Andreas Malm longs for the good old days. In his new book, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Malm, who teaches human ecology at Lund University in Sweden, pines for a time when manufacturing depended on waterwheels instead of steam engines. Indeed, Malm spends more than 300 pages—about 75 percent of the text—discussing why English manufacturers abandoned waterwheels and replaced them with coal-fired steam engines. It’s worthwhile history. But in the hands of an avowed Marxist like Malm, it’s tedious sledding. In Malm’s view, the rise of the steam engine was little more than a ploy by evil capitalists to subjugate workers, and because of that, we are now all going to die from global warming.
Yes, that’s a simplistic analysis, but Malm has written a simplistic book. He quotes an economist, Richard Jones, who, in the 1830s, wrote that water power is “cheap but uncertain. The steam engine is costly but powerful and its action is certain and continuous.” Jones goes on to explain why waterwheels had to go. For some reason, Malm prefers the days of yore, when production had to be shut down because of drought, or flood, or frozen rivers. He attempts to explain the complex world of energetics by marrying Marxism with climate-change catastrophism. By doing so, he puts himself squarely in the camp of the climate doomsayers—a group that includes Canadian author/activist Naomi Klein and U.S. environmental activist Bill McKibben, who have claimed that the solution to climate change is to abandon modern society and organize a socialist, organic-agriculture economy, where we can all, no doubt, have free yoga classes. In a 2011 essay published in The Nation, Klein—who provided a blurb for Malm’s book, calling it “the definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis”—called for nothing less than “a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal.”
It’s not Malm’s fellow travelers who are the problem, it’s his blinkered approach to basic physics, and in particular, to the essentiality of power density—that is, the ability to concentrate the flow of energy from a given area, volume, or mass. Ever since humans began walking upright, we have been trying to corral more energy so that we can turn it into more effective power, whether for farming, heating, or computing. Farmers moved from doing all the planting and hauling themselves to using draft animals, which helped increase production. Over centuries, they perfected their harnesses, going from throat-and-girth harnesses to breastbands and finally to collar harnesses, which allowed animals to pull loads as much as ten times heavier than they could pull with the earlier models.
Over the last seven decades or so, we have moved from electricity-hungry computers based on vacuum tubes to ones based on nano circuits millions of times lighter and more efficient. Malm insists that every joule and BTU we use is infected with class struggle. In the first chapter, he writes that “fossil fuels necessitate waged or forced labor—the power to direct the labor of others—as conditions of their very existence.” Yet, he doesn’t provide a single example of any place on the planet where modern workers are being forced to produce oil, coal, or natural gas. Malm decries the steam engine at every turn, but ignores how steam power led to a revolution in transportation that allowed even low-skilled workers to travel and search out better opportunities on railroads and steamships. Malm condemns all hydrocarbons, yet he ignores the creation and perfection of the internal combustion and jet engines. In doing so, he leaves aside discussion of the parallel creation of the global oil and gas sector, which is among the world’s biggest industries. Malm also ignores electrification, though electricity production (the biggest share of which is provided by coal combustion) now accounts for about 40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
Malm spends 13 of his 16 chapters decrying coal and steam. He notes with approval that in medieval England, coal fields were often controlled by the king or local bishops, and that they often imposed “restrictions on output, guaranteeing that the enterprises would be puny.” He continues: “Thriving on sword and cross, they could afford to stay aloof from subterranean riches.” In his fourteenth chapter, “China as Chimney of the World: Fossil Capital Today,” Malm details the rising concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and denounces “the bourgeois ideology of eco-modernism” because of its belief that technology can help bring more people out of poverty.
In chapter 15, we finally get to Malm’s solution, which is, wait for it . . . central planning. A few paragraphs after quoting Leon Trotsky, Malm notes that the majority of global greenhouse gases are emitted from four places: the U.S., the E.U., China, and India. The way to cut those emissions is simple, says Malm. We merely need to “set up one special ministry in each and we would be on our way.” Ah yes, a special ministry. Welcome, comrades, to Professor Malm’s Climate Gulag. It’s for your own good, after all.
Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His most recent book is Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong.
h/t to Paul Driessen and John Droz
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The watermelon crowd.
Who knows we may be getting a new type of watermelon red on the outside red on the inside, at least the debate can advance with integrity under these new rules.
Mods: Do we need this?
Nope. Deleted. ~mod.]
