Piss Off, Evan

The image above comes from my daughter’s 7th grade English textbook. The textbook was published by Cambridge University Press and the text above is from a lesson on ways to talk about the future. On the face of it. Beneath the face, as you can see, it’s a small pile of methane-emitting, biofuel-status begging propaganda garbage, “authored” by a fictional Dr. Evan Wilde. I checked.

That the transition crowd is going after children is not news. The openness with which this is being done, however, surprised me a little when the abovementioned daughter came fuming to show me that lesson and deliver a ten-minute speech about how her already silly classmates would believe the garbage and become even sillier when they grow up. She certainly had a point although we do have to work on that charming teen tendency towards an unwavering conviction about one’s rightness on every issue.

Anyway, the textbook is a fact, it is in schools not only in Bulgaria, I imagine, and it is dripping on teen minds — just a year after they learned in science class that CO2 makes life on Earth possible at all. It’s quite unfortunate timing but, as suggested already, most teens are not exactly fans of academic progress. They’re fans of exciting stuff and the prospect of cities under water is certainly exciting, as is the prospect of car sharing, which is straight out of a Black Mirror episode but they haven’t watched Black Mirror yet. Most teens are ripe for the plucking. Even better for the pluckers, some are eager to be plucked. And no help is coming.

We’ve discussed energy ignorance at length here and I’ve always maintained that people should be under no obligation to familiarise themselves with how the world works but it is not a bad idea to do so, if only to avoid nasty surprises in the future of the “Why the hell am I paying so much for electricity? Wasn’t it supposed to be cheap?” kind.

That said, we are being literally drowned in climate catastrophism on a daily basis. It all over the news, all news, all the time. The Wall Street Journal teaches curious minds how to keep cool without an air-conditioner, Reuters intones that “evidence shows global warming and its impacts are unfolding faster than expected”, and Earthday.org tells us that “if you are looking for a new career or your children are planning theirs, make sure you have green skills on your resume because that is what businesses are looking for and it will make you stand out and be highly employable.”

The amount of speculation and wishful thinking being presented as fact is so enormous that people — parents — can be forgiven for giving up and giving in, at least by the more magnanimous among us. But parents, being adults at least on paper, have a choice — buy the crap or question it. Kids can only question something if someone teaches them it can be questioned.

In fairness and a sign of hope, many are raising their kids as questioning individuals. Others, however, are not questioning the narrative themselves because they don’t have the time, the energy, and the inclination. As a consequence of that unfortunate combination of shortages, they are not teaching their children to question the narrative.

So when Kid comes home from school he or she might tell Mum or Dad about that lesson, which in addition to the infuriating “will” of certainty also features the concept of 15-minute cities and how cool they will be. Mum or Dad, busy with their own worries, would nod along and agree it would be cool or shake their head sadly at the mention of “CO2 causes global warming!” Thus the catastrophism loop closes and strengthens.

Children are an invaluable weapon in climate activists’ arsenal and I would appreciate you noticing I resisted the temptation to say that children are being weaponised, overwhelming as it was. But this is exactly what is happening — remember those child lawsuits? Or Greta’s early truancy stints in defence of the planet? These stints gave a massive push to the latest transition rush — the child weapon is highly effective. In case any of you are wondering what happened to Greta — she grew up. She’s a legal adult. That climate assault rifle has outlived its usefulness.

But many more are coming. Unicef celebrates them and Save the Children has them “calling on world leaders meeting at the COP29 Summit in Azerbaijan to include children’s needs in their response to the climate crisis.” There is no danger of a shortage of child activists right now — and slipping the transition narrative into textbooks, which is my delicate way of saying that they’re dumping it brutally on the young and impressionable minds, is key to ensuring more such minds turn activist.

Growing the ranks of the activist troops is important because there’s a war going on and the climate crusaders are losing. There is not enough money in the world to make the transition work — but there are plenty of malleable brains that can be convinced to sacrifice their personal comfort in favour of the greater good — and never mind this greater good will never materialise however much comfort those malleable brains sacrifice.

What those sacrifices would do would be to increase the survival chances of the transition vision, perverted as it is. Learning to live with blackouts and meat once a month from an early age makes it easier to take energy unreliability for granted later in life — and secure the continued remuneration of thousands of people earning a living by telling others that blackouts are healthy and we need more of them.

That’s why curricula are being revised to be stuffed with “climate education” material. That’s why there are organisational tumours such as Teach the Future, which is “a campaign led by secondary and tertiary education students to greatly improve education on the climate emergency and ecological crisis in the UK.”

That tumour, by the way, has an “adult advisory board” that features “a school governor, married to a secondary school teacher and father to a vegan, harp playing, paddle-boarding 15 year old climate activist!” There are many of these and they are busy making the vision of the fictional Dr. Evan Wilde a reality, whatever it takes. Generation Climate, indeed. Get them while they’re young and shape their little minds appropriately. After all, the most ferocious soldiers are those who started as child soldiers.

Now for the good news because this is actually a very optimistic post. All this massive brainwashing effort requires money. Unfortunately, there is no way around this and even the most dedicated fathers to vegan harp-playing activists have to eat — and something tells me they like to eat well. It’s a habit that’s hard to kick unless you are forced to.

Yet as the transition advances, thanks in part to the tireless efforts of these child army commanders, life gets harder because it gets more expensive. The commanders can blame climate change until they’re blue in the face but that won’t change the laws of nature and economic systems. Which means that sooner or later many of those starry-eyed teen volunteer climate saviours would have to check their priorities and discover that climate change is not “the single biggest issue of our time.” Poverty and hunger are much bigger “issues”.

Climate change will stop being the single biggest issue of our time the moment the money runs out and it is already running out. That $300 billion the Parties agreed at their last Conference? That’s not happening, not after those same Parties barely managed to scrounge $100 billion for the first time ever years after they agreed on paying it. And that $100 billion made precisely zero difference for both global CO2 emissions and the well-being of people in the poorest nations. Also, the Maldives and Miami didn’t sink underwater but that’s irrelevant.

The climate catastrophism house of cards is collapsing and this is good for the planet and for our species — and biodiversity. What’s not so good is that all those children groomed by the Dr. Evan Wildes of the green camp to become climate activists are in for some serious mental trauma.

This article (Piss off, Evan) was created and published by Irina Slav and is republished here under “Fair Use”