George Monbiot just gets stranger and stranger. For those who don’t know of this fertile writer, check him out at his own website www.monbiot.com. The Lefty Leftist of Everything Left, who used to protest against the construction of roads, has clearly wired himself to the moon with this latest bizarre article which says explicitly that mankind should MOURN the invention of the airplane. (?) His weekly article in The Guardian today must be one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read. Tomorrow is the official centenary of the airplane, an event at which world leaders, historians, etc. will get together and commemorate the vehicle that changed the world – that FINALLY got man in the air, and connected the globe as it had never been known before. This is not how Georgi Monboit sees it.
According to him, tomorrow is the centenary of “the world’s most effective killing machine”. He goes on to say how the most obvious initial application of the plane was to the military. “The aeroplane was conceived, designed, tested, developed and sold … not as a vehicle for tourism, but as an instrument of destruction.” I assume the point of this curious statement is to cause his readers to gasp with shock and repent for flying in planes. Not me, thanks George. Plenty of stuff was devised for the military without being inherently evil by virtue of the fact. Unless Georgio actually believes that the entire concept of the military is evil (probably), in which case he would rather that we didn’t HAVE a military, in which case by this time of writing we would probably be under the control of North Korea. Anyway.
He then goes on to mention specific acts of war (or defence, something he doesn’t appear to have heard of) which he obviously considers evil, and all have involved airplanes. Something that would be similar to me listing the crimes of all people with pierced ears in an attempt to prove a point that all people with pierced ears are criminals. Of course this kind of argument is nothing new to the Lefties, who frequently use such devices to try and argue that, for example as we saw a couple of weeks ago, tobacco should be banned and smoking made illegal. If planes had never been invented, the world would not be as evil, right George? That’s an interesting way to look at it. (Ahem.)
After his catalogue of evil air acts, he goes on to say, “I doubt much mention will be made of all this at the centenary celebrations tomorrow.” No, me either Georgie. “Instead we will be encouraged to concentrate upon the civilian applications of this military technology.” OR, perhaps, the MILITARY applications of this military technology which have been used to STOP evil instead of perpetrate it, in order to protect and save the asses of people like Cranky George who may very well be living under authoritarian German rule today, unable to spew his vile rhetoric. That’s what gets me most about this weird politics – its immensely irrational bias.
But up until this point, Moonbeam is not being entirely up-front. He is scrambling together the negatives he percieves in an attempt to disguise the REAL reason he hates aircraft (and it has nothing to do with the above, for he hates cars too, and the military did not initiate the design of those). No, his whole point here is (surprise, surprise) POLITICAL. The guy used to chain himself to trees, for Pete’s sake. He is so zealous to put across his viewpoint in a way which seems more reasonable than the political/environmental hybrid drivel we’re used to hearing, that he waits until three-quarters of the way through his article before getting to the point.
And here it comes: “…Even when used for strictly commercial purposes, the airliner remains a weapon of mass destruction. Last week the World Health Organisation calculated that climate change is causing 150,000 deaths a year.” CLIMATE CHANGE!!!! We might have known! Well how’s about a RECORD change, George, because we have been listening to this global warming voodoo-science for too long. How such a scientific interest can become a political agenda for these people to such a large degree is incredible.
The WHO (more like the WHAT???) have an interesting chart on their website, depicting global warming as they believe it was over the past 20,000 years, and as they believe it will be. Of course most of this has not been directly recorded, it is educated speculation. What is interesting is how completely irrelevant their chart would be to their political agendas, were it not for their “estimated” projections of how warming will continue. Certainly it is true, and nobody can deny, that the earth is warmer today than it was in the 1970s. Nobody, not even the scientists who disagree with this lefty bunch of wingnuts, would try to say that the empirical data does not show an increase.
But to derive from the 0.4 degree increase, WITHOUT the evidence to back it up, a conclusion which not only declares the earth to be warming more than is USUAL for an ecosystem which has been here doing what it has always done in our absence, which not only declares that human beings are for the most part responsible for this latest increase in temperature, but also seeks to coerce and curtail the actions of formerly free human beings by political means as a way of dealing with it; it is a conclusion I find severely wanting. In fact, I’d say these people are out of order.
If Moonbeam had his way, I would never be able to see my family who live a 12,000 mile round-trip away due to the absence of air-travel – and I would owe it all to the shallow, unfounded, scientifically-lacking ulterior motive of a politically-charged minority who DARE to suggest that anyone should hold the authority to impinge on the actions of free human beings in that way.
One more: “….every passenger on a return journey from Britain to Florida produces more carbon dioxide than the average motorist does in a year.”
I guess it would be better for the entire global population if you were to voluntarily curtail your right to breathe, then, George.