(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed below are those of the authors and do not necessary express the views of Socotra House Publishing. They are not an argument against climate change, since it does, but rather an expression of dismay that we are embarking on a series of radical and dramatic social changes without demonstrating that they are actually possible. Or whether there is actually an emergency. That is why we have a disclaimer).

We are about to lose it. Or have lost it. We members of the Writer’s Section don’t claim to have the answers to the question, since it is symptomatic of everything else going on. In that context we were talking about the new Congress yesterday. It is apparently the 118th of them. It is the same as the unit number of a condo we are trying to purchase, so as a group we are a little confused.

Melissa suggested a luncheon out of the Building, still a fairly novel sort of thing to do in Arlington after life on The Farm. In Spring it might have been a nice walk over to the restaurant, just a few blocks away. In this January, walking did not seem practical. The trip in comfort mandated firing up the Panzer. The car was not particularly crowded with only four of the group contained in the moving machine. Part of the Production discussion continued from the backseat. We had been talking about the Cookbook project, but starting the car changed the direction of the conversation as efficiently as backing the vehicle out of a space we like in the parking lot. We can see it from the balcony, and validate its presence and tire status from a distance. Cars are great.

High-speed personal travel revolutionized our nation and our times by providing a capability to go wherever we pleased whenever we wanted.

Sounds simple, right? But we grew up with the idea that our cars were a bit like the horses our great grandparents used for the same purpose. One family routinely drove one and sometimes several automobiles to the cabin in the north woods of Michigan. That happened most weekends in the ski season and extended periods on the lake in the delightful summers.

There was much more to all the moving around, of course. Racing and road trips. Commutes and carnivals. A feeling of entitled freedom unchallenged in human history.

Which is why the current drive to take it away is both startling and eerily invisible. Mobility is an important issue, and intrinsic to freedom. You would think it might have come up in the discussion about what we are doing, but of course, we are in a new system that runs on “emergency.”

The 2,700 page Infrastructure Bill passed by another recent Congress contains direction for spending $1.2 Trillion dollars. For reference, that is more than a thousand billion bucks, passed with passing discussion only about the “emergencies” it was supposed to remedy. It is an example of something now common and done without much debate. This bill was rolled up outside the regular order since it was so important and passed so quickly there was little time to review what was in it. We did that with Healthcare, too. It is sort of unusual.

One of the provisions for Infrastructure relief was on one page of the thousands that are now laws. That page mandates automakers to install backdoor wireless kill switches in every car sold by 2026. That will enable police officers- or hackers- to transmit a signal from their vehicle to yours that turns it off. If the government decides it needs you to stop, for whatever reason, they will be able to do so.

What they are doing is laying the foundation of a society in which any movement of its residents can be controlled.

The changes initiated in the Covid Scare were an indication of how effective voluntary compliance can be. Imagine the prospect of a government that decides there may be an emergency that requires swift action to prevent danger. Lost in the rapidity is who exactly is in danger. It may be that it is a threat to itself.

We are tired of arguing about the “Really Big Crisis Happening Right Now.” We have been following the heated discussion since the first Earth Day in 1970. That is more than a half century ago. There have been developments in that brief blip of time. Remember when it was getting colder and the Ice Age was returning? That changed to Global Warming with Hockey Sticks of ominous rapid change. That didn’t work out, since there has been no change in eight years. Now, we are told it is simply “Changing!” which is apparently what it has always done.

We retain a fashionable interest in the environment. We still agree with some of the rhetoric. Like, “changes in climate are professionally measured in blocks of time thirty years in length.” We agree there has been some mild warming since the end of the Little Ice Age. Some scientists date the end of that to 1850. That is the same starting point for “catastrophic warming” in some of the alarmist literature. In a rational discussion about the climate, we would expect it to be warming a bit naturally with the end of a small icy period in our Earth’s long history.

There is a viewpoint that there is no “fire in the theater.” We are now in the eighth year of a period of no change to the global temperature. Most of the audience for that have already gone home in their cars after the last cold spell.

So here we are again. We are going to junk Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) cars for electric ones. And we have to do so right away! Granted there is only a miniscule infrastructure to support them, of course. Plus the requirement for rare earth materials and energy to produce them. If the catastrophe is not imminent, why can’t we take a minute and think this through and justify the dramatic steps we are making mandatory?

That discussion on energy use and the need to centrally control it pervades most issues. The underlying implications are not permitted discussion. Have you heard of the “15-Minute City?” That notion is a once obscure concept for urban living in which “most daily necessities can be accomplished by either walking or cycling from residences.” It may be mandatory soon, due to the emergencies.

The “fifteen minute” might make speed-walking or cycling a requirement not able to be shared by all citizens, but you get the drift. One of the other development themes is to mass residence along mass public transit systems “because of the emergency.”

We all rode Metro when we worked in the District and have no basic aversion to buses or trains. But ridership has declined as disorderly conduct has become common on trains and platforms. If mass transit is to be the backbone to the new Society without the option of operating our own cars, we respectfully decline. That too has become a bit of an issue, because disagreement in time of “emergency” has changed. It has become “misinformation.”

We understand the misinformation part, since there is an awful lot of it going around. But if some earnest individual walked up to you on the street and said that because the sky is falling you have to surrender your vehicle. There might be a discussion about whether the sky is actually falling fast enough to justify a massive dislocation in travel. We just had a glimpse of EVs in cold temperatures. Battery lives shorten dramatically. They were short to begin with.

All these changes seem to be happening without much discussion, and without a demonstration of how this might work. That aspect of the “climate emergency” is certainly not a product of happenstance. It resembles what Thomas Malthus used to say a couple centuries ago. Tom was an English scholar, cleric and economist who became famous with his prediction humanity was doomed in 1798. He claimed we could not possibly sustain the existing population of his time. We have episodes of that pessimism in every generation. Ours is Paul Erhlich, who has been maundering all of our lives on impending emergencies of all sorts of issues, all of which are equally incorrect.

So, the dilemma is sharp at the moment. We seem to be in the grip of some Malthusan moment of madness. Change in Nature is a natural process. An example is a change on one of our recent winter days. There was a natural and abrupt decline of about 40 degrees in a few hours of a single afternoon. The sun rose again the next day, things were a little milder and life went on.

So what do we say to people who claim an emergency situation requires us to make dramatic changes to our lives and freedom of movement? An emergency so severe we do not even have time to talk about it? It is already settled science? We need to get moving and there is no time to talk about it. You know, because of the emergency.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com