Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Atlantic wants people to view climate change as a wartime situation. They demand Americans accept a lower standard of living, to defeat Global Warming.
According to The Atlantic;
Why Solving Climate Change Will Be Like Mobilizing for War
… Assuming we do manage to significantly accelerate deployment without cancerous levels of corporatist corruption, if emissions targets still remain out of reach, some growth must be temporarily sacrificed. At the same time, investment across the portfolio of energy technologies will need to continue.
In other words, we are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies. For ordinary Americans, austerities might include an end to expansive suburban lifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return to high-density urban living and train travel. For businesses, this might mean rethinking entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissions regimes.
What Gates and others are advocating for is not so much a technological revolution as a technocratic one. One for which there is no successful peacetime precedent. Which is not to say, of course, that it cannot work. There is always a first time for every new level of complexity and scale in human cooperation. But it’s sobering to look back at the (partial) precedents we do have. …
I must say, given repeated claims that subsidising green energy will stimulate the economy, it seems peculiar that greens also believe people should adopt a wartime austerity mentality, and brace themselves for a lower standard of living. Perhaps the economic stimulus will be delivered in the form of more green air miles, and an increase in the number of climate conferences.
“…defeat climate change.”
It just keeps getting weirder and weirder these days.
“…an accelerated return to high-density urban living…”
I envision a major Model Cities program, reminiscent of Detroit. These all become state supported Democratic power bases.
An accelerated return to high-denisty urban living…
What and when?
Does the article explain this past utopia?
As we have noticed a dramatic population shift from the country to the cities, in the last 6 decades, how far back in time do we have to go to find this “life style” to which the authors would have us return?
Life; Short an brutal over for most at 35 years.
Socialist Heaven?
My thoughts also.
damn it John move into your container and shut up!
It is a kind of war — class warfare. The rulers against the rest of us.
Kinda sucks when your Gulfstream has to sit on the tarmack cause there’s no Jet-A around.
Look at history. As soon as any country stops growing its economy, the country starts to decline. There has never been a successful “steady state”, sustainable model.
Climate change is never going to go to war against the US. If it does, turn up the furnace in winter and the air-conditioner in summer. Problem solved.
Tell me, which would you rather have. Climate change or:
Fred
I didn’t get that. Saw the image.
Climate change submission or war ?
Are those the forced choices you envision ?
Nero fiddles while Rome burns.
Ah, understand.
Real problems fester and approach while the world swings at a phantom.
…..I didn’t get that. Saw the image.
Climate change submission or war ?
Are those the forced choices you envision ?……
In a sense we have just that choice. Allow the UN to spend lavishly on climate change junkets for a few corporate cronies or spend the money on controlling clearly terrorist states like ISIL.
There may be a place and time to use that image.
This ain’t it.
The Atlantic solution is illogical. What they are saying is that the best way to deal with climate change is to use less heating in the winter and less cooling in the summer.
Followed to its logical conclusion, the Atlantic is calling for people to stop heating their houses in winter and stop cooling their houses in summer. And of course turn off all electrical appliances and walk everywhere. In other words, the solution to Climate Change is Poverty.
Once you are poor, Climate Change wont bother you. You will be too busy try to get enough to eat and stay warm, there won’t be any time to worry about Climate Change.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3015/2511354604_e12d132d82_m.jpg
Fred
“The Atlantic solution is illogical.”
I get the science battle. Science needs to assert it’s fundamentals of critical thinking skills. All for it. That’s the logical theatre.
The Atlantic is not appealing to logic. It is appealing to emotional heartstrings, namely conservation and charity.
In a cult, they often use psuedoscience, yet defeating the psuedoscience is often not the best way of defeating the cult. What works most often is having the cult follower “see” the life they could have (and the life for their offspring even more so) if they leave the cult behind.
So what is an alternative outlet for the core beliefs of conservation and charity ?
“Once you are poor, Climate Change wont bother you. You will be too busy try to get enough to eat and stay warm, there won’t be any time to worry about Climate Change.”
Replace “Climate Change” with “consumerism” and I think that is the end goal of the left. Climate Change is just the tool they are using at the moment.
The comments over at the Atlantic are effectively demolishing the article.
What seems to have happened is that the political/media classes have entirely failed to keep up with the science and economics of climate. Which gives us skeptics a huge advantage.
To the believer, the science is a low impact factor in decision making. To the fencesitter, it is higher, but still not the deciding factor because both sides have “uncertainty”.
Try this commonly heard phrase
“I’m not sure if we are f____ up the planet, but I’m all for a using our resources without polluting our environment and I’m certainly for helping out my fellow man”
Cagwistas seize on that opening.
