[Transcript] – It’s time to stand up for humanity. Underlying so much of what is wrong in the West now, is a pernicious, baleful belief that there are too many people in the world – that people are the problem.
Generations have grown among us that have been taught – actually taught to believe – that our species is some sort of plague upon the Earth, a planet-wide cancer, if you will – that human beings only destroy, only do harm, only contribute one by one and billion by billion to the end of the world.
There are uncounted millions of children out there right now who are growing up unhappy and terrified of the future – all because relentless anti-human propaganda dressed up as Green politics and policies – the activities of outfits like Extinction Rebellion and many others besides – have made them feel guilty just for being here and alive.
There are so many adults who talk about how they, “Don’t feel it’s right to bring a child into this world.” Plenty more, if they allow themselves to have children at all, consciously limit how many they have – not because they don’t want them, wouldn’t love them, cannot afford to raise them, but because the guilt they have internalised persuades them a child is a sinful indulgence – a wrong committed against the planet and against nature.
Those are people who have been affected by more of the same propaganda that openly declares the world would be better off without us, better off without most of us at least.
How many possible people, fellow travellers – individuals whose contributions to the world will never be known because they were never born – have we been denied on account of anti-human fear mongering? This is a profound evil and it has to stop.
All the time we are told there are so many of us now – approximately 8 billion and counting – that we are collectively an unsustainable drain on finite natural resources.
This nihilism has been in the air since at least the work of the Reverend – note that he was a man of the cloth – Thomas Malthus, who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthusianism concluded that a species – yeast, rats, whatever – eventually multiplies until there are too many individuals for the available food supply, so that all must starve.
In the 20th century more harm was done by American biologist Paul Ehrlich and his bestselling book The Population Bomb that predicted, in 1968, imminent world-wide famine caused by over population.
The scientific theory of Reverend Malthus was hopelessly flawed, and Paul Ehrlich’s famines never happened.
But in spite of how wrong both scientists were in concluding people were the problem, the fear and the anti-human rhetoric has stayed with us.
Now that same fear emboldens destructive nonsense like Net Zero and Agenda 2030 that will, by denying them access to plentiful cheap fuel, perpetuate the poverty of hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people while simultaneously dangling millions in the so-called developed West back over the same old yawning abyss that swallowed so many of our ancestors.
Lord Grey, British Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of World War I famously said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” He was talking about the looming darkness of war, its attendant miseries. More than a century after the war to end all wars the lights are being extinguished again.
This time it’s on account of a war being waged against all of us by the ruling classes. Blackouts, energy rationing, in Germany, in France, in Poland, in Spain and all over. Winter is coming and people will die – not because of Global warming, but because of cold and hunger, on the continent that was a birthplace of civilisation.
In Germany people are cutting down trees for firewood so they might heat their homes and cook food this winter in the absence of natural gas. France has gone from being an exporter of energy to a country in which energy must be rationed.
Here in Britain there’s talk of 70 percent of restaurants preparing to close … for the last time … for want of plentiful cheap fuel. There is talk too of rationing and blackouts, closed schools and cold swimming pools. PM Boris Johnson has made it all about Ukraine – the sacrifices he loftily declares Britons must make in support of Ukrainians. But the energy situation is the product of many years of insane, ruinous policy-making driven in its entirety by Green zealotry. And always remember too that Johnson, like the rest of those preaching necessary hardship, has no intention whatever of experiencing so much as a moment of discomfort.
His gilded world of excess, of plentiful food and the thermostat turned round to full will continue without the merest disruption.
And while we’re on the subject of Green, it is always worth exposing the lying hypocrisy that underlies the Green movement.
If we’re supposed to be about saving the planet, how are we meant to square that with the catastrophic damage to landscapes and ecosystems that results from the making of all the batteries to store the electricity – electricity still generated mostly by fossil fuels?
The extraction and processing of the rare earth element lithium is wildly destructive of environments and ecosystems, as rapacious as any other mining, and also toxic.
So too the acquisition of cobalt – most of which comes from the DRC and exploits the labour of children in circumstances little different from slavery.
It has been estimated that 50 tonnes of ore are processed to make the battery for just one EV.
How many people acknowledge to themselves that when they depress the accelerator in their shiny Green EV, they are putting the boot in to some of the world’s poorest children?
Presumably the Malthusians and the acolytes of Ehrlich rest easy, insulated by their belief there are too many children anyway. None of it is Green.
What it is … is grotesque. It is a ruthless and determined ideology. It is about changing society by having people accept a leap back into the impoverished past. It is about weakening people, diminishing people’s options so they are more susceptible to control.