What a lot of people don’t get, and I did not until I read Das Kapital, is that Marx was a luddite. Thus this thinking of this professor is right in line with Marx.. All of these people, like Kirkpatrick Sale in his book on the simple life, miss the central point. Life was short, brutish, and hard. This is what industrialization saved humanity from.
What is really scary is that this fool teaches this garbage to vulnerable children !
Meh, college students. And this particular generation of college students have never lived without ipods and cell phones and laptops and cars and the ability to travel and most of them have never, ever had to perform manual labor. I’m sure his proposed lifestyle gets them very excited. (not) They might all totally agree with his mentality about evil capitalists and destroying the planet, but how many of them have ever even seen an actual horse plow? Or a horse? A generation that has never truly worked hard, cannot build a society in which everyone is required to work hard.
“A generation that has never truly worked hard, cannot build a society in which everyone is required to work hard.”
True enough. But the danger is that they might try.. and fail.
Aphan wrote:
“A generation that has never truly worked hard, cannot build a society in which everyone is required to work hard.”
Everybody else is required to work hard. Someone has to do the planning. Wait ’til they find out they are not going to be the ones doing the planning. It always ends in tears.
My grandfather used a 2 horse hitch and they were dirt poor.
And….that has exactly what to do with my comment?
Where I live most of the year is the Driftless region along the upper Mississippi Valley. Lots of Amish around. It’s quite a sight seeing up to 6 abreast draft horses pulling a plow. Very fertile farms and a lot of cooperation among the people who don not depend on mechanization BUT they all have to take on outside mechanized work to survive.
If the Amish can’t do it – nobody can.
And a lot of these college students are not very bright. Just think that a pass mark on a degree level course at the Open University in the UK is only 40%. And it’s not the only college that has such a low pass mark!
Consider how the “Bern” 70% of the “youth vote” in his “Party”, it’s no accident how these people were indoctrinated both in HS and College. If you have kids go read their science, history (Social Studies) and English resources. Depending on where you are there is plenty of retro 60’s Marxism. The U.S. the vilian in the Cold War, Climate Change a proven indictment of “industry” and on and on.
Some will get smarter but there is a a residual who will go into government and education in particular and live completely delusional lives. Now the sciences are a growing haven following the climate science model. More ideological and propaganda funding fields to follow, certainly other “green” fields like GMO and anti-Pharma fields will prosper. They need only find the funding source as “victim” advocates.
Marcus, not only scary to be teaching, but unable to understand his position in life.
Andreas Malm … who teaches human ecology at Lund University in Sweden
He is a long way up the needs pyramid. Revise society to his liking and he has no job or career. Simple farmers don’t need lessons in ‘human ecology’ enough to exchange any surplus food.
This is the inevitable result of a scientific controversy becoming dogma and political.
It gives cover to all manner of idiots and their idiot ideas. As long as you come out in favor of “fighting” global warming, you can pretty much say whatever you want and the True Believers will accept it at face value.
I declined an invitation to speak at the first Earth Day for my university and took an insightful thermodynamics course instead. I recall discussions later about how we would starve without hydrocarbons and we were left with “fossil” windmill towers when the subsidies vanished. Some may still exist.
“Watermelon” does seem an appropriate insult. Of course, if his nirvana was instituted, only about 90% of the population would die off, but I tend to think he really wants such an outcome.
I’m convinced that most of these people are still mad that the Population Bomb never went off and the unwashed masses insisted on thriving, breeding, and thinking unapproved thoughts all on their own when by now they should have been starving and begging the Ivory Tower Oligarchy to manage their lives for them.
Google “Georgia Guidestones”. They think that 500 million is an “appropriate” number of humans.
Hell, me too – as long as I’m one of them.
I don’t particularly care what the number is, so long as I’m one of them.
Pol Pot implemented this model and a lot of Cambodians died as a consequence.
What’s even more amazing is that Publishers are destroying trees to print this garbage. This will probably be his required textbook in whatever class he teaches on Eco-Communism.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
The cheap and reliable nature of fossil fuels made it possible to end slavery. Because we use machines instead of people. You either have cheap labour or cheap energy.
Without concentrated fossil fuel energy, every tree on the planet would have been cut down to provide heat and cooking material.
The beliefs of the Andreas Malms of the world would devastate humanity and the very environment they claim to want to save.
This by Kirk Sorensen, who is describing the next stage in the ongoing process of taming fire, the liquid Thorium reactor,
Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we’ve learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common.
It is my understanding that the problem with Thorium isn’t in the nuclear science but rather in materials science. Chemistry rather than physics.
