Globetrotting green elites are a threat to democracy. By Brendan O’Neill.
Jacinda Ardern has been sworn into the highest political caste. She takes her place alongside the likes of John Kerry and Mark Carney as a member of the globe-trotting eco-elite. She’s been admitted to that inner circle of eco-globalists who spend their days wringing their hands over the climate apocalypse and wagging their fingers at the polluting throng. …
Anyone who thought Ardern’s ducking-out of NZ’s top job would give us a break from her smiley authoritarianism is in for a rude awakening. It’s not just the good people of New Zealand who will now have to endure the paternalist Ardern style, that oppressive hectoring always delivered with a toothy beam and caring liberal head-tilt – it’s all of us. …
Global royalty:
The world is overrun with former politicians, bankers and bureaucrats who have been elevated to the level of oceangoing climate saviours, zealots devoted to protecting Gaia’s honour from the pox of industry and growth.
Kerry is the best known. He was secretary of state under Obama and is now America’s special climate envoy. It’s a positively imperial position. …
Witness his haughty decree that he would examine the likely impact of a new coalmine being built in the UK and then deliver his verdict on whether it’s the right thing to do. Or his imperious proposal to Australia that it ‘phase down’ coalmining. It’s neocolonialism behind a Greenpeace sticker. …
Delusional:
Glimpse the religious fervour in the comments Kerry made at Davos in January, where he said ‘it’s pretty extraordinary that we select group of human beings… are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet’. It’s ‘almost extra-terrestrial to think about’, he said. Saviour complex much?
His assumption that he enjoys the most extraordinary power a human being can enjoy — the power to save the world — echoes the views of another climate crusader: Al Gore.
Gore once talked about what a ‘privilege’ it was to be one of a ‘relatively small group of people [who] could control the destiny of all generations to come’. This is the god delusion of the superclass of eco-aristocrats. They really do see themselves as the enlightened ones who must rescue humanity from itself, save Earth from the hubris of our species. Their delusions of borderline divinity, of having a deity-like responsibility to save every human being from the consequences of the sins of industry, should chill us all.
Democracy? Out of the way, we know best:
It is supremely anti-democratic. When a class of people can position themselves as the representatives not of mere nations or of trifling ideologies but of the planet itself, of every person alive today and every person yet to be born, then they become tyrants. …
The authoritarian impulse of eco-hysteria is becoming clearer by the day. This is why they’re so keen to replace that flat, tired phrase ‘climate change’ with the more shrill ‘climate emergency’. Because in an emergency, special powers are often required to ensure that the greater good of existential security is taking precedence over the lesser good of people’s freedom and desires. Ardern knows the game: she declared a ‘climate emergency’ in New Zealand in December 2020. …
Ardern is stupid enough to fit the mould:
And this is a leader who recently called for a global crackdown on ‘dangerous’ ideas, including climate-change scepticism. Ardern has all the necessary qualities to be an eco-globalist, to become one of that select few who believe they control the destiny of every generation to come — authoritarianism disguised as social concern, an outsized sense of moral virtue, a saviour complex, and a tyrannical disregard for dissenting speech.
There’s one more quality: hypocrisy. We need ‘waste-free living’, says [Prince] William’s Earthshot crusade. A bit rich coming from a literal future king whose family’s air miles in recent years would be enough to get them to the Moon and back and then complete three loops of the Earth’s equator. John Kerry has his own private jet and once flew it to Martha’s Vineyard for Obama’s 60th birthday bash. And Ardern once took a flight that cost NZ taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars because she wanted to ‘minimise time away from her infant daughter’. These are the people telling the rest of us to drive less, fly less, farm less, eat less meat, use less coal, use less gas and generally be less of a pest to poor Mother Earth. The gall.
These people are not going to be happy when they find out that the warming effect of carbon dioxide has been grossly exaggerated due to a technical error made in the 1960s. I imagine they will deny it most emphatically. And what do tyrants do to messengers bringing unwelcome news?
