Newspeak rules in reportage of climate and energy issues in the mainstream media.
In 1984 George Orwell introduced the concept of a new way of speaking to consolidate the grip of totalitarian regimes by thought control as well as brute force and intimidation. He spelled out the design and purpose of ‘newspeak’ in an appendix to the novel which incidentally revealed that the date for the consolidation of the New Order was not 1984 (the inversion of the publication date in 1948).
It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.
So the transition, the Great Reset if you like, is still running on time and we were not home free when we got through 1984.
The idea was to cripple and cramp the thought processes of people in some simple ways for example limiting the vocabulary so dangerous words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion simply ceased to exist. More sophisticated methods involved the structure of sentences and the mode of expression to limit communication to basic processes with minimal scope for imaginative or critical thought about abstract concepts.
Turning to the language of climate and energy policy in the press.
Decarbonization. This is a primary goal, it is Very Good, or even “doubleplusgood”. Getting rid of carbon is a very strange objective, given that all living things including human beings are based on complex molecules built around chains of carbon atoms. What is so desirable about getting rid of the atom that is the basis of life on earth? What is the chain of thought that ends up with the concept of decarbonization as a target for energy policy.
Carbon pollution. What is this carbon pollution that we read about? Not the deposit of soot that used to be a hazard of living next to railway lines in the age of steam. No, it is the trace gas that is essential for plant life (and life on earth) that is present in short supply, far short of the amount required for optimum plant growth, in fact it was dangerously low during the Little Ice Age.
Clean energy. This is energy that does not produce CO2 and various other undesirables. Some of these are genuinely undesirable and they are scrubbed out of modern machinery. So wind and solar power are “clean” because they do not generate plant food. However when you examine the trail of human and environmental disaster from mining and transport, through manufacturing, construction and installation to decommissioning and disposal of the toxic wastes you find that they are very far from clean and green. The myth of “clean RE” is one of the biggest lies of our time. Just check out the story told by Bill Stinson in the paper attached to this briefing note.
There are more examples to talk about another day, like Sustainability (using wind and solar power) and RERT the Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader scheme that is used to keep rolling blackouts out of sight by taking power from big-using Peters so that the mass of Pauls will not realise when we are verging on serious blackouts,