I was wondering how long until someone brought this up. It shows that his arguments are based on willful ignorance of basic history that I would chide a first grader over. Slavery thrived in the pre-industrial era, and many people have argued that industrialization only happened because machines finally became cheaper than slaves (despite the prerequisites being present in Ancient Greece, Rome, and China).
Also, it’s not just slavery, but modern automation has allowed us to practically end domestic servitude as well. Not 80 years, almost every middle or upper class household had at least one full time servant.
Finally, he actively praised the feudalistic serfdom, which was slavery in all but name. I just don’t know what else to say about this guy. His proposal is just backwards
We still have “cheap labor” today, STILL doing all the jobs that Americans don’t want to do. And many people who don’t have to labor in fields all day, but have to stand in an air conditioned restaurant or grocery store ringing people up on a cash register want to raise the minimum wage because they want to support a family on job that was never meant to be a career choice.
It wasn’t “free” to own slaves to do your work for you. They were “purchased” either from someone else, or they sold themselves into indentured servitude for passage and room and board. Housing, clothing, feeding, guarding, etc a lot of slaves took a LOT of money too-money that if paid to those slaves would most likely not have purchased land, a home, and the ability for them to feed and care and protect themselves.
I’m NOT endorsing slavery. I think it was a horrible and disgusting practice. But some slaves were well treated, well loved, and lived lives far superior to any kind of life they would have had otherwise. (I said SOME) My point is that farming by non-mechanical means will be just as expensive, if not MORE SO, and thus the price of food would skyrocket because you have to PAY people for their work, we don’t pay machines hourly wages.
Being ignorant I have often wondered what buckshot was intended for, now I have found the close range answer!
I got a woman, she’s so mean
She sticks my boots in the washing machine
Sticks me with buckshot when I’m nude
Puts bubblegum in my food …
“…organize a socialist, organic-agriculture economy…”
What unbelievable drivel. There’s so many things wrong with this it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s start anyway.
First, there was a reason farming was one of the world’s most hazardous occupations until the late 20th century. Much of it had to do with working in close proximity to large, heavy draft animals.
Second, productivity was trivial compared to modern agricultural yields. There was a reason why most of the pre-industrial population lived in grinding agricultural drudgery. Again, yields were low. Also, rural unemployment was stunningly high by modern standards. Such is possible only if close to half the population is living at primitive subsistence levels.
Third, disease was rampant in large part because of huge quantities of animal faeces on streets, indoors, just about everywhere. Alcohol was consumed because water was usually foul.
Fourth, their intent to rely on animal labour might get them into at least a bit of trouble with their fellow-travelers, the dedicated folks at PETA.
These socialist dimwits, Malm,Klein et.al., wish to impose the most horrific economic class system again that the western world spent the entire 20th century desperately trying to escape. My most earnest wish is that these morons would live and work just one day on a real mediaeval farm. Then they might truly understand just what a hell they are recreating.
To hell with draft animals, there was the common practice of using the wife to pull the plow while the husband steered the thing. Not to mention the scythe and the winnowing and the hand grinding and the baking and on and on and on of the rural drudgery of the medieval period.
Echoes of Pol Pot
So . . . why do we give the wet-dreams of socialist eco-fantasizers LEGS by re-posting their nonsense HERE? Frankly, this guy sounds like he’s been to one too many pot-parties at the Chewonki School. WUWT should concentrate on disseminating the true SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE, and let the drivelers hang themselves. They’ve got just about enough rope now.
It needs to be seen here in order to remind us all what really underlies CAGW: socialism. They attempt to hide the basis for their religion, but every once in a while something like this ooses out to remind us what they are really about.
“Science” is being used as a fig-leaf to conceal what the true agenda is for global warmists.
It may already be too late for true science to prevail.
getitright: scythes alone were a huge source of death and injury in pre-industrial agriculture, let alone milling accidents. There is a reason why pre-industrial lifespan was about 35, and a lot of it was purely work related.
Goldrider: this is very much the desire of the so-called Deep Greens. If environmentalism is a religion, then the Deep Greens are the extreme sect which believe that there are too many people in the world by about 95%, and that human subsistence should be reduced to having no machine power. All Environmentalists believe that some of the technology we have developed should be abolished. The differences among the Greens are chiefly how much and to what degree technology should be abandoned. This is the essential division among them, and why nuclear power has proven so divisive among them.
