You light up my life...

...I have on my bookshelves a gift from a dear friend, now dead, the late William Manchester's book "A World Lit Only by Fire". It is a wonderful collection of fact and anecdote about medieval Europe; its cruelty, superstition, bigotry and its fear of heresy. Looking at this satellite image of the Korean peninsula is to look backwards and forwards at the same time. Backwards at the underdeveloped, fearful and idelogically constipated North Korea and forwards to what 50 years of capitalism have achieved for South Korea.
If the green/left have their way, if, as Maurice Strong (founder of the UN Environment Programme) hopes; that the industrialised nations collapse, then the lights will go out again, and not just all over Europe and South Korea...more here...and here...
...and for a UK perspective...It is ironic that this week’s stories about the Government admitting that we face the possibility of blackouts should have originated with the Tory Party, whose own energy policy has long been indistinguishable from the Government’s — windmills, ‘carbon capture’, ‘smart meters’ and all. The truth is that, if David Cameron comes to power in nine months’ time, there will be no bigger headache confronting him than how to avoid precisely the disaster which his spokesman was yesterday warning about. If there is one issue to which he and his colleagues should now be giving their fullest attention it is how to keep Britain’s lights on without prices going through the roof. And that will mean abandoning a lot of that childish Milibandian make-believe which now threatens us with as great a crisis as any our politicians have ever landed us with...more from Christopher Booker, here...

...and the red/green church under the spotlight here...My desire to live a free, mundane life is a fundamental cog in our messy, glorious, capitalist democracy. It is built on millions of such small entrenched postitions. Red-filtered, my desires are despicable and bourgeois and must be beaten out of me with indoctrination or force. Green-filtered, my small desires are despicable acts of ecological vandalism. My house is a carbon factory. My desire to travel, to own stuff, to eat meat, to procreate, to heat my house, to shower for a really, really long time; all are evil. The word evil is used advisedly. Both the green and red positions are infused with overpowering religiosity. Dissenters from the consensus are shunned apostates. Professor Ian Pilmer, the Australian geologist and climate change sceptic, could not find a publisher for his book Heaven and Earth, which questions the orthodoxy about global warming. He is the subject of hate mail and demonstrations...Our intransigent refusal to choose green will be met by a new militancy from those who believe we must be saved from ourselves. Ultra-green states cannot arise without some form of forced switch to autocracy; the dictatorship of the environmentalists...more from Timesonline, here...

...and totally off topic, but extraordinary, Normandy 1944 then, and now...

Environmental rationalism...

...is a commodity that the green left despise. With their disdain comes hatred of their world and prosperity induced guilt. In years to come people will marvel that these last few decades have produced enough self doubt, guilt and panic (a.k.a. Y2Kyoto) to make a retreat from prosperity and technology back to the Dark Green Ages and the coldness of the cave a real possibility. With the knowledge that we have today, we in the developed nations enjoy comforts that our predecessors could never have imagined. It surely is up to us to share this knowledge and this luxury rather than attempting to stifle human development....Ian Plimer (author of Heaven and Earth) compares what's happening now ...to what happened with Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union 7 decades ago. When Lysenko convinced Stalin that he could improve grain production by treating seeds before they were planted, Lysenkoism became a state approved methodology. Dissenters were killed or sent to the gulags. An entire nation converted their agricultural system to accommodate Lysenko's theories. But the grain refused to grow. Sixty years later, they went back to science. ...global warming has divided scientists into two basic camps. The AGW proponents are a new breed, confident in their computer models, dismissive of those who think skepticism should be the first response to new theories, and for the most part conducting their science while driving a computer. The second camp is both older and older-fashioned, for the most part, and is bent on going out and getting the data and seeing where the data leads them...AGW proponents have experienced considerable political success, and national governments and world institutions are contemplating changing the world's infrastructure to suit the needs of this new political doctrine. But the science is clearly not there yet...The debate is not yet over... if the political decisions are made now, while the debate is still in progress, we risk turning away from our best chance to lift one third of the planet out of poverty, using the same tools that lifted us out of poverty just a century ago-cheap and readily available energy. We can not only condemn these people to a life of miserable deprivation, we can turn our backs on our own futures and begin to retreat from what technology can give us.
If instead we moved practically and sanely towards a greener technology base, led by research and development instead of eco-lobbyists and windmill producers, we could stabilise and then reduce emissions over the course of this century without actively oppressing the poor... and continue to move ahead.
The worst of the eco-warriors are not shy about saying they want a much lower population on this planet living a vastly reduced lifestyle...(they are) the enemies of the rest of us who want to live a normal life and give our children a better future. By brazenly claiming that there is no future without sacrificing our energy base, they propagate a Big Lie that would send us back to a past long before Lysenko-back to a cold, cold period we called the Dark (Green) ages. But they didn't need Lysenko back then--they had the Inquisition to tell them how to treat skeptics...more here...