As I suggested in my latest Loose Ends post earlier today, our standards for giving out one of our highly coveted Green Weenie Awards have been significantly raised. You can’t get one any more just for proposing a Green New Deal or something economically illiterate. You have to do a lot better than that.
Like Samuel Miller-McDonald, who writes at The Trouble today that perhaps the only hope for avoiding catastrophic global warming is for a nuclear war to reduce human population and consumption. You need to read the whole thing to appreciate its full dementia, but here is the climax of the argument:
One wrench that could slow climate disruption may be a large-scale conflict that halts the global economy, destroys fossil fuel infrastructure, and throws particulates in the air. At this point, with insane people like Trump, Putin, Xi, May, and Macron leading the world’s biggest nuclear powers, large-scale conflagration between them would probably lead to a nuclear exchange. . .
A devastating fact of climate collapse is that there may be a silver lining to the mushroom cloud. First, it should be noted that a nuclear exchange does not inevitably result in apocalyptic loss of life. Nuclear winter—the idea that firestorms would make the earth uninhabitable—is based on shaky science.
Um, isn’t the idea of nuclear winter based on the same climate science that is settled at the 97 percent confidence level? Oh never mind. To continue:
An [nuclear] exchange that shuts down the global economy but stops short of human extinction may be the only blade realistically likely to cut the carbon knot we’re trapped within. It would decimate existing infrastructures, providing an opportunity to build new energy infrastructure and intervene in the current investments and subsidies keeping fossil fuels alive. . .
Like the 20th century’s world wars, a nuclear exchange could serve as an economic leveler. It could provide justification for nationalizing energy industries with the interest of shuttering fossil fuel plants and transitioning to renewables and, uh, nuclear energy. It could shock us into reimagining a less suicidal civilization, one that dethrones the death-cult zealots who are currently in power. And it may toss particulates into the atmosphere sufficient to block out some of the solar heat helping to drive global warming. Or it may have the opposite effects. Who knows?
What we do know is that humans can survive and recover from war, probably even a nuclear one. Humans cannot recover from runaway climate change. Nuclear war is not an inevitable extinction event; six degrees of warming is. . .
It is a stark reflection of how homicidal our economy is—and our collective adherence to its whims—that nuclear war could be a rational course of action.
Now, I’m so old I remember when the most socially conscious people regarded the prospect of nuclear war with dread rather than hope. And perhaps we should be grateful for Mr. Miller-McDonald in making explicit what I put in boldface above—that the climatistas want to “shut down the global economy.” This is another good sign of how climate change has completely deranged some people.
And if this doesn’t merit a Green Weenie Award, I don’t know what would any more.
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