Well, that idea is so completely wack that I can’t imagine anyone taking it seriously, anywhere. That ship sailed long about 1840, and if these freaks really want to live the pre-industrial life, they can always go join the Amish if they’ll have them–which I doubt. The best thing we can do about ideas like this is allow them to die an instantaneous death by IGNORING them–the LAST thing we should do is give them the attention they crave.
Yeah, because pretending there is no enemy out there, brushing it all under the rug, is the best way to protect against it happening in the future. It’s always best to turn your back on your adversary and ignore them. That ALWAYS results in them slinking away into the mist, unable to harm you because you never acknowledged them or said their names outloud….Voldemort….Beetlejuice….
But you said earlier…by discussing it here, we were “giving it LEGS”, then said “that idea is so completely wack that I can’t imagine anyone taking it seriously, anywhere”…and then ended by once again saying that the best thing to do was “ignore it”. Which is it? An idea so stupid that exposing how stupid it is will not result in anyone, anywhere, taking it seriously, it will NOT gain legs here…and thus there is no harm done by discussing it…or an idea so good/bad that you fear discussing it here will change things?
Your opinion about what WUWT “should disseminate” is merely that, an opinion, but irrelevant here because the topics here at WUWT are not yours to determine, or mine, or even the majority’s.
The Old Order Amish have agreed they can use cell phones because it doesn’t violate their rule against being connected by wires. Heading ‘back’ to a horse-drawn lifestyle doesn’t mean what many assume.
The old order Mennonites have decided that cell phones are not allowed, but they do allow the use of telephones connected by wires provided they are installed by the road at the end of the driveway, not indoors. That way communication remains possible but not in a way that encourages frivolous gossip or seeking after ease.
As patterns for living these lifestyles are poorly understood. They are not viable and at a national scale. They only work because they are supported by a society that shelters them.
We mustn’t forget that a proportion of the farm’s output had to be set aside to feed the horses.
And, unlike tractors, the horses had to be fed even when they weren’t working.
So the transition to fossil fuels meant more food for humans.
Indeed, at one step removed, we are eating the coal and oil.
“The horse eats a third of everything on the farm”; an old Scottish saying. 66% surplus over the land it can work, given expert management. And that means expert.
So the Hansen/Oreskes feud is ultimately an ideological one: Hansen at least pretends to believe the climate needs a real remedy (nuclear), while Oreskes wants to see the West go belly up. –AGF
Oreskes wants to see the entire human race go belly up. Progressives have to destroy Western culture to get a really good start on the long term goal. They will run afoul of all those other cultures that are bent on improving their standard of living and don’t give a d**n what Europe or North America thinks about it. When we are finished destroying ourselves they will simply move into a position where they are the masters and we are the third world countries. We won’t have the money to defend ourselves.
Quite obviously, Andreas lives in a dream world where the evidence of reality never intervenes: I offer him the example of the DDR; the Soviet Union; North Korea; Venezuela; etc. Does he really advocate that the world’s population be reduced to a sub-feudal level of existence?
I recently read a biography of an ordinary local man, born in Shakespeare’s home town in the 1880s. The way of life he experienced is not dissimilar to that to which Malm would have us return: one is reminded that – partly because of that life-style – his life was disturbed by two World Wars.
I can thoroughly recommend the book, based on verbatim recordings from the man himself when in his 90s – and I hope the mods won’t mind me posting a link to it here..
BTW: A ‘Dillen’ – which is what he was called – was considered to be the runt of the family: this chap was only about 5’4″
While Mr Malm apparently thinks an agrarian society is the ticket, he doesn’t speak towards the most common path I hear among warmists circles. Artifical intelligence and it’s takeover of the highly inefficient way we use energy will be the future. Smart homes, grids, mining done by machines, manufacturing produced by AI … transportation operated by it … blah blah. The current way will be a distant memory and they certainly see it occurring in their lifetime.
I think AI will make current life unrecognizable much like a horse and buggy owner wouldn’t recognize a mechanized world.
Who knows. Maybe they’ll be AI operated hobby farms with safe spaces for the getting dirty.
While CAGW is obviously a ruse, the place where AI advocates want to get to will happen. I’m not sure what will power it, but the world will be much different than this one. I always hope this transition period isn’t don’t so clumsily that it knocks off a few billion along the way to the brave new world.
Don’t sb done
Always sb also
Geeeesh
“I’m not sure what will power it”
I am positively damn well sure what it will take to power such a society and that will be fossil fuels!
