The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man wrote the English economist (and godfather of the science of demographics) Thomas Robert Malthus. Thereby establishing the belief that an exponentially growing human population will ultimately end up being too large to be fed - which will ultimately lead to reduced living standards to the point of triggering some sort of mass population decline. The destructive event which triggers the decline - generally referred to as a Malthusian Catastrophe - occurs when population growth outpaces agricultural production causing either famines or wars that result in widespread poverty and depopulation.
Malthusianism is also an undercurrent to the Michael Moore & Jeff Gibbs' highly controversial documentary Planet of the Humans which alerts the viewer to both the existential threat of human overpopulation and the fact that politically we are all losing the battle to stop climate change because most world governments are made up of leaders who have ostensibly led us down the wrong path on the green agenda — selling out the core green movement to wealthy self interests and global corporates. As this film is particularly controversial in green circles its important to state here that we were disappointed not to see any IOM Green Party candidates actually get elected in 2021 as at least then we might have seen a valid belief-based sustainability strategy emerge for the Isle of Man not merely witness gullible politicians and their officers desperately virtue-signalling for green brownie points as we are now.
Moore & Gibbs' film should apparently be removed from public view according to an assortment of climate scientists and environmental campaigners so we're not going to dwell on it anymore in this write-up - but to counterbalance some of the empty virtue-signalling it can be found here:
Planet of the Humans
All of which via a fairly circuitous route leads us back to the Isle of Man where the only net zero we seem to be achieving is a net zero amount of activity in any discernible form on the establishment of a sustainable Island infrastructure in favour of politicians and government officers yet again apparently seeing our net zero commitments as simply the source of new budget currency to be spent on yet more [brand new, expensive & often largely untested] shiny things with public money. Yes we needlessly wasted tens of millions on shiny things we didn't need before, but this time they're green shiny things!
At this point as a bit of balance it would have been nice to have done a quick run through on what IOM Government has specifically achieved so far in relation to its sustainability strategy - but lets face it we all know that this is literally nothing. Immediately after the Pandemic we raised £400M via a Sustainable Bond which was then used to largely refinance debt or raise new capital for our big polluters such as the Steam Packet and Manx Utilities. Then as a bit of a smokescreen for the masses we allocated an almost imperceptibly tiny amount of money to a failed IOM Government Home Energy Audit & Grant scheme to help people to insulate their own homes which, as it was totally over managed by public sector administrators, effectively helped almost nobody to insulate their own home last winter. We now have a replacement Green Living Grant scheme which is only just taking hold after everyone who didn't get any money out of the first scheme has presumably spent all winter trying to keep warm in their inefficient homes. In total less that half a million pounds of the £400M raised has so far been used to help people manage their energy bills and insulate their homes better after nearly 3,500 applications have been processed (see the dashboard below) and several Home Energy Auditors have been employed. Maybe by this Christmas we might actually get round to supporting the Island's low and average income residents many of whom can no longer afford to heat their energy inefficient homes with MUA prices soaring again?
We've also put some extra obligatory EV charging points in for the Islands mass-affluent early adopters, and it appears that we're now almost breaking out the incontinence pants such is the departmental excitement over the prospect of new EV buses at half a million pounds a go to run on our natural gas generated extra expensive to produce MUA electricity. So largely its been the sum total of almost nothing tangibly achieved for the common good or benefit of the average IOM resident since Mrs Caine and her excited Climate Change Transformation Team returned from Cop26 in October 2021 like Neville Chamberlain waving their commitment on net zero around like they were actually going to do something about it.
Yes there's been plenty of talk about IOM Biospheres and other international accreditation's but the bulk of any money raised largely seems to have been allocated to fund or refinance government and the salaries of swathes of public servants who are ostensibly delivering nothing as a tangible end product to the Islands taxpayer.
In the meantime lets not forget too that we've gone hugely over budget (possibly to a total cost of £100M or more) pumping hundreds of tonnes of dirty concrete into the foundations of a new ferry terminal at Princes Half Tide Dock and that once more we are in the throes of hosting the annual TT festival where the carbon offset that was said to be needed to cover all the extra travel and fuel burned to host last years event was around 5,000 tonnes. Although when it comes to public virtue-signalling nobody seems to even be bothered carbon-offsetting the TT again this year (or if they are they're keeping very quiet about it) - that perhaps was merely last years empty green soundbite on the conveyor of consistently empty green sound bites and likely wasn't deemed important this year now that we have the EV buses to coo over on Facebook.
We could go on but we won't as its embarrassing. The expensive taxpayer funded talk shop has to end and some credible action has to start. Where's the money gone? Where has any vision gone? Where is the master-plan? Where are any meaningful deliverables documented? As you can't work it out from the slabs of waffle in the following document which projects the general feel of an excitable interns summer project paper.
The Isle of Man's Annual Climate Change Progress Report:
Or maybe it was all a bit of green washing aimed at fooling some heavily expectant greens into supporting Government to largely just re-finance public debt and re-capitalise public sector budgets? Rather like the Treasury 2018 SAVE initiative this appears to have again just been a means of securing more government jobs and more government infrastructure and budget spend on things. The only sustainable bit seemingly being the salaries of all concerned funded by the public purse.
The £495,202 paid under the Green Living Scheme so far is 0.123% of the £400M we are now paying off to fund sustainable IOM. Making this an info-graphic on what moving deckchairs around on the Titanic looks like.
