This is the decade in which the conceits and vanity of the bien pensant elites stopped being merely silly, and became outright dangerous, so exorbitant has their wealth-destruction become.

The flagship preoccupation of the chattering classes, climate catastrophism, still has plenty of life in it, having long ago ceased to be a scientifically-informed anxiety, and become a quasi-religious cult. Its adherents used to ‘believe’ climate change existed; nowadays, they ‘believe in’ climate change. However, its bastard offspring, Net Zero, the grotesque means by which wealthy rent-seekers tax the poor to pay for the luxury beliefs of the bien pensant bourgeoisie, shows signs of predeceasing its father, the masses having tired of having their pockets picked, and finally noticed that the claims of the priestly classes that a cheap, dependable power grid could be built upon the use of ‘renewables’ were outright lies.

That is, I suppose, good news. As Spain’s experience shows, the more a society depends on renewables for its electricity supply, the more unstable its grid becomes, and the more prone to catastrophic failure.
There is ample evidence that the key predictor of a society’s resilience in the face of disaster, whether natural, or the consequence of hostile aggression, is its wealth. You know, that thing the elites of the Western world have spent the last few decades destroying.

There is another form of resilience, of course, familiar to the residents of Harare, for instance, or indeed anywhere in the third world that has an unreliable, intermittent power supply. They have had to learn to cope with outages on a scale that for the past century unheard of in the developed world.

A Net Zero society would have to learn how to live much like a third world society – with power outages as a way of life. It would learn, no doubt, the ‘hacks’ needed to live without reliable mass transit, and how to power its homes independently of the grid. It would no longer be able to take for granted the supply of water and the disposal of sewage, the continued functioning of the data centres upon which it relies to process payments, and its mobile phone networks. What remains of its industry would be severely impaired, diminishing productivity and deterring investment. Suppliers of Uninterrupted Power Supplies would do well. Everyone else would be seriously inconvenienced, and would, if they were to maintain any semblance of modern life, have to learn the sort of workaround strategies that are second nature to the residents of Harare.

So, if Net Zero is indeed in retreat, if the continued building of useless windfarms and the hideously expensive wires intended to connect them to the grid are but the whirling of Wile E. Coyote’s legs as, after running off the cliff, he briefly defies gravity before plummeting to earth, then we will be spared the need to learn these survival skills. And a good thing too.

Or perhaps not? Because by the time a stake is finally driven through the heart of this demented cult, it will have seriously impoverished the societies that embraced it.

Apart from the money spent lining the pockets of the carpet-baggers selling the infrastructure that will henceforth be abandoned for the useless junk that it is, the damage done to industry, and by extension to the economies of the Net Zero states will be enormous, and slow to reverse. If that were the only economic damage the self-anointed elites had done in the first quarter of the 21st century, it might be survivable.

But there was Covid – a moderately severe upper respiratory tract virus released into the world by sloppy lab work in Wuhan that was talked up as if it was a recrudescence of the Bubonic Plague, and made the excuse for wealth destruction on an epic scale.

I grew up in a Britain which flirted with South American-style inflation, and developed a hearty distaste for it. So, the idea that we could simply print a few trillion dollars to hand out to people, while insisting that those people sit at home and spend it, but refrain from producing anything at all, without doing serious damage to our economies, seemed literally crazy. Yet platoons of economists lined up to insist that it was so. And such was the hysteria engendered by the political class and by their credulous cheer squad in the mainstream media, that the public, convinced it was facing a once-in-a-century crisis, and rather taken with the idea that by staying at home and being paid in funny money to sit on its arse, it was making some kind of noble sacrifice, was prepared to go along with the madness. This was their rainy day, and even though they had spent the last three decades avoiding saving for it, they were determined to spend as though they had, and as though the possibility that a genuinely rainy day lay just around the corner simply did not – could not – exist. Idleness had become a virtue – what could possibly go wrong with that? Well, as it happens, plenty.

Vladimir Putin had not spent the last three decades worrying about what the burning of fossil fuels was doing to the planet – quite the opposite. Having gulled Angela Merkel, quite possibly the most over-rated politician of the 21st century, and certainly its most gullible, into believing that “Wandel durch Handel” would turn him into a nice, tractable Davos man, (a variety of the delusion under which Trump seems to labour) he made unmistakeably clear what should have been evident when he invaded Crimea in 2014 by launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 – that he was a tyrant prepared to expend unlimited quantities of other people’s blood to get what he wanted, and that what he wanted was to go down in history as the man who restored Russia to a position of power from which it had been unjustly toppled by the fecklessness of his predecessors.

His attempt, in 2022, to do so by reclaiming its Ukrainian hegemony ought, as I argued here, to have been an opportunity for the US to restore its etiolated deterrent credibility by defeating, in humiliating fashion, a copper-bottomed villain. Biden dithered because he was a demented old man whose decisions were being made for him by a bunch of naïve, spineless and historically ignorant fools, and Trump dithers because, rather (but not exactly) like Merkel, he assumes that Putin’s organising principles are essentially transactional, like his own. Europe, and its kindred societies try to sound resolute, but they aren’t kidding anyone, because everyone knows that they lack the means to back up their fine words with force, having run down their armed forces to token levels, in the mistaken belief that the US would protect them indefinitely. These are yet wealthy states, but having decided to squander their wealth on wokery and a panicked response to a nasty sniffle, are in no position to fund the rearmament necessary to deter Putin. The smaller economies of Poland and the Baltics are of course spending admirably, Germany is making encouraging noises and so is France, but it’s all too little, and much too late.

Weakness of this kind, to a man with the mindset of Putin, or, for that matter, of Xi Jinping, is a provocation. We must conclude, therefore, that some kind of overt war with our antagonists (whether or not our leaders yet see them as such) is becoming more than probable. Of course, when I say ‘overt’, I acknowledge the innumerable hostile acts Russia has already committed. From the Salisbury poisoning to the Russian maritime habit of forgetting your anchor is dropped and allowing it to drag the ocean floor, severing data cables as it goes, Russia has been conducting hybrid warfare against his European enemies for years. But what would a declared war with, say, Russia, look like? I’m far from a military expert, but I have been paying a lot of attention to people who are, and I think I’m on pretty safe ground to say that it doesn’t start with the arrival of little green men on Romney Marsh, in the case of the UK, or in our case on the northern beaches of Sydney. (Of course, if the Russians disguised themselves as Ethiopians, Sudanese and various varieties of Arab and climbed into a RIB, they could undoubtedly make it ashore in England and safely into the nearest commandeered Travelodge, but carrying enough concealed weaponry to thereafter consolidate their beach-head might prove difficult).

So far as I can determine, though, the smart money is on the aggressor attacking its adversary’s electrical and electronic infrastructure, and thereby degrading his radar and communications systems, and his civil infrastructure more generally. Now the citizens of Harare would be sublimely unaffected by all this. Britons and Australians have not had the inoculating benefit of a Zimbabwean education in living ‘unplugged’, and would rapidly lose the will, and the means, to defend themselves against an aggressor seeking a victor’s terms of surrender.

It would be ironic if we had dodged the bullet of Net Zero, only to fall victim to an aggressor who inflicted upon us damage to which, had we been vaccinated against it by Net Zero, we might have been far less vulnerable.