Though tragic, it is not unbecoming that Europe in this very hot summer should suffer so desperately from the absence of air-conditioning. For decades, in stark, stupid capitulation to the mighty fraud about climate change, most of the leading states in Europe denied themselves the opportunity to provide the security of comfort to their populations in extreme weather conditions. The British essentially abandoned the North Sea oil reserves while the Germans happily dismantled their sophisticated nuclear power facilities, closing their last three reactors in April 2023. The result has been a stratospheric rise in the cost of petroleum products that has not only discouraged air-conditioning, but has put all those with modest incomes under severe financial strain.
Because Europe effectively committed suicide as the political centre of the world starting in 1914 and gave the world the sanguinary political derangements of communism and Nazism, it has fallen profoundly into the habit of paying Danegeld to the working class and the small farmers. What was not only difficult to foresee but remains almost impossible for most Europeans to comprehend, is that when the United States led the West to the total and bloodless strategic victory which ended the Cold War with the quiet disintegration of the Soviet Union, taking international communism down with it, the international Left, with a previously undetected talent of improvisation, clambered aboard the conservation movement, shouldered the butterfly collectors and birdwatchers aside, and turned it into a battering ram with which to assault capitalism from a new direction in the name of saving the planet.
The green movement has forced the expenditure in the last 30 years of an estimated $16 trillion, in which time the world’s temperature has not moved a single fraction of a degree and no lives have been saved as a result of this expense. All the dire warnings of the present British king, Charles III, and former British prime minister Tony Blair and the continental alarmists, especially in Germany, have proved to be unfounded. Historians are already beginning to contemplate the madness that possessed the authors of the Kyoto Protocol to agree to colossal sums of reparations to the most corruptly governed and underdeveloped countries in the world as a penalty to the West for having imperilled their ability to enjoy the climate. In perhaps the most supreme act of gall of contemporary times, the world’s most aggressive and unapologetic polluter, the People’s Republic of China, put itself at the head of 77 countries, the developing-nation bloc known as the Group of 77, claiming reparations from the more advanced industrial powers for climate damage they had supposedly done, excluding itself from any responsibility for having been the most reckless polluter of all.
Fortunately, in not the least of his admirable bequests to the West, US President Donald Trump imposed a 180° turn on the Obama and Biden policy of strangling fossil fuel use and has repeatedly dismissed climate change as “a hoax”. The fact that American economic growth and growth in income per capita has vastly outpaced the European Union for decades has finally forced the euro-bureaucracy to take note of their uncompetitive businesses and of the restiveness of the society beneath them, which is deluged every week with the authoritarian ukases from Brussels. The discomfort of all those of modest means who had been squeezed financially and left at the mercy of the elements in winter and summer, and which many of the European governments tried to dismiss as racist hostility to immigration, much of it illegal and accepted with no appropriate attention to increased housing requirements, is finally forcing some of the European governments to think the unthinkable and try to respond rationally.
The current World Cup tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, has attracted astounding numbers of Europeans to the United States and Canada and apart from the magnificent scenery and many of the splendid American and Canadian cities, and the hospitality of most North Americans, there were widespread reports of the utter astonishment of the benefits of air-conditioning, which is present in the homes and workplaces of 80 per cent of Americans and Canadians. It is a hot summer in North America also, but nobody is dying as a result of it and few people find it oppressive.
It must be only a matter of time before Europe follows the example of Giorgia Meloni in Italy and the principal opposition parties in France and Germany and outgrows the doctrinaire dirigiste authoritarianism of postwar reconstruction. Europe has been rebuilt, democracy thrives, but the economy is largely stagnant and the leadership is cowardly. It is time to move Davos to Dallas; the weather is better and so is the public policy discussion.