Skeptics don’t offer a better alternative.
What seems to have happened is that the political/media classes have entirely failed to keep up with the science and economics of climate. Which gives us skeptics a huge advantage…..
No several social science studies have proved beyond question ( They can, and given half a chance, will show every tiny detail of the studies which do stand up to very close scrutiny unlike climate scientists and their global warming) that a well presented factually totally incorrect case beats even the best of logical cases. Even overt fiction dressed up as being the likely scenario helps indoctrinate the vast majority of people.
Even if the West eliminates all emissions of CO2, global emissions would only be 5% less than 1990.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/travel-back-to-kyoto/
Yeah, well it’s a “symbolic” gesture.
Like symbolically setting fire to yourself in front of your ex-girlfriends house after being spurned.
A meaningless gesture that results in massive personal agony and achieves nothing beyond upsetting everyone involved, including the paramedics who are called to the scene.
But, we are “leading the way”.
Except that having clearly demonstrated how to rapidly destroy a once prosperous and powerful economy – it is hard to imagine who might wish to follow our example.
So, if the population in sub-Saharan Africa continues to expand per UN projections, do we need to halve our standard of living for each doubling?
England has to pay more.
They ruled the world far longer than most .
So raising everyone’s standard of living isn’t an option?
That is the option.
While you are doing that you have to account for those that are lagging. Move them along a little faster.
The fraud artists get under the skin of doubt. They tell folks that people are suffering while they prosper. And while they prosper they are destroying the world. They hook their false guilt and turn the worm around … make them pay.
Very tawdry, but evidently easy to do.
If you show how badly this will affect the silent majority (aka middle class), self preservation kicks in. Self preservation usually wins over false guilt.
How about we give them a fishing pole instead of more fish?
Sadly, it’s kind of sick and twisted that the business of helping the poor is a business. Yeah yeah, sure sure your a NPO, but you pay yourself, your organization and are not sleeping on reed mats.
Okay, that’s the sick part. There are, however some really well run lean mean no frills outfits that do some good stuff. They ascribe to the teach so they don’t need you mantra. Obviously, you can see there is little profit to this model.
The trick for the trickster is to associate himself with a little bit of the truth while they slide in their main agenda. It’s the con, the ruse. Been done a million times and will be done a million more.
This one is epic though.
Truly epic.
It is important to grasp that the Sub-Saharan demographics have no relationship to their problems.
Nor does the constant conflict and civil strife. Or FGM or internecine conflict, cattle theft or military conscription. Or living a life of permanent fear and oppression.
Everybody in Africa is prevented from prospering due to the fact that global mean temperatures are approximately 0.8degC above 1850 levels. Although we have no idea how the 1850 global average temperature could be calculated to an accuracy of within 1 degree centigrade.
Consequently the Africans are fleeing to Europe where we are beset by storms and flooding induced by “extreme weather”, in order to escape from their imagined increased average hotness.
This entire thing is now a complete joke. Reality was abandoned some considerable time ago.
I wish that I could laugh. But some real people are really going to really suffer.
(Contains sarcasm)
Are they advocating what happened to thousands of people in Britain that were forced to”sacrifice” their coal to stop CC?
Bot
Britain has been the “pilot project”, yet the press on the actual effects on the British people has been sparse.
This is ripe territory for a webpage like WUWT.
A series of articles and perhaps you tube doc of the common plight would make a dent.
It makes a dent because it challenges the boundaries of “to what end do I deny my own to help my fellow man”.
Americans will have to settle for a lower standard of living, regardless, when your colossal national debt comes home to roost. That debt won’t be going away, and the same goes for the UK. In the end, we’re all screwed.
Fiat currencies go up and down in credibility since their inception. Perhaps the dollar has had its day. Perhaps the SDR of the IMF is next. Some suffer more than others and many prosper.
Which one will you be ?
That colossal debt is for our children and grandchildren. I’m sure they will appreciate it (not) as it will be soooo much better with an unchanged climate!
SteveT. do I need a sarc?
So are choices appear to be:
1) Give government the power to force austerity on its citizens in a bid to reduce, however slightly, a future warming that may or may not occur and may or may not be harmful.
2) Ignore the alarmists, continue to encourage prosperity, adopt clean alternative energy sources when they become reliable and affordable, and plan to adapt to the negative aspects of climate change when and if they occur.
To me, option 2 is the only logical and responsible choice. The only reason to choose option 1 is if you despise liberty and actually want a big, all controlling government to tell everyone what to do and to plan every aspect of the economy. Such societies are always ‘austere’ for everyone but the elites who run things. Who would want that, except for those who believe they are the elites who will run government and tell everyone else what to do?