Maybe, to start with. But in the end (by which I mean ‘in the next 85 years’) the only real choice is going to be some form of large scale Nuclear, whether Fission, Fusion, or the largest Nuclear of all, the Sun. Nothing else, not even the Earth’s vast supplies of hydrocarbons, will be able to generate the massive amounts of energy needed to lift our 8-10 Billion fellow Homo Sapiens out of subsistence level poverty. Not long term at least.
Hydrocarbons can be an excellent short term solution however. Assuming we focus on improving the technologies needed for that future, and not waste our time chasing Green pipe dreams of ‘Sustainability’ and back to feudal methods.
The truth is that, for people calling themselves ‘progressive’ they always look to the future with fear and to the past with longing. Real progress is made by those who look to the future with hope, take the present in hand, and never forget the lessons the past has left us with, least we repeat them.
In 85 years the population will be more like 5 billion or less. Even South America birth rates are below that needed to sustain populations. Already Russia and Japan have noticed there won’t be enough workers to sustain the current industrial and agricultural output if they don’t start encouraging people to marry and have children.
You mean http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project ?
Ah, yes, heard about them. Sounds less than well thought out, but it keeps some busy I suppose. On the other hand, I think its inevitable that the pursuit of AI will march along till it can’t any longer. Any discussion of a future world needs to include it.
The fundamental problem with the Venus Project can be summed up in one simple equation.
‘Workers of the World Unite’ + ‘All work done by Robots’ = ‘Robot Uprising’
^¿^
the transition from activist industry to fluffer industry did require AI to cross the threshold.
so far, any idiot who can not type has predictive apps that will make it appear as if his vestigial thumbs can.
so far any idiot who could never write a single line of code- can have a computer so he can take pictures and chat.
we are almost there –
but now, the missing ingredient is Artificial Stupidity to save the vestigial brains the labor of being idiots.
It will be a combination of Asimov’s Robots and Rossum’s Universal Robots. Read RUR.
“..a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal”
I suppose that farming is out, since farmers dominate natural crops rather than picking and gathering them.
And Nature . . . she is is such a heartless bitch.
We must follow the lead of our brothers in Venezuela:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-collapse-brings-savage-suffering-1455323300
Venezuela sits on the second highest amount of known oil reserves. Yet, it can’t feed its people. Venezuela is the ultimate counter-example proving why individual freedom, capitalism, and efficient energy supply lead to prosperity.
You only have to kick out one leg of the stool to wreck the progress of the human condition. Of course, our POTUS is targeting all three legs at once.
If you fully count the oil sand reserves in the Orinoco belt, Venezuela may have double the reserves of the rest of the world combined.
did you miss this?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-24681894
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has announced the creation of a new Ministry of Supreme Social Happiness.
maybe he did consult the richard…lol
How many acres of hay and oats does it take to make one horsepower going this route? Also, I thought we were supposed to be decommissioning dams.
HankHenry. My dad said it took about one third of your crop to feed the horses all year long.
How much would the horse farts add to global warming? And are these counted as AGW or EGW (equinepogenic)?
The roots of global warming originate with the beginning of the current inter-glacial and will stop when the inter-glacial we now enjoy ends.
What a rube to think a political system is going to resolve his problems with the climate system.
Let’s return to those good old days of yesteryear. Said by someone who very likely didn’t live in anything approaching those idyllic times. Life expectancy seems to track the growth of those evil fossil fuels. Life expectancy in 1900 was about 47 years. Life expectancy in 2014 was about 77 years (US from birth). Go look at the third world with lower standards of living and lower life expectancy. Would he want to return to that?
The collective farms in the USSR worked so well at food production. I guess his idea is a good way to get rid of perceived overpopulation.
Bob,
I should be pleased if you would stop using the term “third world”: there is no such thing. This is a most polite, respectful request and NOT anything else.
I keep banging on about this I know but (bear with me please) people in what we now call Egypt were making sea-going, luxury cruise ships in the first century A.D. when “we” Angles were still paddling our coracles.
A better term to use would be “poor countries” (If one really means to say poor countries). Thank you.
Regards,
WL
Who cares what groups of people were doing 2000 years ago.
3rd world is an accurate description of how they are living now.
Yes, the climate of Nile river valley was more conducive to creating civilization compared to the cold regions of Europe.
So what.
Despite their handicaps Europeans built an advanced civilization while despite all their advantages the Egyptians lagged and by the time of the Romans had been left in the dust.
