Even the British are getting stuck to Attenborough over his shameful and misleading evidence to a UK Parliamentary Committee .........
UK TELEGRAPH: DAVID ATTENBOROUGH - ‘’A NATIONAL DISGRACE’’
Even the British are getting stuck to Attenborough over his shameful and misleading evidence to a UK Parliamentary Committee .........
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/stand-david-attenborough-neo…/
For someone who purports to be a national treasure, Sir David Attenborough’s select committee performance yesterday was more of a national disgrace.
The broadcaster said that he wants people to pay more for airfares – removing the newly found opportunity to travel from millions of lower income families.
When asked about the greater effects of his proposals on poorer families he coldly responded: “Yes. I’m afraid that is the case.”
Rather than a hero of the conservation movement or smooth-voiced demigod, we should see Attenborough as the fallible and clearly flappable man he is. Just because he can describe the world beautifully does not make him an expert on public policy.
That has not stopped Attenborough from trying to control our lives, however. He is the patron of the 21st century Malthusian group Population Matters, who campaign for a lower world population. In the spirit of China’s one child policy, they want to halve the current birthrate, with a special emphasis on the developed world, while curtailing migration to keep those born in poverty in their place and not emitting much carbon.
We have been here before. In 1798, English scholar Thomas Malthus claimed that population growth would soon trigger mass starvation. Since then, the global population has grown seven-fold, yet fewer people are malnourished than ever before.
Just like Malthus, today’s apocalypse evangelists are deeply misguided.
We’re not running out of the world’s resources. In fact, we have continuously developed technology to find more resources and use them more efficiently. Our market system helps us apportion cost to activity and, so as prices rise resources are put to their best use.
Nor can Sir David decide what is good and what is evil. His diatribe sought to assign all of us in the West, and particularly Britain, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, the ‘original sin’ of carbon emissions – a sin for which there can be no redemption.
He overlooked the billions lifted out of abject poverty over the last two centuries, the development of new technologies that have made our lives easier or medicines that have doubled the length of our lives.
Of course, Attenborough doesn’t believe what he says applies to him. When questioned about his own situation which involves considerably more flying than the average person, he simply described it as a “paradox”. It wasn’t of course. It was mere hypocrisy.
Inevitably, there is one rule for the multimillionaires and another for the little people.
With the Guardian and now the Government branding climate change an “emergency”, they can travel whenever and wherever they want while trying to permanently ground the rest of us. Sadly though, our political system, and the luvvie-Left media, does little to persuade Attenborough and his fellow evangelists to abandon their insulting, overblown language and illiberal policy recommendations.
Hyperbole was certainly on display yesterday when Sir David compared concern for the environment to the turn away from slavery two centuries ago. This careless comparison may generate headlines but it also makes a mockery of the human suffering of that evil system.
The trouble is that Attenborough and his ilk give a veneer of reasonableness to radical, authoritarian and impractical ideas. Young people, especially those of richer backgrounds, are indeed coming round to the opinion that throwing plastic into the ocean is unacceptable, that taking lots of foreign jaunts in jets has repercussions. That’s their prerogative. When the alternative to straining every sinew to survive is no food on your family’s table, however, then the environment tends to receive short shrift.
In reality, prosperity is the solution. As we get richer, we care about the rivers we live near, the air we breathe, the planet we share.
By bringing nature directly into our homes, Attenborough’s documentaries can even make us care about plant and animal life all over the world. But if we start to control everyone else to fit our worldview, it’s hard to see how we’ll encourage anything other than poverty and resentment in their lives. Removing the vital freedom to choose the lifestyles environmentalists believe are so rational will simply cause people to turn away from the cause altogether.
Full story:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/stand-david-attenborough-neo…/
