When I first visited Asia nearly 2 decades ago I felt like a giant….still do. Here’s why…even though this chart is 10 years old my guess is it’s not changed a great deal.

The other thing I remember is that if I’d been to the gym that day, after a meal..I’d order another. And I’m not a big guy…or fat, or a pig, and I’m pretty sure I’ve no intestinal worms devouring what I put in. Thing is, a small bowl of rice with some veggies and a smattering of chicken or prawns isn’t the same as a big juicy steak…plain and simple.

And you know what it takes to eat meat?

Cash.

Here’s GDP per capita VS average height.

The correlation between protein consumption, GDP, and height is a well documented one. I’m not telling you anything you didn’t likely already know and I’ve nothing to add except that I’m rather grateful I wasn’t born in Nepal…or Cambodia. 

So on that note let’s look at where folks are getting wealthier…because with increased wealth comes higher protein consumption…and something else I’ll get to shortly.

Unsurprisingly this is all taking place in Asia. It is THE region.

Here’s Asia’s projected meat and seafood consumption growth prior and projected.

On the other side of the planet

In the west everything is racist. Being male is racist…toxic apparently, being white is racist, and eating meat is most certainly racist. And clearly it’s these white, male, meat eating racists who are causing global warming climate change. Oh and it’s coming…being Asian will shortly be racist too.

The reasons are easy to identify. Asians are increasingly successful (hard work and sacrifice have this knock on effect) they’re obviously part of the conspiracy…against – um – rich, entitled gender study graduates, and most importantly they don’t screech “I’m a disadvantaged minority” anytime someone disagrees with them or they mess up. Nope…they just get on with it. So they’ll soon be racists too. Watch.

The cultural marxists in the west may very well want the rest of the world to survive on grasshoppers and organic kale grown only from the nutrients provided from dead white male capitalists but I’ll tell you a secret. The developing world could care less. 

To prove my point – in China the worst insult you can give someone. An insult to show your utter disdain is to label someone a baizua. Translated this means “white left” and refers of course to the cult like leftist agenda that is currently sweeping the west like a plague. 

Now throughout history there have always been some dreadlocked misguided kids with loopy ideas, too many drugs coursing through their veins, and the naivety of youth championing some cause or the other….because they’ve yet to experience responsibility in life and grow the pha-cup. 

And really it was all good fun because we could laugh at them and wait for the police to come and drag them away when they disrupted the orderly lives of their fellow citizens. Not anymore. Now we have extinction rebellion folks who brandish their placards lecturing us that fossil fuels are murder, failing to realise, because they’re dim, that without those fossil fuels their yoga mats they’re standing on would not exist, and while shaking their fists in outrage they neglect to realise, because they’ve spent their college funds on “gender studies” – that their stretchy pants would fall down,because yes elastic too is a by-product of oil.

And now, because they’ve found virtue signaling to be popular, the western corporate world is jumping on this bandwagon.

Blackrock, who manage about $7 trillion in investors money, has stopped financing fossil fuels. This follows on from Standard Chartered who’ve quit financing coal. (can’t be left out you know)

What’s that saying…buy low sell high? 

Someone forgot to tell these guys.

But wait – it gets more absurd. 

Then we have…Davos, which could most accurately be described as that grouping of the “do as I say not as I do” crowd has taken to getting on the bandwagon of “woke”, entertaining – and you couldn’t make this isht up…rantings of a dangerously misguided teenage girl who is driven around in a plastic filled Tesla (yes really) powered by in most instances electricity generated from – wait for it – coal and natural gas. Yup. 

If we are to follow this crazy ideology we’re all supposed to become vegans, ride bicycles and travel on other people’s yachts. Trouble is I’ve a friend with one and he charges $45,000 a week for the thing with a skipper…and let’s face it I’d need someone to help me to …you now…not sink the thing. I also don’t have 2 months to get to my business meeting in 24 hours that is 10,000km away, so no that’s not going to work for me, and if it’s not going to work for me it’s probably not going to work for you either.

