Lately in Melbourne and other major cities around the globe, young people (and older people who should know better) have taken to the streets, marched with signs and banners, dressed up, blocked traffic, locked themselves into metal tubes , glued themselves  onto  roads, torn of their clothes, smeared their bodies with paint, dressed up in medieval garb and fallen down as if dead.

This all allegedly in the name of the (latest) looming acopalyp…ehm..mass extinction threatening the planet . I guess we haven’t had a good apocalypse since 2012 and no decent boy bands either.

It’s not as if they are completely wrong, I mean Mother Earth does deserve our care and attention and there are plenty of environmental issues to get worked up about, although most of them involve getting off your butt and coming up with some decent , viable solutions like for example for  the Grand Australian Plastic Recycling Fiasco, to name but one.

It’s just that they picked the one issue (Climate Change aka man-made global warming), of which their is still no scientific  proof and even if there was, there is very little they can personally do about it (ironically), other than take to the streets.

According to Bjorn Lomborg, famous politically -incorrect Danish mathematician “Most of the 21st century emissions are not being emitted by the rich world. Indeed, if every single rich country stopped all CO₂ emissions today and for the rest of the century — no plane trips, no meat consumption, no gasoline-powered cars, no heating or cooling with fossil fuels, no artificial fertilizer — the difference would be just 0.72 degrees°F by end-of-century.”

However, unless not granting countries like China and India the same economic benefits from industrialization that the West enjoyed or possibly advocating for mass extermination or at least mass  sterilization of “people of colour” (China tried), is your cup of tea, then there is very little the West can do about it.

That is, if you actually believe that Global Warming is a) real and b) man-made, and that it matters, on which there is no consensus, scientific or otherwise.

The so-called Extinction Rebellion protest is nothing but a mass hysterical quasi-religious  frenzy dressed up as a street -rave, created by the deep seated panic of young people (and older people who should know better) who have been brainwashed since Kindergarten , by well-meaning “environmentally aware” educators ,that the world would end in their lifetime.

Here we go again. We are all gonna die, we’re all gonna die. In my day it was the cold war threat of communist-fueled nuclear winter, or at least eternal winter (ice age) due to global cooling, or possibly both . Luckily for me I had older relatives who did know better. “They won’t do it”, said my then seventy-old great aunt, who, part-Jewish but married to a gentile, had survived both world wars hiding out in her mansion on the outskirts of (West) Berlin, and what she meant was, that the “evil old men” would not blow up the planet. Well , they didn’t. She saw the fall of the Berlin wall and no mass starvation due to Ice age or communism, and, a life-long smoker, died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 93, proving, that we are indeed all going to die, but some of us will lead a long life first.

Extinction rebellion is reminiscent of the 1518 Dancing plague of Strasbourg , the physical expression of a mass psycho-genic disorder based on fears, both real and imagined , in which a group of up to 400 people danced frantically  until they were exhausted or died of dehydration and heart attacks. The mania lasted for about 2 months before ending as mysteriously as it began . This being Australia, it will probably end at Christmas and the Cossie-clad nymphs can head straight for the beach, unless, of course, the world ends first.