News from the New Party

Hari's hysteria

Things really are not as bad as all that, are they?  Surely they could be worse, couldn't they?  Not if you read the Independent, it seems.  Johann Hari lays it on the line:

Our leaders have been to Heiligendamm and back - but as the G8 summit in the German city ends with a chorus of boos and the tossing of rotten fruit, the two great threats to life on this planet remain as imminent as ever.

The heads of the richest nations could not agree to keep global warming this side of two degrees centigrade, and despite Vladimir Putin pledging to point his nukes at European cities once again, they didn't even talk about reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world. This means that the odds of mankind making it out of the next few centuries alive just shrank a little bit more.

This sounds, at first glance, hysterical, I know...

Well, it sounds stark staring bonkers, actually.  It doesn't get any better, either.  After a detailed description of our impending date with destruction caused by an increase of six degrees celsius in global temperatures, Happy Hari lays into the real villain of the piece - not the G8 itself, but the man who has just signed on the dotted line to commit his country to a fifty percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050: George W. Bush.  Of course George W. Bush must be the villain of the piece, because not only is he the devil incarnate, he is also the leader of the most evil empire in the history of the world, the United States of America.  He is therefore obviously lying, not only for the foregoing reasons but also because he praised someone who said something nasty about environmentalists six years ago, and in any case Johann Hari can read minds so he knows it's true.

But enough of this.  Now onto something which in the considered opinion of Johann Hari is just as serious as the extinction of 95% of life on earth: Vladimir Putin - or more precisely the Presidential Anti-Christ's reckless provocation of Vladimir Putin:

Far from draining the nuclear pressure, the Bush administration is perversely ramping it up. The current moves towards a nuclear missile shield have been misrepresented. No such shield could ever work against incoming nukes, as every test has shown. But what it can do is shoot down non-US satellites. Satellites are now essential for military communications; if you can take them out at will, you have massive and unrivalled power. That's why Putin is asserting his own power in response, and why Bush will decline his offer of a shared base. The Bush administration is choosing to increase its own power, even if the cost is an increase in nuclear danger.

Fortunately, cometh the hour, cometh the man.  Hari has the solution to save us all:

There are rational solutions to this twin-set of nightmares. They lie in a hard, binding international agreement to slash greenhouse gas emissions, and a return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in which all nuclear powers gradually reduce their stashes of WMD.

Wow.  Funny how no-one ever thought of that one before.  But there's more:

The G8 was a slap-in-the-face reminder that we cannot leave it up to our leaders to choose the sane path. We have to force them through mass democratic movements like Greenpeace and a reclaimed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Perhaps we will fail. Perhaps humanity is such an irrational, poorly evolved species that we cannot overcome our tribalism and mutual suspicions and act in our own self-defence. But when the alternatives are a barren world that is six degrees warmer or a freezing nuclear winter, I think we ought to find out - and fast.

So Johann Hari's scheme to save the world would involve Greenpeace, whose obstruction over decades of the only feasible and realistic method of reducing carbon emissions - nuclear power - has done as much damage in the fight against climate change as George W. Bush has ever done, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which is also opposed to anybody anywhere having nuclear weapons or nuclear power, except in Iran.  No doubt he would also support turning over the levers of power to the Neanderthal thugs rioting outside the G8 meetings.  The idea that Johann Hari might be thought a suitable arbiter of sanity and rationality in these circumstances is, ahem, quaint.