Not despite the handicap of Europe’s constantly changing Climate, BECAUSE of it. Necessity is the mother of invention, and Europe’s usually colder climate was the mother of all necessities.
I didn’t know where “third world” came from, so I looked it up.
“The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO (with the United States, Western European nations and their allies representing the First World), or the Communist Bloc (with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and their allies representing the Second World).”
I had always seen it used as referring to poor or poorly developed.
But, in any event most third world countries, as initially defined (and the label or grouping was accepted by Egypt) still exist. So, they were third world … and if they are playing politics and courting opposing powers instead of working to develop on their own (as some countries like Egypt have a history of doing), or are poorly developed (by today’s standards), then they are third world.
Warren Latham,
The term third world is defined by business dictionary-“Collective name for most of the nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, many of which share a colonial past and are variously termed as developing, less developed, or least developed countries. They support 75 percent of the world’s population but consume only 20 percent of its resources, and are generally characterized by (1) slow pace of industrialization, (2) low to very low levels of per capita income that is insufficient to generate savings for economic growth, (3) low literacy levels but high rate of population growth, (4) poor health facilities and transport infrastructure, (5) dependence on agricultural and commodity exports as main foreign exchange earners.”
By Merriam Webster as-
Definition of third world
1: a group of nations especially in Africa and Asia not aligned with either the Communist or the non-Communist blocs
2: an aggregate of minority groups within a larger predominant culture
3: the aggregate of the underdeveloped nations of the world
The term “third world” is pretty much an internationally accepted and understood term that does in fact indicate and define “a specific thing”. That “thing” is underdeveloped nations and the term’s definition involves a much more detailed description of what those are, than the term “poor country” does. You apparently don’t like or accept the term, but it’s impolite, and disrespectful to ask or expect people to “please you” by using terminology that you declare “is better to use” but that they might not agree actually IS better.
Do you also object to the use of Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, perfection, sinless, omnipotent, dragon, Klingon, wormhole, time travel, etc because there are “no such things”, or do you just object to a term that actually DOES describe a real thing for some irrational reason?
What bugs me it the term “Developing Countries” It invariably refers to countries that obviously are not developing but going backwards at a rate dependent on how corrupt and socialist their leadership is.
Whatever they were, they are 3rd world today, Allah help them.
Bill Partin, you are bad. No really, Allah did help.
Warren,
In the 1st century AD, the Angles, then still living in Germany and Denmark, and their neighbors had already developed the boat building techniques that would in coming centuries enable their descendants to conquer the British Isles, Normandy, Sicily and Russia, reach Iceland and Greenland and explore North America.
https://www.abc.se/~pa/publ/odergebi.htm#Sluseg%C3%A5rd
Nordic oaken boat dendro-dated to c. AD 310.
In the next century, ie the AD 400s, the longship, such as at Sutton Hoo (c. AD 600), was already carrying Angles, Saxons and Jutes to Britain.
“The collective farms in the USSR worked so well at food production. I guess his idea is a good way to get rid of perceived overpopulation.”
Bob
I think you hit on the real point of this foolery. Not only has this guy bought the CAGW lie he is working from the assumption that the population bomb has already exploded.
He needs to ask-How many people can a man with a horse feed? Modern tractors can have 850 horsepower and help that farmer feed other folks who don’t have time or land to grow their own food.
Where is PETA?
There are certain undertones in Malm’s writing that sound an awful lot like Marx and Engels, particularly the inevitable conclusions that are only derived from a tortured development of straw men that “must be dealt with”
And dah commrade, we all know how Marx and Engels analysis played out…
Andreas Malm is a very radikal leftist whom I have great problems with taking seriously.
Robert Bryce:
You say
I agree that communism cannot work and should be opposed, but Malm argues for more than that: Malm calls for communist, totalitarian central planning to be adopted as a method to impose extreme environmentalism.
Malm’s suggestion has been tried. It was applied in Cambodia during the 1970s by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge movement. They ruled from 1975 to 1979 and in that time at least 1.5 million Cambodians out of a total population of 7 to 8 million died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork.
Richard
Malm does not realize that 7 billion people are alive because and only because of fossil fuels.
Roland Reagan:
YES! The use of fossil fuels has done more to benefit humans than anything else since the invention of agriculture.
Richard
I suspect that he does and that that is why he hates fossil fuels so much.
Growing wheat in Kansas with horse and mule power, plus maybe some steam threshing, produced from nine to 19 bu/acre, mostly 10-15. With fossil-fueled machinery, chemicals and improved varieties, it’s 28 to 50 bu/acre. In the high, dry western reaches, there’s also irrigation, which also requires power. Half to two-thirds of grain is oil and gas.
