17/01/2021
I’m a pretty disturbed bunny right now. Since July 2020 I’ve had to throw away a lot of ideas I had and embrace a lot of new ones. I used to think environmental collapse was imminent, in truth, we all do/did. The difference was, I did something about it, I was a conservationist and activist. For a bit there I might have been on the same bandwagon that Greta Thunberg in pedalling the “man-made global warming will kill us all” propaganda.
But I was wrong. And let me tell you, that was a pill to swallow. In 2011 I left a very well paid job to go off and “save the planet”. I had put my money where my mouth was to go off and do something about it. Consequently I got to know more about it all than most people do.
Ok, nothing is quite a simple as that, is it? For a start, a lot of my conservation was directed at rainforest destruction and species extinction. We are chopping down rainforests, I have been to several and seen that with my own eyes. I have not seen the slaughter of animals but I have seen men selling them on the roadside. I have also seen the complete replacement of rainforests with palm oil plantations. African palm plantations are monocultures, nothing much lives in them. I had this quaint idea before I went to those countries that there would be several miles of rainforest in patches followed by palm. No. There are just miles and miles and miles of palm. You need to travel for hours by car and then walk for hours to reach primary rainforest. Primary rainforest means, unmolested, never chopped down by mankind. Secondary rainforest means, chopped down, but grown back. In Ecuador I was driven for hours to the edge of a forest, followed by a five/six hour walk through secondary forest to the primary rainforest. Even then it is not clear cut. Back in the 70’s a US president made it a law that if you went into the rainforest and chopped down 50 hectares, you could own 200. So, as a result, there is very little in the way of continuous primary rainforest.
Since I was a kid I was interested in nature. I had a nature book as a child and I would look at the animals with great interest. I adored the Gerald Durrell books. Though I wonder now about his angle. He used to go on zoo collecting expeditions and pinch animals from the wild for zoos. Admittedly, later he made his own zoo for conservation. However, I am no dubious about our impact on other species, how much is made up to promote the “humans are killing the world” agenda?
In these days of propaganda and lies, who can really know anymore? The main thing I have to go on is the palm oil plantations. The plantations that bring a lot of money into 3rd world countries. However, you must realise, those plantations don’t belong to the locals. The locals may get jobs on them, and get money, but the plantations are usually owned by big UK companies. The locals said to me, “but these plantations are not ours, they do not belong to this country.” Palm oil is added to food to “puff” it out. Before they used to add animal fat, then vegetable fat and now, to cut costs, palm oil. Palm oil is not good for you. Palm oil has no nutritional value, all it does is make the product “bigger” so they can make a food product with less ingredients but the consumer thinks they are getting more for their money. Not only are the food companies selling us out, the palm oil companies are selling it to the food companies, and they are all big wealthy UK companies. Our food has declined for years in the name of profit.
Previous to the Ecuador and Asia missions I volunteered for the RSPB and Greenpeace. I don’t have much of an axe to grind with the RSPB, at least the place I worked at near Norwich: Strumpshaw Fen. The main focus of the RSPB though it not to save birds, their main desire is to sell memberships. That was the push all the time for us unpaid volunteers: sell more memberships.
I was also a Greenpeace activist. Better not to dwell on that.
I have always liked the renewables idea. For an off grid house, a solar panel or four and a wind turbine, great idea. For the world running on windfarms and solar? Bad idea. Windfarms take a huge amount of fossil fuel to be made, this negates them right from the start. Not to mention limited life of wind turbines and the fact they are pretty un-recyclable. Solar is also flawed. The panels use very specialised crystals, very intensive in production, very unfriendly to the environment. And… batteries. Don’t get me started on how nasty those boxes of chemicals can be. Renewables are just a symbol to look like we are doing something to use less fossil fuel, the reverse is the case. What we actually need to do is use less energy, rather than come up with a way to make more of it with what in effect are more products: turbines, panels and batteries. Behind the scenes the oil, gas and coal power stations are still ramped up, as it they could not meet peak demand quickly for spikes in power demand. They are still running all the time and in truth, wind and solar really add very little, despite what the propaganda would have you believe. “Power brown outs due to less wind.” Rubbish. This is designed to make you think there is a real crisis, there isn’t.
Why do they do this then? Greed and profit, look no further. Al Gore is a very rich man. Big oil invest in the green lies because there is big money in it.
Granted, there are a bunch of issues with human kind on this planet but global warming as influenced by humans is not one of them. So why doesn’t it snow much now? I’m not saying there is no global warming, but it’s a cycle as influenced by the sun. We are actually heading to a new ice age, the planet was warm like this before the first world war, but the actual long term is that the planet is cooling. These big companies have an agenda and it is always profit and greed, oh, and power, don’t forget that one, not power for your mobile phone, power over you.
P.S. these facts are not merely opinion, I didn’t pluck them out of thin air. All the facts are researched and available in references. I can’t be bothered to find the sources again, but if you want to disagree, goto the sources and disagree with them, it’s doesn’t take much research to find. Oh, I forgot, no-one researches anymore do they? Or maybe a quick Wikipedia? Warning, don’t trust Wikipedia.