All of this madness is excused and promoted as the remedy for a world being overheated by too many people using too much natural gas, oil and coal. Renewables – energy generation based on wind and sunlight – will never … never … replace fossil fuels in a like-for-like hand over.
What is being forced on what was once the most developed continent in the world is fuel poverty and all its myriad consequences.
Millions of people – all but the richest elite – are being coerced into smaller, colder, hungrier, darker lives.
All of this incoming misery is necessary medicine, we are told by those who travel endlessly in their private jets – the biggest generators of the infinitely maligned and demonised CO2 – for a planet made terminally ill, choking to death on too many human beings.
A new book – Superabundance – the Age of Plenty – by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley – invites us to consider that more people actually means more ideas and thereby the inspiration for more solutions to problems.
For almost all of the 2 to 3 hundred thousand years our species has been here, virtually every individual endured a life inconceivably tough, miserable and short compared to our own. The mass of people were poor – in every sense – in ways that are impossible for us to imagine.
It wasn’t until around 1800 that the world’s population reached one billion for the first time. Now there are 8 billion of us – and more of those than ever before – more than any Malthusian could ever have imagined – are living longer, better lives, freed from poverty.
The possibilities actually made manifest by our numbers mean we are infinitely better equipped to solve our problems, carry more and more people into better futures.
I watched a podcast this week in which Marian Tupy talked about the potential of combining different elements. There are around 100 elements on the periodic table. It took our species the better part of 200,000 years to discover you could combine copper and tin to make bronze. That’s just one combination of just two elements.
Once you start thinking about combining groups of 4 elements – and wondering what those combinations might offer – you realise the same 100 elements allow for 94 million different combinations.
Now, says Tupy, if you think about all the possible combinations of 10 elements – mixing 10 elements at once – you have possibilities more numerous than the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago.
We are smart compared to our Bronze Age ancestors, but the potential of our future, made possible by all the ideas and innovation drawn from billions of people, unique individuals, becomes limitless.
Thinking we will run out of resources is like thinking we will run out of tunes because there are only 8 notes.
It is also useful to appreciate that in the almost empty world of our ancestors, good ideas often died like sparks in the darkness, for want of others of like mind to help cradle them, coax them into fire.
For most of our species’ history we were too few, and so the sparks flashed for moments and then went out forever. Only once there were billions of us together, sharing ideas, did we reach the point where we could make life better for the many rather than just the few.
Here’s the thing: to seek to persuade generations of children that they and their kind are a plague upon the earth, a curse, is an unforgivable wrong.
In many ways Greta Thunberg is the textbook example of a child frightened out of her wits by anti-human propaganda. Her fear was picked up and weaponised by adults determined not to improve the lot of the many, but to favour and enrich, beyond imagining, the few.
Natalism is a belief that promotes the reproduction of human life as a good idea. It is high time we recognised that the agenda being pushed upon us now is anti-human and predicated upon the belief that a world with far fewer people in it would be much better for the few that remain.
By now you will likely have heard the words “Useless eaters” to describe the mass of the human population. It’s not a fringe term – it’s freely thrown around by public intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari, closely allied to the World Economic Forum. Keep a close watch on any and all who would describe, let alone dismiss, as useless eaters, billions of fellow human beings, each with his or her own unique hopes and dreams.
We split from the species that would become chimpanzees and gorillas some 6 or 7 million years ago. Courtesy of clever hands we have clung to existence on this earth ever since, often by our fingertips. It has been a close-run thing more than once – times in the not too distant past when the whole human species numbered perhaps just a few thousand individuals.
We are challenged by plenty of things. We are infinitesimal specks of existence on a blue dot in the dark. We have enough to contend with in the years ahead. Who, after all, gets to decide which of us eaters are useless? I say it is time to remember and to have some respect for the species that has, inside three pounds of rosy-pink meat, beneath a thin cap of bone, a human consciousness, still barely understood, that represents the most profoundly astonishing creation of the universe that we know about so far.
In ways best expressed by philosophers, the universe only exists because we – we troubled and troublesome human animals – are here to comprehend it. Our eyes evoke the blue of the sky.
Our ears evoke the sound of thunder. The light from distant stars is only able to begin its unimaginable journey because our eyes, optic nerves and brains are here ready to receive the photons and so be dazzled by their brilliance.
But for us, Homo sapiens, the universe – and everything that surrounds it – might be mere meaningless quanta.
That so many are denied the opportunity to reach their potential – to give what they have to give – is on account of years and years of deliberate schemes to keep us inadequately educated, thereby dependent upon malevolent institutions, lied to and, worst of all, in a perpetual state of fear.
What those malign elements fear above all are smart, educated, independent, happy people who DO NOT NEED THEM. I say it is time to stand up for the people … all of the people. And I say the more people, the merrier.
