The overall message from last week’s World Economic Forum kook festival to all us unwashed coach flyers paying $6 for a dozen eggs was abundantly clear:
Shut up and put the diaper on your cow.
How we little people thirst for the annual gems of knowledge from this Avengers-like meeting of the world’s self-proclaimed super intellects of climate crisis at Davos, Switzerland. Remember the Far Side comic of the nerd trying to push open the door to the Midvale School For the Gifted that’s clearly marked “PULL?” Their wisdom comforts us this time each year, when the long, cold shadows of winter remind us that being able to heat our homes, cook our meals and drive to work is really nothing more than a selfish, troglyditic, Trump-esque gluttony.
It’s like that clique of pasty-looking chess club members holed up at the back table in your high school library playing Dungeons and Dragons suddenly won the lottery, and staged their own invitation-only pep assembly where they get all the awards. Trouble is, all the big government chokehold Lefties who’ve gained such influence in Europe and the U.S. wring their hands right along with Al Gore and take what these goofballs say to heart.
What Davos needs is a dose of reality. What Davos needs is Kansas.
I want to hear the egghead aristocrats of Davos explain to Kansas ranchers out at Abilene they’re going to have to put diapers on their cows now to contain their methane releases to help thwart global warming; I want to hear the conversation with the Monday night pitch game at the Four Corners Steakhouse in Scranton that revolves around them now raising and eating bugs for protein instead of all that polluting, grain-fed beef; I want to hear them explain to Secretary David Toland that the drag shows funded by his Kansas Department of Commerce now have to have hemp-based “performance accessories” instead of rubber ones.
Oh, yes. When Kansas gets to Davos, there’s gonna be a reckoning.
The reality is no one takes their nonsense seriously – least of all these elites themselves. This orgy of international virtue signaling has no intention of actually changing anything other than increasing Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas – and that’s all worked out pretty well, after all – said no one in Ukraine or the Russian army.
What’s celebrated most by people with any real gumption is the annual exposition of oblivious hypocrisy these multi-national grant-seeking shills present as they pitch us what amounts to a Bernie Madoff-esque world climate ponzi scheme. The business plan’s pretty simple: Wail about impending climate catastrophes – Al Gore’s declaration that trapped heat is equivalent to 600,000 Hiroshima bombs a day boiling the planet’s oceans (he’s obviously never been to Corpus Christi in November) – then convince the nation’s scared poopless governments to fund research and the wind farms your brother-in-law’s company builds.
All this while these audacity addicts fly in and out on their private planes – burning the equivalent fuel of 350,000 vehicles in a single week. How much carbon-generated energy do you suppose gets spent washing the hotel sheets of these 2,500 “delegates,” running elevators, cleaning plates and cocktail glasses from expensive meals and limo-shuttling their $2,500-a-night hookers to and from hotels? Did they never hear of doing a meeting by Zoom?
No, that’s not for John Kerry’s “select group.” The U.S. Special Presidential Envoy on Climate (and if you’re wondering what that gig pays, like I did, you’ll be interested to know he thumbed his nose at a Freedom Of Information Request from the Boston Herald for that very info – so welcome to Venezuela…I mean America… under the Biden Administration) sees a higher calling for his particular brand of human.
“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — select group of human beings” (yes, he really said it) “because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives — are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet. I mean, it’s so almost extraterrestrial to think about ‘saving the planet.’”
Yep, John Kerry is Captain Marvel. What touched Kerry at some point in his life was more likely marrying multi-millionaire Heinz Ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz, a 50-year bed down with kooky East Coast Liberalism and perhaps a continuing bout of bell’s palsy.
Until next year, Davos; we’ll be waiting right here in Kansas – with our common sense, our $6 eggs and our diaperless cows.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan. His 2003 Kansas-based novel “The Skinning Tree” celebrates a 20-year re-release in the fall of 2023.