the original.

The real question isn’t whether everyone should have air conditioning. It’s why we’re still accepting the choices offered by those overseeing ecological collapse.

I sent this piece to the New Statesman. They turned it down within 2 hours. This is itself a central part of the story here — how the left’s thinks about “climate” is effectively the same as the way the Victorians thought about “sex”. Everyone knows something enormous and defining is going on. But nobody in polite company will say what it actually is, or what needs to happen. 

So what is actually going on, and what does the actual situation demand of us?

Participating in the “public debate” about whether everyone should have AC has the same logic as the Jewish councils negotiating with the Nazis over the Holocaust in World War Two. The framing is this: do you want to die this way or do you want to die that way? You choose. Do you want people to die by not having AC because it will get so hot they will die in their apartments, or do you want everyone to get AC, which will massively increase emissions so even more people will die through starvation and wars as food production collapses? For the record, put the question “what does 7 days of 40C heat in temperate climate countries — that is, Europe — do to food supplies” into an AI chatbot and you get the answer: a 20 to 50% reduction in food outputs for that year. And that is just the beginning. It goes on and on.

The Jewish Councils were given the obscene proposition that they should cooperate with the Nazi authorities to send just a few people to the death camps in order to save everyone else. Except, of course, their tormentors were lying. Like today’s corporate elites on AC, the Nazis just wanted to reduce their “costs”. Duping the leaders of Jewish communities was a way to do this. And yes, as we now know, the plan was always to progressively exterminate the whole of the Jewish population. In the famous example of the Warsaw ghetto, it took the decline of population from over 300,000 to 60,000 for the penny to drop about what was actually going on — and for the remaining population to revolt: to die on their feet rather than like sheep.

The Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out the indisputable fact that the Jewish Councils’ cooperation with their murderers significantly aided the ability of the Nazis to enact the mass murder of six million people. She was heavily criticised for merely stating what is, of course, obvious. But, as she tried to make clear, she was not making a moral judgement on their actions — she was simply pointing out what happens when you cooperate with such intensity of evil. In a sense, we could say “they did not know.” This level of deliberate genocide had never been enacted before in Europe.

But this is the key point: we do know. After the Second World War, the core moral slogan of Western democracies became “never again” — meaning never again for anyone. We now know what humans are capable of. We cannot pretend. We know the Nazi Holocaust happened. And we know how it happened: by the systematic dehumanisation of the other. Core to this strategy is the framing of “do this and fewer people will die” — the disgusting cesspit of instrumental calculation.

Which brings us to the disgusting cesspit of the mainstream media at the present moment: the framing of the AC debate. The elites, who have no intention of stopping their mass death project of blocking emergency reduction in emissions, use the ever-gullible liberal media class to create “debates” which, by design, take the real question off the agenda. That question being: how do we live a life of integrity when murderers are in the process of murdering all of humanity? The answer to this — the real question — is of course simple: we revolt. And critically, we revolt with no instrumentalist calculation. We revolt because our very humanity demands it. So if we are to die, we die on our feet, not like sheep.

And then the divine paradox comes into play — virtue shows itself to be more effective in getting results than any vile instrumentalism which accepts the options presented to us by those in power.

Let me give you a small example of how this works — of what happens when we choose to live in truth. Last week I was called up by Good Morning Britain to participate in this “Jewish Council” style discussion on whether or not everyone should have AC. I said that if I participated, I would say that 2C is now locked in and unless we overcome capitalism, we will starve to death. They decided not to have me on. I put what I had said on social media and got over 2 million views, landing me on the front page of Reddit.

My action was a tiny echo of the action of one of the Jewish leaders who broke ranks in the Warsaw ghetto. He was taken to a meeting with Nazi officials and told to cooperate in murder to supposedly stop more murders from happening. He told the Nazis, words to the effect: go fuck yourselves. He was shot on the spot.

Does anyone out there get it yet? You die on your feet, or you die like sheep. In the face of radical evil, those are the only choices. And being asked to participate in the murder of our children — billions of them — is the most obscene, most radical evil in human history.

Isn’t it?

Article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I have made a slightly change in spelling to the title. I agree that it is totally ridiculous to both accept the choices offered by the ultra-genocidalists and to actively participate in our own mass deaths instead of rebelling. I tried What does 7 days of 40C heat in Europe do to food supplies?