“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Upton Sinclair.

The global climate change industry is worth an annual $1.5 trillion, according to Climate Change Business Journal. That’s the equivalent of $4 billion a day spent on vital stuff like carbon trading, biofuels, and wind turbines. Or — as Jo Nova notes — it’s the same amount the world spends every year on online shopping.

But there’s a subtle difference between these two industries — the global warming one and the online shopping one. Can you guess what it is?

Well, it’s like this. When you go to, say, Charles Tyrwhitt to buy a nice, smart shirt, or Amazon to buy the box set of Game of Thrones, or Krazykrazysextoy.com to replace your girlfriend’s worn out rabbit, no one is holding a gun to your head. You are buying these things of your own free volition either for yourself or for someone you love. You have paid for them, out of your own money, because you have made the calculation that they will make your life that little bit better. Better than it would, say, if you’d kept the money in your bank account or spent it on something less desirable — a novelty dog poo ornament, say, or a handknitted sweater with Jimmy Savile’s face on it and “I HEART paedos” picked out in gold lamé lettering.

When, on the other hand, you buy stuff from the climate change industry, you have no choice in the matter whatsoever. It’s already priced into your taxes, your electricity bills, the cost of your petrol, the cost of your airfare, the cost of every product you buy and every service you use. It is utterly inescapable, this expenditure. Yet unlike your online shopping — which, remember, costs roughly the same as you spend each year on the climate change industry — you get precisely nothing in return.

No, it’s worse than that. You get less than nothing. You get stuff forced on you that you really don’t want: bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes looming on your horizon, keeping you awake, trashing  your property values; fields of solar panels where they used to grow wheat or you used to walk your dog; prissy missives from your local council expecting you to be grateful for the fact that now you’ve got to separate your trash into seven different recycling bags rather than the previous five, and that they’re only going to collect your rubbish once a fortnight instead of once a week; teachers filling your kids’ heads with junk science propaganda; free parking slots for electric cars you don’t own but which you subsidise for richer friends who do; feel-bad nature documentaries about how it’s all your fault that this stuff “may” soon disappear; energy-saving lightbulbs that take your nocturnal home back to the kind of sepulchral gloom Western civilisation thought it had bade farewell to in the 1890s; the Prius, the car which recalls the style and comfort of the cars the fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to have ended; yawning gaps where used to grow the woods which have been chopped down and chipped to create biomass for burning in power stations which used to run more cheaply and efficiently on coal…

More here.