'Progressivism' Versus Progress | The Pipeline

'Progressivism' Versus Progress | The Pipeline
"A cry is going up across the world— in Cambridge England, in Germany, and above all in Canada. It’s the cry heard down the ages from the Common People, the Reasonable Person, the Over-burdened Taxpayer, the Forgotten Man, the Silent Majority, and whoever is feeling his shoes pinching and his belt tightening.
That cry today is more puzzled and poignant than usual because it expresses bafflement as well as indignation.
That cry is: “What the hell’s going on?”
The note of inquiry is entirely justified.

...Nevertheless, the environmental history of socialism provides a very weak argument for getting rid of capitalism. 
Yet, it is where most solutions to the climate emergency end up and, not coincidentally, where they begin too.
Why so?
XR’s multiplication of justifications for their hooliganism is explicable when you realize that their predictions of doom keep not happening. 
And when any particular doom doesn’t happen, the climate seer needs to invent another likely catastrophe to justify his activism. 
Dr. Madsen Pirie, founder of the Adam Smith Institute in London, gave a fairly comprehensive list of such predictions here.

• 1966: Oil will run out in ten years
• 1967: Famines by 1975
• 1968: Worldwide overpopulation
• 1970: World's natural resources run out
• 1970: Ice Age by 2000
• 1970: Water rationing in US by 1974, food rationing by 1980
• 1971: New ice age by 2020 or 2030
• 1974: Satellites show new ice age near
• 1976: Scientific consensus that Earth is cooling.
• 1978: 30-year cooling trend continues
• 1980: Acid rain kills life in lakes
• 1980: Peak oil in 2000
• 1988: Regional droughts by 1990s
• 1988: Maldives underwater by 2018
• 1989: Nations will be wiped out if nothing done by 2000
• 2000: Children won’t know what snow is
• 2002: Peak Oil in 2010
• 2002: Famine in 10 years unless we stop eating fish, meat, and dairy products
• 2004: Britain will be Siberia by 2020
• 2008: Arctic will be ice free by 2018
• 2008: Al Gore predicts ice-free Arctic by 2013
• 2009: Prince Charles says we have 96 months to save the world
• 2009: Gordon Brown says we have 50 days to "save the planet from catastrophe"
• 2013: Arctic ice-free by 2015
• 2014: Only 500 days before ‘climate chaos’

Of course, Pirie was writing in 2014; the list will be longer now.
But however often the predictions are falsified, the soothsayers never admit error. 
Like the religious lunatics who assemble on a mountain to witness the Apocalypse in this Peter Cook sketch, their conclusion is always: “Okay, next week, same time, same place. We must get a winner some time.”