On saving the planet

& why Sam Bankman-Fried and Elisabeth Holmes are fraternal twins

Sam and Elisabeth: saviours of mankind?

Here’s my latest insight: we’re always yearning for ‘saviours’ of one kind or another. And lately, they always turn out to be swine who can fly because, as they say in the pragmatic USA, there’s a sucker born every minute. And that sucker is us. Let me explain how easy it is to dupe people, beginning with me.

Once upon a time, way back in the waning days of the twentieth century and well into this one, I was a committed environmentalist. I volunteered with Stand Earth, an American activist outfit protecting forests in BC, I went on marches and made strange plans about how to ‘save the planet’ with my best friend. And to top it all off, I spent a year researching the subject of ‘global warming’, got clinically depressed, and then wrote a bad novel about it all. Honestly, what else could I have done? After all, the MMM was telling me that all the wrong people didn’t ‘believe in Climate Change’, that the Science was clear. All the good people knew this. I was one of them, of course. I was at one with the people who had seen the light, like the novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

He was one of the ‘early adopters’ of the environmental catastrophe narrative, and for some reason, his usual sarcasm and wit deserted him in the face of The Science. He gave an important speech at the first Earth Day in 1970, and then in private, he wept. I was ignorant of this at the time; but it is laid out in great detail in an article with the gripping title: Polluters will be looked upon as swine. https://lithub.com/polluters-will-be-looked-upon-as-swine-on-kurt-vonneguts-environmental-activism/

I believe we have arrived at that moment. And let’s not blame Vonnegut and all the others, who could not have foreseen that a once noble cause could be so thoroughly corrupted and flipped into an instrument for would-be fascists.

Fast forward to yesterday when we woke up to another cheery episode of Collapse of Civilizations and the story of Crypto, another thing that was going to ‘save’ us. The original idea behind Crypto was that money had to be reinvented, that we needed to get out from under Big Bad Banksters and their evil financial machinations. At first, it was a truly egalitarian and libertarian idea until certain bad actors got hold of it and ruined it.

Which brings me to the baddie of the moment, a guy named, appropriately, Sam Bankman-Fried or SBF. He managed to hoodwink the great and the good to the tune of endless billions that have all vanished overnight. FTX, the Crypto exchange he owned, is now in the hands of a regulator who claims that in all his years of cleaning up bankrupt companies, he’s never seen such a complete mess of irresponsible financial dealings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/briefing/crypto-collapse-ftx.html

Gosh. He was nothing less than the Wunderkind of Crypto, hung out with the likes of the Clintons (that alone should have warned us lesser mortals) and was lauded as a brilliant thinker by well, everybody. He had that genius vibe going, with the unruly hair, endless attitude and all the right slogans. Also, and I believe this is the key to the whole unlikely saga, SBF swore that he wasn’t just into making money, oh no, he was just making money to be able to give it to worthy causes. He was playing the great philanthropist game, officially spearheaded by the Centre for Effective Altruism, of which SBF was briefly the CEO.

https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org

It was that fairy tale that catapulted him to the top. He was a genius alright; he understood which idealistic buttons to push, and went all in. And it really does sound wonderful and earnest and good. Only cynics could doubt them.

But the most interesting thing about SBF is that he always knew that it was a game of extreme virtue signaling: he never bought into his own BS. Only his investors did. You can’t blame them, he did have the ‘right’ credentials: son of two lawyers, MIT grad, worked for an elite financial outfit for a while, and then decided that he was going to ‘do good’, save humanity, and get filthy rich all at once. He pulled a fast one with true elan. And to my utter delight, Sam spilled, and admitted that all that do-goodery was a ‘dumb game woke westerners play’. It got him accepted in all the right places, so why not. I think this is called letting the woke cat out of the corporate bag. https://www.foxnews.com/media/progressive-ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried-admits-ethical-image-an-act-dumb-game-woke-westerners-play

Another game that ‘dumb woke westerners play’ is the one where we ‘save the planet’ with Green Everything. The latest insane version is where all the evil western nations who gave birth to the modern world will pay ‘reparations’ to the rest for polluting the planet in the process. And now we have discovered that we can’t actually do without oil and gas just yet. The renewables aren’t reliable or big enough. If we rely on them, as Europe is trying to do, we’ll find ourselves freezing in the dark. What a way to go bust, virtue signalling all the way down.

For a reasonable discussion of how we got here and where we might be going, I can point to our old friend, Jordan Peterson, talking to Danielle Smith, the new Premier of Alberta, also known as Texas North. Alberta is where most of Canada’s oil and gas is located, and something is brewing there, maybe a grass roots rebellion against our corrupted, illiberal, fatuous yet dangerous Trudeau government.

This conversation is a long, revealing look at the global issues that have erupted around the energy sector and the Green Agenda I once believed in.

And I have yet another example of how we Idolize those promising ‘salvation’ of one kind or another. Remember Elisabeth Holmes? She reminds me uncannily of SBF. Holmes was yet another charismatic dreamer who pushed our collective buttons and persuaded big players like The Walton Family among others, to fund a little device that was going to ‘read’ all of your diseases from a single drop of your blood! It was pure magic, just like Crypto. Except it was another fraud. She has now been sentenced to eleven years behind bars though her team claimed, again like SBF, that she was never ‘motivated by greed’. She was a pure idealist, a believer in her own BS. That seems to be the winning formula: collect vast sums from gullible investors but claim it’s not about filthy lucre, but pure goodness. She just got a little carried away and according to the prosecutor, Sam Leach,

“Holmes preyed on hopes of her investors that a young, dynamic entrepreneur had changed health care”. Leach summarized his sentence in a 46 page memo, calling her crime  

“…one of the most egregious white collar crimes ever committed in Silicon Valley”, and that he was “taking this opportunity to send a message that would curb the hubris and hyperbole of the tech boom…”

Oh yeah, hubris and hyperbole. If Holmes gets substantial prison time, what should SBF get? What would Leach say about this guy? The sums he lost vastly outplay hers. But she was his equal in the hubris and hyperbole department. Frankly, we’ve had a lot of that during the last two years. I won’t even get into the ‘vaccine’ scandal, those wonderful magical marvels of The Science, that were sold to us as ‘safe and effective’. There’s hyperbole for you as well as extreme hubris. The fallout from that evil will take decades to unravel. Who are we supposed to trust now? I think that is the question.

However you tackle it, I am no longer an uncritical believer in Climate Change and I have ceased buying into the Green Agenda. It has clearly been hijacked for other purposes. If there is one thing that the Pandemic has taught me is that we can all be manipulated, and that the Truth is a very slippery thing indeed. The only way to know anything for sure is to adopt a somewhat cynical ‘prove it to me first’ attitude to any and all promises made by the Elites. They can’t all be totally bad, can they? Or can they. It’s up to us to hold their feet to the fire and not let go until they scream and fess up. That takes commitment, and a certain coldness. It’s unfortunate, but maybe Freedom isn’t free and Truth does demand eternal vigilance.