If memories of school dinners make your stomach turn, you may wish to be grateful that you no longer languish in what passes for the UK’s full time education system. Primary school children could soon be offered a course of insects as part of their daytime meals “in order to help the environment”.

According to GB News:

This, no doubt, is a prelude to inducting a bug-based diet to the rest of the population as part of the so-called “Green Industrial Revolution” – that utopian vision of a future free of things we should apparently do without, such as carbon dioxide and civilisation.

Whether insects and the like are either an “adequate” or even a “good” source of nutrition in a technical sense is beside the point. I am even happy to accept that, according to the report, there are already over “30 parts of bugs in every 100g of chocolate…bread, fruit juices, hops.” Fine. What bugs me (pun intended) is this: there is no reason on God’s green earth to impoverish ourselves with an “alternative protein” source solely because of the unfounded climate hysteria of the urban, liberal left. We should in no way accept the alleged “necessity” of shoving aside the delights of a juicy joint of beef or a bulging breast of chicken simply because of the misidentification of carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant.

We seem to be living in an age of anti-innovation in which all of our productive effort – whether its in food, energy, transport, housing or whatever – is geared towards making our lives worse rather than better. We are being ever-so-gently nudged into a life of mere survival in accordance with the dictates of a wealthy, Malthusian elite that views humanity as an aggressive cancer in need of cutting back and subjecting to their rigorous control – all at the same time as they themselves indulge in luxuries that few of us could afford. To add to the irony, it is their own statist-corporatist-leftist policies that are decimating Western society and breeding social decay; they then have the gall to ascribe the resulting problems to rampant overpopulation and the wanton consumption of the great unwashed. Ordinary people should no longer put up with this.

In contrast to any forced “Great Reset” or “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, the path to sustainability, productivity, innovation and progress is, in fact, remarkably simple:

All of this, moreover, will furnish us with the wherewithal to become more resilient to climate-related problems, whether they be induced by nature or human activity. Indeed, deaths caused by such problems are already at an all-time low.

As for this latest, entomophagic “initiative”, one can hope that the unfortunate children designated as guinea pigs will, themselves, give it short shrift. After all, it’s difficult enough getting kids to finish plate of vegetables; one might have to promise an awful lot of ice cream if they are to finish their creepy crawlies as well.

In response to large profits posted by BP and Shell, the UK government is considering a so-called “windfall” tax on oil and gas companies. The aim of this measure is to redistribute, to consumers, the proceeds from those profits so as to ease the burden of the spiralling retail cost of fuel and heating.

In a free market, a sudden rise in price in response to an influx of demand – usually due to an equally sudden change in circumstances, such as a natural disaster – can, indeed, furnish handsome profits to companies which happened to purchase their inputs while prices were still low. Ordinarily, this would serve as a signal to entrepreneurs that there is a grave shortage of capacity in that particular industry, relative to the height of demand. Such entrepreneurs would then rush to expand their investment in the industry, increasing production of the heavily demanded commodity so that its price could be brought down again. Indeed, it is likely that the initial, extraordinary profits – rather than being distributed to shareholders to be spent on mansions and yachts – will be the first source of that fresh investment. Such profits are, therefore, of a benefit to the consumer, but it is also worth noting that they are just as temporary as high, consumer prices. Increased investment in the industry will have the effect of raising the cost of inputs while lowering that of outputs, shrinking profits back to relatively “normal” levels.

A windfall tax, however, would completely destroy this important incentive mechanism. By robbing the companies of those profits, the opposite signal is sent to entrepreneurs and investors: stay away from this industry or your returns will be confiscated! With no fresh investment forthcoming, that industry then struggles to cope with meeting the increased demand through its existing capacity, the only consequence of which can be scarcity and permanently high prices. The proceeds of the tax itself can, at best, provide only temporary relief - and that is assuming that the government doesn’t find some way of wasting the money completely.

Further, in the case of oil and gas, the reason why large profits cannot be used to expand capacity as efficiently as they otherwise could be is because of green-centric government policies that make it difficult to do so. In fact, for the past generation or so, the strategy of governments towards so-called “climate change” has generally consisted of running down the existing fossil fuel infrastructure while throwing subsidies at inferior alternatives such as wind farms. We are now feeling the squeeze as the dilapidated capacity that remains is struggling to cope.

Another destructive mechanism that governments often resort to in these situations is price fixing, although price ceilings are normally applied directly to consumer goods rather than to capital goods. The initial effect here is to stop any kind of extraordinary profits from being made in the first place. The long term consequence, however, will be the same: desperately needed investment in a vital industry stays away.

The only solution to the rising cost of energy is to get governments out of the business of energy entirely, so that companies are able to deploy resources freely to where they are most demanded. In tandem, governments will need to cease all of their activities which are causing the inflationary pressure in the first place, namely: the incessant printing of money, and their geopolitical adventurism that has wrecked supply chains still reeling from the insane COVID lockdowns.