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It feels like Western economies are being hollowed out from within.

The body advising the UK Government on climate change has said that 62 per cent of emissions reductions must come from “behaviour change and individual choices”.

In other words, the government must train people to use less energy.

If you think that’s a good thing, you forget that energy is necessary for everything we enjoy — whether it’s powering our travel, producing our food or manufacturing the goods we prefer.

Net Zero will not be reached by using renewables. It’s going to be achieved by reducing our living standards. And that’s the plan.

Clamping Down on Commoners

Since energy is required for producing things and for travelling, the government is being advised that it must ensure people produce less and travel less.

Governments are being told they must oversee a deliberate reduction in our standard of living.

Remarkably, the living standards of elites will likely not be affected. But I digress.

Consider some of the recent recommendations from The Climate Change Committee, published on the UK government website in October under the heading “Government must support behaviour change to meet climate targets”.

The group recommended that the UK government,

“Learn from examples of where it has enabled behaviour change, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, and enable people to make the necessary shifts in the key areas of how we travel, what we eat, what we buy and how we use energy at home”

If that doesn’t send chills up your spine, you weren’t awake during the past two years. The government did not “enable” behaviour change during Covid, they mandated it, often at the end of a police baton, or worse.

The government is being told to make rules surrounding where we go, what we eat, how much of what we can purchase and how we conduct ourselves within our own homes.

For good measure, they recommend the same thing again, using slightly different words.

“Help the public to reduce carbon and resource-intensive consumption in diets, products, services and travel.”

We saw during Covid how governments “help the public” to do the ‘right thing.

The report continues:

“Use every lever the Government has — including regulations and fiscal incentives and disincentives — to address the barriers which prevent changing behaviours”

In other words, hit people with higher prices until they cannot travel or consume like they used to.

Down the Drain

The fact is that we cannot build prosperous societies around the vagaries of the weather.

And yet politicians around the Western world boast about shutting down coal mines and restricting access to gas.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese boasted this weekend to Woodford Music Festival goers that Australia has not opened a new coal mine in 15 years.

The crowd cheered as they would for a drum solo, which is about as helpful as the Prime Minister’s announcement when you’re needing power to do the things you love to do.

When these deranged policies being promoted by our climate fetishist elites lead to energy shortages, they double down on their green fantasies and insist the only thing to do is to shut what’s left of coal and gas down even faster than they had planned.

And they do this while having no clue at all about how to provide reliable baseload power to provide abundant energy in the meantime.

It’s increasingly difficult to believe other than that Western economies are being deliberately and systematically hollowed out from within — not to change the climate, but for some other purpose.

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Originally published at The James Macpherson Report.

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Photo by Shreyas Sane.