Jordan Peterson: Net Zero is a Brutal Form of Nature Worship and the Tories Need a Desperate Slap for Falling For it

WILL JONES

Jordan Peterson has branded Net Zero a “brutal” form of “nature worship”. Speaking to Spectator Editor Michael Gove, the famed Canadian psychologist says the fanatical agenda is leading only to “petty tyranny” and is a “catastrophe” for the world. Here’s an excerpt.

MG: One of the commitments that you have made is to support a new organisation, Arc – the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship [backed by the Spectator’s proprietor, Sir Paul Marshall] – in its search to provide a better story in a number of areas of public policy. Why? What is the message that you believe that Arc should get across?

JP: One of our principles is that our endeavour is to be invitational. If you tell people a good story, then they’re enthusiastically on board with it and enthusiastically means to be possessed by the spirit of God. The zero-sum Malthusian nightmare story that’s been foisted on us by the globalist, green, utopian, virtue-signalling, manipulative elites is not invitational. It is a story that will produce nothing but the most petty tyranny that you can imagine, regulating every single thing that people do. How much water their toilet uses when it flushes; how much water comes out of their showerheads; how much electricity they’re going to be able to use or not use; how much carbon they’re going to be able to emit. This is a catastrophe. We’re seeing the terrible results of it in the U.K. and in Europe.

We [at Arc] are trying to formulate a more attractive story without being naïvely optimistic. We believe that the West should be striving to drive energy costs down to the lowest possible level. If renewables can play a part in that then more power to them, so to speak. But the fact that nuclear has been off the table for 50 years is appalling. It comes from putting the wrong thing at the highest place. We’ve devolved into nature worship, which is a brutal theological enterprise. People should conduct themselves as wise stewards of the environment – obviously we have to take care of where we live. But the evidence is very clear that if you elevate people economically to the point where they’re generating about $5,000 a year in average GDP, they start to become confident enough in the future to take a long-term view of survival. They start to become, in the modern parlance, environmentally aware. If you’re scrabbling around in the dirt looking for the dung to burn for your next meal, the probability that you’re going to dispense with anything like a long-term view is essentially 100%.

A particular highlight is when Dr. Peterson tells Gove – a key figure in the Conservative administrations of the past 14 years – that the U.K. Conservatives “need a desperate slap” after what they’ve done to Britain.

MG: Which of those in power or bidding for power across the West do you admire or come close to admiring? And which of those do you think have done the greatest damage?

JP: The Conservatives in the U.K. need a desperate slap. They got one in the last election, but that doesn’t mean they’ve learned anything. I’ll speak bluntly: they allowed Boris Johnson’s obsession with his young wife to decimate the U.K. economy. Maybe that’s a bit on the cynical side, but I just can’t believe that the Conservatives fell for Net Zero. Any politician who talks about zero anything has instantly outed themselves as incapable of mature thought. It’s a foolish target because zero is perfect. There’s no way you can make anything perfect without sacrificing everything else.

MG: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

JP: I get a kick out of Nigel Farage. He’s patterned his Reform party after the Reform party in Canada, which put the conservatism back in conservatism in Canada. Farage is a pretty odd conservative, but so is Pierre Poilievre in Canada. And obviously so is this preposterous pack of Republicans that now occupies the White House. I’m pretty much in favour of anyone who dares to question the DEI narrative and the climate apocalypse. That’s at least a start.

On the free speech front in the U.K.… what are you people doing? ‘Non-crime hate incidents.’ Really? That’s what you have your police doing? Jesus, you’ve lost your bloody minds! And then for Keir Starmer to come out (I thought it was an AI fake) and say: “Oh, you know that immigration policy we’ve been pursuing for 10 years and the one that we persecuted everyone for exposing, that was all a big lie and everyone knew it. Sorry.” Kemi Badenoch basically made the same admission. Badenoch could be a force for revitalisation on the conservative side, but I’m just so appalled by what the Conservatives did when they were in power: the immigration mess and the Net Zero mess. I don’t see how you could fail more spectacularly than to fail on those two fronts simultaneously.

The U.K. had better get its act together. I’m hoping it does, because the world would be much less without the U.K. and without Europe. My God, it would be a catastrophe to lose the European endeavour. I can hardly imagine anything worse.

Watch here, and read the full interview (well worth it, with a fascinating discussion of the Bible, faith and family values) here.