Cognitive dissonance is the situation of holding “conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours”. For instance, someone on a strict, calorie-controlled diet who regularly sneaks a doughnut, because “just one won’t hurt”. Note the rationalisation: it’s bullshit, the person making it knows it’s bullshit, but that’s how they resolve the inherent problem of holding contradictory beliefs.
A much more serious case of collective cognitive dissonance was recently exposed by bankers executive Stuart Kirk. In a presentation to investors, Kirk pulled the rug out from under the corporate rhetoric on “climate risk”.
If climate change poses such an enormous economic threat, Mr. Kirk asked, why did asset prices surge as doomsday warnings increased? Either climate risk is negligible, climate risk is already in the prices, or all investors are wrong, he said. If you believe the latter, then you don’t believe in markets and shouldn’t be regulating them.
Wall Street Journal
More to the point, how do big banks, let alone the IPCC, reconcile their apocalyptic claims with their simultaneous assumptions, explicitly built into their climate models, that the humans of 100 years hence will be vastly more well-off than even today?
Another example of the cognitive dissonance of the climate cultists is the demonstrated fact that the most ostentatiously “green” types tend to have a grossly out-sized carbon footprint. Mostly as a result of their penchant for overseas holidays. Like the doughnut-scoffing dieter, they rationalise their addiction to overseas travel by arguing that they have a Tesla and solar panels, so a little indulgence now and then won’t hurt.
Speaking of indulgence, overseas travel and climate cultism…
New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, appeared on the Stephen Colbert show in New York.
‘Welcoming guests to New Zealand is so much of who we are!’ Ardern said, as part of a campaign to persuade American tourists to return to New Zealand.
Note: the tourism industry has been decimated by a two-year-long Covid-Zero closed border policy that excluded anyone except citizens and permanent residents – so maybe not so welcoming of guests after all? But I digress […]
Is this the same Jacinda Ardern who, in December 2020, declared a Climate Emergency?
Or in 2021, said the climate crisis was a matter of ‘life or death’?
Or in an interview just a few weeks back she said, ‘We need to play our part in making sure that we are reducing our emissions as a nation.’
If Ardern really believed all that, she’d be doing her damnedest to stop people flying to New Zealand. She’d also give up her addiction to overseas junkets and do all her appearances by Zoom.
A return flight (economy) from New York to Auckland equates to (depending on which calculator you use) between 1 to 4 tons of CO2. From Los Angeles it would be less, but still around 1 to 3 tons.
These are per person figures, not the whole flight you understand. This means a return to 2019 (pre-pandemic) levels of American tourism (ca. 300,000 American citizens) would equate to around 600,000 tons of CO2 (if we assume a two-ton return trip).
I haven’t even begun to factor in each visitor’s ‘within New Zealand’ CO2 footprint (hire cars, camper-vans, hotels, restaurants, food, and internal flights).
Spectator Australia
All up, just the tourists from America would account for nearly 2% of New Zealand’s carbon footprint. Add in every other country that Ardern presumably also wants people to travel from and it starts to add up to a fairly substantial slice of NZ’s contribution to those supposedly catastrophic carbon emissions.
Remember, in her own words, New Zealand needs to play its part in reducing emissions. Which, so far, it notably hasn’t done: for all Ardern’s high-falutin’ rhetoric, New Zealand’s emissions have gone steadily up.
If there really is, as Ardern asserts, a “climate crisis” that urgently needs to be addressed by reducing emissions in any way possible, then that simply cannot be reconciled with encouraging carbon-spewing international travel.
Does Ardern really not see the inherent contradiction between her preaching and her practice? I mean, surely it’s not that she’s too stupid to work out that two plus two cannot equal one.
Surely not.
