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December
18
2023

When Did Governments Become So Ridiculous?
Jeffrey Tucker

The world media breathlessly reported last week on what they say was huge and important news. 

Two hundred people who claim to speak for billions of others, because they happen to have a title associated with a government post and are involved with the United Nations, say that the planet needs to transition away from fossil fuels, meaning oil, gas, and coal.

Oh, sure. If this happens, and the world truly does go dark as we revert back hundreds of years in progress, there will be hell to pay. These big shots who agreed to this will be long gone, their bank accounts stuffed with payoffs of various sorts. No one will take responsibility at all. It’s not just a plot against progress; it’s a plot against the world’s poorest in all nations.

More likely, this is more public relations blather.

Not that it won’t be damaging, but 2023 is not 2013, when people were more naïve about this whole topic. 

Now we are very aware of the utter impossibility of preserving anything approaching civilization without what they say we are to transition away from using.

This whole scene is so ridiculous that it is hard to fathom. Central planning has never worked on any level of government. It certainly has not worked for global governments working together. And it has never been attempted on a whole sector like this, much less the single most important sector, namely that which provides us with energy that powers civilization itself.

How do these birds imagine that they know for sure how best to power the planet? In their fevered imaginations, they conjure up a world run by breezes and sunbeams rather than the ready energy given to us by earth itself. They know their plans are better because they claim that oil, gas, and coal are causing catastrophic climate change, even though many of the world’s great scientists say that this claim is utter bollocks.

Of course, they habitually ignore all dissent. And the world press breathed not a word about the many critics out there. We are just supposed to pretend that the “science is settled” and not to question any of it.

But we’ve been here before, most recently with COVID-19.

The United Nations, and the World Health Organization, and every government in the world but a few, all told us that the only way to defeat some invisible pathogen out there was to give government total control of our lives. 

That meant mandatory loneliness and the end of religious and educational freedom, plus preposterous antics like standing six feet from everyone else.

This was another brilliant government strategy. It flopped and caused massive damage. Then they said we should all get this inoculation that they conjured up with taxpayer money while indemnifying the vaccine-makers from any liability. It turned out that the shot didn’t actually stop infection, despite promises, and did not stop spread, despite promises. They maintained their mandates anyway. Millions lost their jobs.

The stocks of the main shot companies are now in the tank, with collapsed demand around the world. The entire episode is one of the most disgraceful in pharmacological history, even to the point of discrediting vaccines themselves.

This is our most recent experience with “government science.” Now they really expect us to believe them when they say that they will control the global climate by controlling how we consume energy? It’s so arrogant, so rotten, so utterly lacking in all credibility.

And yet they just roll forward with these grand statements. None of the signatories will be held responsible if anything goes wrong. They will be long out of office.

Notice, too, how they are targeting the main way that we get electricity, which is coal. The elites have been working hard to force us all away from gas-powered cars to electric cars on grounds that they are better for the environment. That’s in dispute, to say the least. What’s not in dispute is that coal is also on the list of minerals to stop processing.

I have more or less ignored the whole issue of global warming, changed later to the indisputable climate-change, for decades. I truly believed that it was a scientific question and that I was not qualified to comment because I have no training in climatology. That’s precisely what they want you and me to believe.

The COVID-19 experience exposed the racket for me. It’s the same model: Conjure up some impending disaster and buy out a gaggle of intellectuals and scientists at universities who are dependent on their government and foundation grants. Make it clear that all the money goes to one side, and make an example out of dissidents and drive them out of the profession. Then get the media on board with the prevailing line.

There’s one more step: Embed a bunch of government-connected employees at social media companies to de-boost the skeptics and promote the propaganda. This way, those who disagree are marginalized professionally and socially. They are also tarred with all sorts of ideological labels, like right-wing and deplorable and worse.

It’s an elaborate scheme, seemingly hard to pull off. If you had told me about the plot a few years ago, I would have said that there were too many moving pieces and it surely couldn't work this way. But watching how the COVID-19 caper unfolded, I’m now a believer that it is possible for the ruling class to at least attempt all this.

Reading Klaus Schwab’s book “The Great Reset” clued me in to what is really going on. The whole scheme to phase out “fossil fuels” (I put this in quotes because it’s not even obvious that this is what petroleum products are) is really just a big ploy for a new class of capitalists to make money from a big industrial transition. Down with the old ruling class and up with the new one.

All these people are now heavily invested in solar panels and wind turbines, which they hope will all be pushed with government “infrastructure investment.”

In other words, it’s an industrial racket, not really a plan to save the planet. Once you see that, the rest becomes very obvious. These government officials who signed up with the great declaration of an energy transition are hoping to be on the right side of a new gravy train. It’s nothing more or less than that.

I like to believe we are all less naïve than we used to be. What we can do to stop this is another matter. The mechanisms we have in place right now are things like lobbying and voting, but those seem more broken than ever. That said, it is just not believable that a global ruling class can get away with this grand scheme if most of the world’s population do not trust their governments and do not believe that propaganda. That seems to be the case.

In other words, these officials speak for themselves and the industrial interests they represent, but not really for anyone else. Will they get away with this? I suspect not. The reputation of most governments in the world is utterly shot, probably for a generation or two.

I'm executive editor of Laissez Faire Books and the proprietor of the Laissez Faire Club. I'm the author of two books in the field of economics and one on early music. My main professional work between 1985 and 2011 was with the MIses Institute but I've also worked with the Acton Institute and Mackinac Institute, as well as written thousands of published articles. My personal twitter account @jeffreyatucker FB is @jeffrey.albert.tucker Plain old email is [email protected]

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