Some years ago, I visited an aquarium in Monterey, California.  At first glance, it seemed like an interesting place, but sadly, I'm one of those people who read the entire sign explaining each exhibit.

After reading a few signs, I realized that each was a composition using a few words to describe the critter in the tank and progressing into a sad description of how man's actions — or even just man's presence on the planet — was causing trouble for the creature on display.  In short, it was one guilt trip after another, until I finally got the message and stopped reading the signs.

If it had been just one aquarium, it wouldn't be worth mentioning.  But this theme is repeated in many places these days.  It is so pervasive that years ago I nicknamed it the Guilt Trip Travel Agency.

My father taught me many valuable things.  Perhaps the most important of all of them was his statement that "you should never trust anyone who tries to motivate you using fear." 

If you study the dynamics of the COVID "panic-demic," you will see that many people in high places effectively used fear to motivate and control large populations whom they deemed too ignorant to think and act for themselves.  When fear was not effective enough, they used COVID "passports," job loss, shame, and restricted access to beat the people into submission.  All of these things worked well if they could play on the ignorance of the population they wished to suppress. 

Eventually, fear failed them because the vaccines were neither effective nor safe.  Guilt ("if you don't, you're putting yourself and all other people at unnecessary risk") failed them as well because the vaccines did not prevent transmission.  Eventually, they had to resort to one of the nastiest tools in the control freak's tool box: coercion.  "You will do it because I said you must.  If you don't do it, I will punish you and make your life hell."  Sadly, that worked fairly well.

One of the leveraging components that aided all of these control measures was ignorance.  It is easy to lie to people if they are ignorant of the matters under consideration.  How much medical wisdom do most of us have compared to the training and experience of a person with an M.D.?  The people who wish to control our thoughts and actions are doing all this for our own good, aren't they?  Aren't they?  Don't they know best? 

Who can say if the COVID panic-demic is over?  The control freaks seem to have played it for all it was worth and then some.  The next new great thing is (once again) "global warming" or maybe "global cooling," or, to cover all bases, "climate change."  Look for the fear.  Look for the guilt.  Look for the shame.  "Aren't you ashamed to be a human, ruining our planet?"

I'm no doctor (of anything), but saving energy was a major focus of my job.  People paid me to do that for 29 years.  Here I offer the basic concepts you need to prevent the control freaks from playing on your ignorance in the global warming game.

1. The quality of human life is proportional to the per capita expenditure of energy.  At the moment — and perhaps for at least the next century — that energy will come mainly from fossil fuels.

2. Three factors control the nature of human life more than all other factors combined: food, fresh water, and energy.

3. These three factors are somewhat interchangeable.  Once we get beyond hunting and gathering, we need energy and fresh water to make food.  We can use food to make energy.  Most processes run at a loss, so it is foolish to make grain and then use the grain to make fuel (alcohol) and then use the resulting fuel to grow grain.

4. Farming is the only solar collector that works very well.  Most people don't understand farming.  It takes fuel, fresh water, and energy to farm.  There was a time in human history when everybody was a hunter, gatherer, or farmer.  In those times, for most people, life was nasty, brutish, and short.

5. On April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States of American ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.  So much for the wisdom and efficacy of courts.  Carbon dioxide is critical to the life chemistry of plants.  Animal life depends on plant life.  Within reasonable limits, and as much as we understand from known history, there have been times when the atmosphere had more carbon dioxide and times when it had less.  Until very recently, these variations were not created by the activities of man.  When there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plant life flourished.  In those times, the potential for human life to flourish was greater.

6. The advance of technology in the Bronze Age and Iron Age allowed fewer men to feed more people and led to the green revolution of the 1950s and '60s, which allowed farmers to be much more productive.  Critical to this was the Haber-Bosch process, which allowed nitrogen fixation and created ammonia and artificial fertilizer.  Without this artificial fertilizer, farm productivity could not support the current population of the Earth.  Farm machinery depends on fossil fuels, and the Haber-Bosch process depends on methane, which is the main component in natural gas.

7. If you reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plant life will decline.  If you reduce the production of energy from fossil fuels, farm production will decline.  If you reduce the production of natural gas, nitrogen fixation using the Haber-Bosch process will decline.  Each of these declines will reduce the productivity of farming. 

If you reduce the productivity of farming, life will become nasty, brutish, and short again.  If you reduce the productivity of farming, the human population of the Earth will decline.  The controlling factor will be starvation.

There you have it.  If you understand these seven fairly simple things, the control freaks won't be able to get their hooks into you.  They will still write stupid signs for aquariums, but maybe, just maybe we won't let them run the world and wreck it.

Image via Pixabay.