Chronicle Of Dissent - When The Skies Were Free

Clouds, currency and carbon: all that's sequestered is the truth

• The skies are the embodiment of freedom but fear clouds our perception

• Airport chaos puts people off travel and jabs bring low the hero pilots of our age

• The horizon glowers as climate-nature is used to benight our consciousness

• Poland allows foraging for firewood to solve fuel shortage, in apparent volte face

• Climate is used to dock people’s wealth and redistribute it to rich

• “Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe and to love…”

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(3,000 words or 14 minutes’ read)

Credit: Genç Ufuk Derneği

Jun 12, 2022

The Tbilisi hills are deep in pink thistles now the broom has shed its carapace. The searing yellow is replaced by the sepia hue of grass, which grew like topsy under the spring rains and is already sun-dried on the karst limestone of the Caucasus.

A smallholder feeds his cows, herding half a dozen on the commons. You can barely call him a farmer, he is a man with a few animals eking out a living on a slope, like his ancestors.

We wheel our bikes in the other direction, away from the cows, to territory less frequented by the herdsman or assorted pleasure seekers with their Bluetooth drum and bass. A sheltered dale between two hillocks.

My son looks up at the sky, and points out the diverse clouds: cirrus, cumulus and stratocumulus. He’s picked up the talk online about weather modification but, whatever he makes of that, I’m happy he still loves clouds.

Before Covid when I traveled for work as a television news editor, he would visit me in the Americas and the Mid East or Arabia and, freshly alighted from the plane, would effuse about what he had seen looking down on Earth’s softer mantle.

Though we haven’t flown in two years — like most, we have been grounded — the skies are still the manifestation of freedom, of the bird, of our escape from humdrum lives.

At this very moment those who dare to travel are being schooled in discomfiture: the security theatre that was rolled out after 9/11, amplified by lockdown travel bans and PCR mandates; now crowded airports and cancelled flights, with a shortage of pilots even after airlines abandoned vaccine mandates. [1]

The vulgar displays of private jets at climate conferences push the same message: carefree travel is a privilege of the rich. It is not a faux pas, a breach of security by a dissident photographer at Davos or Glasgow: you are meant to notice.

The boy does not see this context but he seems to sense the next crisis will come out of the skies. It may be weather modification or climate change, invisible gases, air-borne this or that. We are even promised aliens. [2]

Real or perceived, the press won’t care for veracity; the event will be used by government behavioural psychologists to fit some managed outcome or corporate objective — an end that justifies the means, by which the sky is rent in two.

Forage, forrester

South Australia is the latest state to declare a climate emergency, the pretext being the country’s average temperature has risen just over one degree in the past century. The declaration from Adelaide is one more preparatory step to introduce people to quotas and rationing as part of environmental, social and governance (ESG).

On the other hand, Poland has just told its citizens they can forage for firewood in the nation's forests. Only three years ago the city of Krakow banned wood fires, including all but portable Hibachi-type barbecues. Smog and climate seem to be less pressing.

The reason, of course, is a shortage of coal from the Donbas but it underlines how thin is the veneer of political truth-telling.

If a changing climate was the immediate existential catastrophe portrayed by garrulous Gretas and the red-caped ghouls of Extinction Rebellion, why would Poland expose itself on the environmental front just as Ukraine totters to its east? Would the real threat put up or shut up.

The BBC says the war has prompted a “fossil fuel rush” that will likely lead to a permanent increase in hydrocarbon useage and the consequent neglect of climate change targets. [3]

It is almost as if they are looking for an excuse now that the fuel crisis has exposed how threadbare is the talk of energy security and the inadequate state of Green energy.

The European Union and United States refused financial help for smaller nations to cut hydrocarbon use, at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. It may have emboldened China and India to block plans to phase out coal — they agreed only to “phase down.”

It is more likely that their intelligence services already knew of the risks of war in Ukraine, and that gas, oil and coal were about to be in greater demand.

None of this realpolitik bothers the media.

The gap between word and deed is explained away in the press as a battle between “consensus” and “deniers.” Roger Boyes, writes in The Times on Jun 7 that “climate crisis will bring on Russia's downfall,” as the developed world bids farewell to oil and gas that last year accounted for 36 per cent of Russia's earnings.

Perhaps we are unfair to demand reporting that corresponds to reality. The Club of Rome, named after the Rockefeller retreat on Lake Como, admitted as much in The First Global Revolution, Club of Rome (1993):

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill… All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

There have been honest attempts to tie currency to energy use and pollution, such as Buckminister Fuller’s, but they’ve been commandeered by selfish interests, like Al Gore’s proposal to “TRACE” carbon that presents the human as offender.

In reality TRACE won’t drill down to individual level but use machine learning to approximate or interpolate human behaviour — already pernicious.

The aim becomes more injurious if we borrow Gore’s use of uppercase to describe CENTRAL BANK digital currencies.