These narrow minded, unenlightened, self-righteous dolts who can’t take care of themselves…tell us “we” which really means “they” are going to – and I kid you not – take care of the planet. 

How? By instituting a marxist collective. In other words – communism.

You know it’s telling that Venezuelans who can no longer afford toilet paper are desperate to rid themselves of marxism, while the west is virtue signaling its way into it.

The saying: Never let a good crisis go to waste rings true, and so now we have the ECB under the watchful eye of the most suntanned person on earth…a person so incompetent you’d not let her walk your dog – one Christine Lagarde who – and I quote is “spearheading a global drive to make the environment an essential part of monetary policymaking.”

Suicide

That the west seems hell bent on commiting suicide is bad enough but what is more worisome is that ideologies can’t and don’t think rationally, nor do they acquise. 

Do we see this ideology finding an audience in Asia? Nope.

And this is really important and I’ll show you why. 

Here’s the energy required to produce certain foods.

It takes a lot more energy to produce meat than organic kale, even if it is nurtured by vegans feeding it the carcasses of guillotined billionaires. 

Now I realise that lefties will use this as fodder for their hysterical banshee like screeching lecturing others on how they’re going to cause man’s extinction by eating hamburgers and mowing the lawn, (lawnmowers those things being powered by gasoline) but I’ll remind them of two things.

1. The developing world doesn’t care about their feelings…no matter how loud they squawk 
2. Meat is much much more energy dense than your organic kale, and yes as they grow wealthier they want more of it.

Which brings me to the coming conflict. Now I don’t wish this to take place and please don’t take me for some fear mongering doomsayer. I’m certainly not that guy. Thing is I can see the puzzle pieces moving into place with bugger all pushback from any adults in the room. The risk…and I don’t think it’s small – is that we look back some years hence and say “holy isht how did we get here” and then it’s too late.

Tell the developing world that they’re not to consume energy the way – you know – you do, and that will be seen as both hypocritical as well as what it is….a threat to their aspirations. Ironically it is a form of colonialist attitude, something the lefties wring their teeth and gnash their hands about, while chastising folks for making tacos…something about “cultural appropriation”. 

For the minute the blame for this non-problem climate hysteria is being laid at the feet of the West’s governments, but have you noticed how swiftly it’s moved into the corporate sector? How much longer do we have before these do-gooders attempt to spread their cancer to developing nations? 

They’re easy to blame too. Take a look.

First level thinking says China’s to blame for CO2 emissions. Seems reasonable no?

Well yes and no.

Let’s walk through the value chain of oh I dunno…an iPhone.

That iPhone is designed in the US. This involves a few geeks at their desks in Cupertino sipping their frothy cappuccino (see what I did there). Low CO2 activity. 

The design gets sent to China for production. China imports all the stuff – cobalt, lithium, aluminium, graphite, gold, silver, copper, tungsten to name a few of the ingredients. They then manufacture it. High CO2 activity.

Multiply this process millions of times for all those goodies manufactured in China and it’s not hard to see that really what’s happening is that the consumer (the west) has simply outsourced the most carbon intensive part of the production process for all the goodies they buy, to developing markets.

A more accurate picture…if that’s what you’re after is this.

But the facts don’t matter. We can see that already. That’s how ideologies work.

And while the facts don’t matter we continue barreling down the path we’re on. One where the East rapidly overtakes the West, which is surprisingly easy to do when your opponent chops his own legs off at the beginning of a marathon. 

That’s OK. It’s been taking place for some time and all but inevitable at this point. What’s worrisome is that if the marxists continue to gain power we all need to watch out because it’s a near certainty they’ll seek to impose their ideology on developing nations. And that my friends won’t go down well. Historically it’s meant war. Let us all hope it doesn’t come to that.

– Chris

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I feel sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible…except by getting off his back. Leo Tolstoy, Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence.