Happy Earth Day, when presidents and prime ministers get flown somewhere to be photographed planting a tree. In a political culture incapable of talking about anything that matters, the exhausted rituals of our dying civilisation take on an ever greater pseudo-urgency. As even the BBC tuts:
Some individuals and companies have also been accused of using Earth Day as an opportunity to misleadingly promote their environmental credentials, without making the real changes that are needed.
This is known as "greenwashing".
For example, campaigner Greta Thunberg tweeted in 2022 that Earth Day "has turned into an opportunity for people in power to post their 'love' for the planet, while at the same time destroying it at maximum speed".
Oh, well. As is traditional at SteynOnline, in honour of Earth Day, I like to recycle a few highlights from climate catastrophes of yore. Twenty years ago, for example, I was down at the bottom of the food chain in The Daily Telegraph:
Professor Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey is worried about – stop me if you've heard this one before – global warming. For this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecture, he'll be warning that the merest smidgeonette of an increase in temperature in the south polar seabed will lead to the loss of a zillion species. As the oceans warm, the ice shelves that extend from the polar depths into the sub-Antarctic light will shrink, and the thick mats of algae on their underside will vanish, and the billions of tiny krill that feed on them will perish, and pretty soon, up at the scenic end of the food chain, all those cute seals and penguins and whales will be gone.
That was 2004. Two decades later, none of that appears to have happened. Per the peer-reviewed wallahs at Nature, "the Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades" and the "Antarctic sea ice area has modestly expanded". As for the cutesy photogenic species, our pal Jo Nova noted just the other day:
One thousand years ago Southern Elephant Seals were happily living in the Ross Sea of Antarctica. Likewise Adelie Penguins frolicked in the sun there during the "Penguin Optimum" of three to four thousand years ago. They had lived there on and off for thousands of years in the Holocene, but the glaciers came back and the cold times returned, and all the colonies were wiped out. All that's left there now is just their rotting bones and fur as testament to the devastation of Global Cooling.
Just so. On the other hand, also from that 2004 Telegraph column, I observed:
What we do know for certain is that the krill's chances of survival are a lot greater than, say, those of the Italians, or the Germans, or the Japanese, Russians, Greeks and Spaniards, all of whom will be in steep population decline long before the Antarctic krill. By 2025, one in every three Japanese will be over 65, and that statistic depends on the two out of three who aren't over 65 sticking around to pay the tax bills required to support the biggest geriatric population in history.
Well, it's not yet 2025, but, as of last year, the percentage of Japan's population over sixty-five is 29.1 per cent: they are the world's oldest people. Births in Italy are at a record low since unification in 1861, and sixty per cent of municipalities register a population decrease. Save for sudden migration fillips such as "the influx of Ukrainians fleeing Russia's invasion", etc, the number of Germans in Germany has been "consistently shrinking":
The balance of births and deaths was again negative in 2023, as more people died than were born.
Spanish birth rate hits lowest level since records began in 1941.
Greece's birth rate fell by 30 per cent from 2011 to 2021 to under 84,000 per year, slipping below the death rate, according to the country's national Hellenic Statistical Service, also known as ELSTAT...
Prime Minister Mitsotakis said that the country effectively recorded just one birth per two deaths in 2022.
Russia? Ah, well. They lost five million people, and then managed to stabilise the situation, and slightly reverse it, notwithstanding all the unfortunate chaps falling out of upper-floor windows. Say what you like about Putin, but at least he'll still have Russians to clamp the electrodes to.
As I always say, there is no greater sin in media than being right too soon. Two decades on, I hope Elon Musk has better luck sounding the alarm than yours truly, but as I remarked in that 2004 Telegraph column:
Does the impending extinction of the Japanese and Russians not distress anyone? How about the Italians? They gave us the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, Gina Lollobrigida, linguine, tagliatelle, fusilli. If you're in your scuba suit down on the ice shelf dining with the krill and you say you'd like your algae al dente in a carbonara sauce, they'll give you a blank look. Billions of years on Earth and all they've got is the same set menu they started out with. But try and rouse the progressive mind to a 'Save the Italians' campaign and you'll get nowhere. Luigi isn't as important as algae, even though he, too, is a victim of profound environmental changes: globally warmed by Euro-welfare, he no longer feels the need to breed.
Then as now, environmentalists are generally indifferent to the above - unless they get to choose who to off. This is from my boffo demographic bestseller America Alone (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc):
We are so bad, so polluting, so exploitative, so violent, so destructive that we owe it to the world not to be born in the first place. As Dr Sue Blackmore wrote in Britain's Guardian:
'In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet cannot take much more... If we take the unselfish route and try to save everyone the outcome is likely to be horrific conflict in the fight over resources, and continuing devastation of the planet until most, or all, of humanity is dead.
'If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved.
'Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population - weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example.'
Hmm. On the one hand, Dr Sue Blackmore and the bloke from Coldplay. On the other, Dick Cheney. I think we can all agree which people would be "needed" – Al Gore, the board of the Sierra Club, perhaps Scarlett Johansson in a fur-trimmed bikini paddling a dugout canoe through a waterlogged Manhattan foraging for floating curly endives from once fashionable eateries.
Curiously, those environmentalists calling for a dramatically smaller population never seem to lead by example, and always manage to give the impression that no matter how small the ark is they're a shoo-in for a first-class stateroom.
And yet, and yet... One consequence of western barrenness is that, by mid-century, there will be no one to plant trees on Earth Day. Because, as you know if you've ever seen the trash mountain outside a Bedouin encampment or a West African shanty town, environmentalism is a boutique obsession of the barren west.
On which note Happy Earth Day! Oh, except to observe that, a decade after my warnings on western demographic decline, Dr Rajendra Pachauri (the late globetrotting climate-profiteer and sex fiend who headed up the IPCC) did his best single-handedly to reverse the trend by publishing a warmographic novel about a shagadelic climate honcho. In Dr Pantsdowni's warm-front bodice-ripper, every sex scene is peer-reviewed, and, alas, not all of them end well:
Sadly for Sanjay, writes Dr Pachauri, "the excitement got the better of him, before he could even get started".
Oh, dear. There are times when even a climate expert can't "hide the decline."
~Speaking of planetary devastation, there's no better way to celebrate Earth Day than by ordering up a copy of Marc Morano's Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think, for which Mark had the pleasure of writing the foreword. Because of attempts to pressure Amazon into disappearing the thing, we're now offering Green Fraud at SteynOnline (with a personal autograph from Mark) - or, better yet, you can combine both the Green New Deal and Steyn's own book on climate mullah Michael E Mann in one dynamite denialist double-bill A Fraud and a Disgrace.
On the latter package, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter your promotional code at checkout for special member pricing. You can find more details about our Club here - and we also have a grand gift membership.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with a Biden in every pot in the jungles of New Guinea. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date plumped for Pietro Germi's Seduced and Abandoned, and on Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week marked the centenary of Henry Mancini. Our marquee presentation was the launch of a brand new Tale for Our Time: Mark's serialisation of The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie. Click for Part One, Part Two and Part Three.
If you were too busy buying an artificial tinselly Earth Day tree made in China, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