If we stop commercial farming, we’ll all be forced to eat liberals to stay alive. They taste bitter, they’re tough as leather, and they have no nutritional value. I’m against communism for that reason alone! 🙂
If there were Posting Awards, Aphan just earned an Oscar. Still chuckling…
Ah…blush…thank you. I’m going to boycott the ceremony though because the nominees weren’t diverse enough to satisfy my political correctness parameters. Plus, the entire audience just looks like military MREs in sparkly packaging….shudder…
Less bitter with organic fava beans and a fine, foot-crushed Chianti.
Communism can’t be imposed without a totalitarian govt. In fact the further you get from capitalism the more powerful and intrusive govt must be. It takes a great deal of force to make people do what they wouldn’t naturally do.
Mental,
Your ignorance apparently is boundless.
Few if any regimes in history have come as close to the totalitarian goal as the Inca Empire, in which practically everything which was not forbidden was mandatory. Nobles in Aztec society got the best cuts of their sacrificed victims’ flesh. Moctezuma liked boys.
If by “communism”, you mean Marx’ so-called “primitive communism”, that has never existed outside of small family groups. In Amerindian farming societies, elites ruled. In hunter-gatherer cultures, the best hunters got first crack, so to speak, at all resources, to include mating rights, as is still the case among “wild” Amazonian tribes today. And various bands and tribes very much recognized private property in the form of hunting grounds, which territory they fought over.
dentalmanagerdmd@gmail.com
Those hundreds of thousands of slaves in the conquered tribes across both continents (north American and South American) and civilizations (Mayan, Aztec, Incan) who died being thrown under their other native American religions as grease for the sacrifices and as non-fossil-fueled stone age slaves (and those who simply died by extermination for land, for trophies, for warfare for scarce food and water WOULD tend to disagree with your “memory” of the propaganda given you the past few years.
Oh, there was a “confederacy” of tribes united in upstate NY for a short period, but who “voted” and when was that confederation begun? The rest of the Indians? Slaves. Dead. Or the conquering tribe when the truce was broken.
RA,
I guess along with everything else, Mental has never heard of a slave-killer, the ceremonial weapon used by Northwest Coast Indians at potlaches to kill slaves in an orgy of conspicuous consumption.
Mental,
It’s not a theory, but a fact, observed by the Spanish and shown in the surviving Aztec codexes, plus confirmed by archaeology.
Cannibalism was endemic in the Americas, not just among the Aztecs. Archaeological evidence abounds from North, Meso and South America.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/news/2011/11/110930-cannibalism-cannibals-mexico-xiximes-human-bones-science/
Mental,
The rise of capitalism is why slavery was abolished. It continued to exist under mercantilism, as it had from time immemorial, but the capitalist revolution of the 18th and 19th century led to its demise in most of the world. But in African and Asian agricultural and pastoral societies, it persisted into the late 20th century and still does in some forms. Saudi Arabia ostensibly outlawed it in 1962, but it continues there de facto, as does debt slavery in Pakistan and human trafficking from countries where the rule of law essential to capitalism hasn’t yet taken hold.
Mental,.jpg)
You give it up.
They didn’t eat their own. They ate battle captives.
The Aztec Empire was not like a normal empire, since it kept enclaves of permanent enemies like the Tlaxcalans as essentially stockyards or feed lots, instead of conquering them and incorporating them into their empire. Lacking major sources of animal protein other than turkeys and dogs, the Aztecs and prior Mesoamerican societies developed a religion based upon human sacrifice.
The Aztecs continued a tradition that went back at least 1500 years and probably much farther:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130206-mexico–xaltocan-human-sacrifice-skulls-drought-archeology/
An instance of mass cannibalism from the time of the Conquest:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/montezumas-revenge-cannibalism-in-the-age-of-the-conquistadors-413272.html
Mental,
They were fools to take on debt for degrees with no clear purpose toward employment.
That’s a voluntary act, however ill-advised. That they didn’t learn a useful trade was their mistake. That’s a far cry from slavery. You insult all real slaves by such a lame attempt at analogy.
Mental,
Apparently you didn’t bother reading the link from the Independent, about the discovery of 550 severed heads and the clear signs of cooking and eating the bodies to which they had been attached, along with stabbing the fetuses of pregnant women and other atrocities.