How about option 3 we get nuclear power actually running instead of knee capped by insane levels of regulation that are almost as nutso as “no more carbon dioxide”. If any one had been furiously injured in the last 75 years by nuclear power (since the actual bombs were dropped) we would be treated to unending photos and stories of those results. Nuclear power is the way to go ” the science is settled”
In some ways, the greenies are not unlike other groups. They have varying opinions on what type of power is good power. Nuclear was riding a crest for awhile until fukushima. It has yet to recover it’s place in the debate.
It doubly didn’t help that California (a major source of the new money behind greenies) got spooked by takes of residual radiation. I’m sure your not surprised about how chatter at parties moves insider opinions.
you mean meaningless spooking on residual radiation? When the residual doesn’t exceed background quit talking about it!
Two prongs too the spear. They aren’t going to hear your facts till you hear their unreasonable emotion.
If nuclear power is reliable, affordable, and clean, then of course we should adopt it. But we don’t need a third option for that because it is included in option 2. Hydropower should also be included as a clean, reliable, and affordable energy source, as well as Fusion should it becomes available.
We’ve had it too good for too long, haven’t we?* Why should we enjoy lives of privilege when the rest of the world doesn’t have it so well?** Suffering and hardship builds character. Good for us.***
* By ‘we,’ I mean you.
** Ibid
*** ‘Us’ — everybody but me and my cronies. I’ve got mine, you’ll never get yours. That’s good, makes you more willing to comply.
‘They demand Americans accept a lower standard of living’
Any reason will do. For now, they are getting some use out of Global Warming. Once Global Warming has been put to rest, they will still demand Americans accept a lower standard of living.
Yes, and that seems to be the Pope’s message in his Encyclical as well:
The US will not only pay more, it will use CO2 regs internally to establish class action lawsuits based on disparate impact.
CO2 regs are a key lynchpin.
Well, at least we’ll PAY a lot more for less.
I view the article in a “positive” light. It is actually a small movement in the direction of the greenies being “honest”. For far too long they have been trying to sell the fact that we need to cut out fossil fuels to save the planet and trying to make it appear that they only calling for a slight economic inconvenience of some carbon taxes that will end up re-shaping our fossil fuel consumption in time to save the planet. In this article, this little bit of extra “honesty” is showing that they are calling for much more than just an inconvenience; instead looking for us to move into wartime “austerity”. Unfortunately, what they have described only tells a small part of the adverse story. In order to meet the greenie targets, there will also have to be a move away from meat in our diets, massive expansion, thus public expenditure in public transit, and substantial social changes (e.g., visiting your grown children across the country for a weekend a couple times a year will be a thing of the past). Add to all this added expenditure, further expense of sending hundreds of $billions to developing countries. I think the best method of educate the masses who don’t really get fussed about climate change politics to take an interest AND stop the greenies in their tracks is to educate them about the fantasy world the greenies want us to move into (rather than the alarmist world they apparently think we will avoid). As mentioned – I only wish they had gone a lot further, and been a lot more honest about the fantasy world they want us to move to – I’d rather keep the society we currently have and adapt to whatever the sea level rises to.
“I think the best method of educate the masses who don’t really get fussed about climate change politics to take an interest AND stop the greenies in their tracks is to educate them about the fantasy world the greenies want us to move into (rather than the alarmist world they apparently think we will avoid)”
You don’t have to do much educating in the classic sense if you just show people how much this will cost them. What has this cost the average Brit ? …. they are the pilot project
The Climate Crazies can spout off all they want. Guaranteed professional politicians will not be running on a platform of calculated pain and poverty. In opinion polls, even when respondents buy into the Climate Catastrophe scenarios, these same people reject artificially raising energy prices to “solve” the CO2 problem by wide margins, like 35-65% (that was the result in a NYTimes poll).
You’ll notice there was very little chatter among the Democratic candidates about climate, much to the deep chagrin of the activist types. Running on climate-based engineered poverty is suicide for electoral candidates.
My comment in The Atlantic comment section:
Yes, fighting climate change will be like preparing for war…but not like WWII or any of those other wars where we actually won. This will be like Viet Nam or Iraq…bad information, unclear objectives, constantly changing tactics, and rules of engagement that will make it impossible to win.
It is one thing to decide that the science behind climate change is sound. There are plenty of reasons to believe that. But to believe that the world will somehow organize itself and balance competing national interests AND ultimately solve the technological problems that will need to be solved is the worst kind of naivete.
It sounds like the old peace and love stuff we used to see on college campuses during the 60’s. Silly, starry eyed foolishness.
“We AGW Skeptics shall go to the end of the AGW fraud. We shall fight in France come November 30th 2015, we shall fight over the false acidification propaganda of the seas and barely rising oceans, we shall fight the U.N and NGO’s with growing confidence and growing strength in the air and social media, we shall defend our island Earth, whatever the cost to the climate alarmists may be. We shall fight on the beaches of Al Gore and Obama’s seaside mansions, we shall fight on the landing grounds of Charles De Gaulle Airport, we shall fight in the bio-fuel fields and in the streets worldwide, we shall fight in the wind turbine scarred hills; we shall never surrender,… “
Reblogged this on TheFlippinTruth and commented:
Climate change is camouflage for the unstoppable collapse of the Anglo-American banking system
Joe
“Climate change is camouflage for the unstoppable collapse of the Anglo-American banking system.”
Global finance is so intertwined these days it’s no longer just “those people” who get hurt when the system collapses. All fiat systems do. Greed is the nature of the beast and the beast lies within us … some more than others.
I replied to your post because there is a connectedness between the selling of homes to people who cant afford them and the propping up of energy prices for again, people who can’t afford them. Failure of this ponzie type scheme takes time. We are nowhere near a true bubble in the energy bonanza, but we are at a low point in real commodity pricing.
The smart eggs are buying coal and other fossils as a hedge for the coming phantom energy bust.
The housing debacle is similar to how the energy debacle is structured. Bet you a steak dinner they’ll write a book about it someday.
The Age of the Ponzie ?
The 2008 crunch went way beyond the “housing bubble” as a cause:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/interviews/born.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born
This is a WWI deja vu; when US women were donating bobby pins to the war effort, and US corporations were supplying Hitler with war materials; aluminum, rubber, fuel, etc. The same corporations, the same families who are funding AGW-alarmism. Check Wayback or Nuremberg archives for Nuremberg Manufacturing and Pharmaceutical Tribunals, or read DOJ attorney and Nuremberg prosecutor John Loftus. Ford, Dupont, Standard Oil, and Wall Street bankers, including Prescott Bush, whose bank, UBC (Bush was a director) was seized for aiding the enemy. It’s probably a coincidence that his son, HW Bush, signed the UN environmental treaty at the Rio Conference in 1992.
The oxymoron described by Al Gore when challenged about his electricity use at one of his homes, equal to 12 Nashville households; that his electricity usage was irrelevant because he could buy carbon credits (from his own carbon credit trading corporation), is that the earth’s environment is out of the loop.
Does anyone read The Atlantic?
And to Venkatesh Rao, the author of this screed, I say: go off and live for a year without using any fossil fuels or products derived from fossil fuels. Then come back and tell us how much fun you had. Hell, I’m not that cruel, a year is too much, make it three months.
Certainly Al Gore is not going to settle for less.
Eugene WR Gallun
I demand that the President of the United States accept a lower standard of aircraft. A 747 for one man!
I demand that the President’s wife, Michelle, accept a lower standard of vacation. No more Bahamas, Idaho, et al.
I demand John Kerry accept a lower standard (or at least a smaller number) of mansions.
I demand Al Gore, Harrison Ford, Oprah Winfrey, John Travolta, Leonardo DiCaprio et al accept a lower standard of travel rather than private jet (or being allowed to own any aircraft whatsoever). A commuter bus will do.
I demand all presidents, directors, lobbyists et al, for environmental NGOs accept a lower standard of (i.e. much smaller) paycheck. Such incomes contribute to overconsumption.
I demand that the Atlantic stop bloviating about common people accepting a lower standard of living while having the mind bending audacity to refer to a man, Bill Gates, who owns a 66,000 (yes, sixty six thousand) square foot mansion, and three Porsches. Words utterly fail me as to how any publication that claims (either overtly or covertly) even so much as a pretense to logic or decency can parrot the advocacy of such an incredibly consumptuous individual in such a disgusting, immoral scheme as to coerce material sacrifice from those who have so much less than him.
Tom
I’m not condoning the behavoir but I can role play.
The silent majority (SM) harbors dreams for themselves or their children to “make it”, so they have a twisted sense of admiration for the guy who lives on the top of the hill.
Couple the silent and not so silent admiration with the following approach. When the rich pontificate, the SM give many a free pass because the rich show how much they give to charity, influence the world for the better and blow angels out of their orafice. The rich know this so they through great pains to present an image of caring and being in touch with the common man.
This is a particular button for me, so I’ll stop here.
Few at the top got there by being righteous, in fact, very much the opposite and many could easily compete for real “Godfathers”.
Why does Dr. Evil have a United Nations logo on his jacket? Seriously? I suspected the UN might be evil, but now …