As before, you’re a hopeless troll case. The ideal Sanders voter.
I actually thought “hopeless troll” was pretty kind.
I was also impressed how GloMax engaged you twice despite your obvious rude attempt at baiting.
10X the patience you deserved in my knuckle dragging world.
“It takes a great deal of force to make people do what they wouldn’t naturally do.”
Like drag million ton slabs of rock into a pile so the king can be buried inside them.
DMD
Sadly, the blog world is polluted with people who are disingenuous concerning the nature of debate. Just like real life, there are many people who have made an artform of what is nicknamed the feminization of warfare.
Essentially, the provocateur enters the debate with the intent to trigger a socially unacceptable reaction. I’m sure your smart enough to know the kind.
Good luck out there and try not to burn too many opportunities for healthy debate.
After losing every argument he has ever started here at WUWT, and proving beyond a doubt that his understanding of almost any issue is trivial huffpo style bullet points, Dental Midget declares himself the winner.
‘Ha Ha’ the Troll declares, ‘I was only PRETENDING to by this stupid.’
“Markw, Native Americans lived under Communism before North America was invaded by Europeans.”
Because you said so? Um nope. SOME tribes lived in a “communal” lifestyle (lowercase c) but that alone does not make them Communists (capital C). They “naturally” lived that way because there really wasn’t any other way TO LIVE and survive at the time. The choice was “dwell together, have children, protect and serve each other and live” or “try to survive alone as long as possible”.
But your argument fails because there were many Native American tribes that FOUGHT with and KILLED and LOOTED the possessions of other Native American tribes. The notion that all Native Americans were docile, egalitarian, passive and concerned about equality for all is a foolish and misinformed one. They all spoke different languages and had different customs and they all warred with each other for the same reasons that Europeans have fought with other Europeans, and Asians have fought with other Asians and Americans have fought with other Americans. Territory, revenge, power, revolution, pride, sex, food, etc. The empirical evidence we have from pre-colonialization, such as skulls crushed in or bones bearing arrowhead markings or knife scars proves that brute force power was in play long before white men and their long guns showed up.
” they still lose the argument.”
Not really. It is a common error to confuse insulting remarks with ad hominem/logical fallacies. They are two different things.
An insult can be an accurate designation of evidenced behavior. If the premises (upon which the insult is based) support the conclusion (of the insult), then it’s not necessarily an indication of a lost argument. More of a commercial break during an argument in which the specific behavior of another is pointed out and labeled accurately.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AdHominem
Ad hominems on the other hand, “are any kind of argument that criticizes an idea by pointing something out about the people who hold the idea rather than directly addressing the merits of the idea “. Even the most despicable person on the planet is probably capable of rendering a logical argument. Calling that person despicable is fine and logical. Calling whatever that person is proposing “despicable” or bad by association, is not fine. THAT is a losing argument.
dentalmanagerdmd said:
” A person can take on debt …, then get the debt discharged”
are you arguing that fraud is a virtue and that keeping a promise is a new form of victimhood?
do you practice this virtue?
Debates with those on the left are best described as chess with a pidgeon. No matter how clear the checkmate is, a leftist kicks over all the pieces, struts across the board and declares victory.
Never fails. I prefer to call them pidgeons vs. trolls.
@dentalmanagerdmd@gmail.com,
Look Snowflake, (Oops! Sorry ’bout that), plenty of folks here, who are simply being skeptical of the conjecture that a rise in CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate catestrophe, have received death threats from the alarmist crowd.
Don’t you think that’s what you should be using your time to criticize?
“Maybe Aphan needs to think outside the box on this.”
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/03/maybe-the-egyptian-pyramids-werent-built-by-union-workers-after-all
Aphan likes evidence. Not opinions. Not yours. Not Hawass’s “Grand Nobel Egypt” opinion. That you buy into the idea that the pyramid builders were NOT slaves, but that people who carry student loans ARE…makes you inconsistent as well.
I kind of liked “snowflake”.
They are temporal items that flutter thru the sky at the mercy of the slightest change in temperature.
They are also unique and special. No two alike I hear.
Sadly, they are victimized by a changing environment and slaves to the imperfect and unstable weather.
Perhaps they didn’t want to fall from the sky but were forced too because mama cloud couldn’t support all the little snowflakes at once. Do snowflakes lose their critical ability to be unique when they fall under duress upon being with other snowflakes ? How do they counter the seemingly difficult task of being special yet doomed to compaction under the weight of a mass movement of snowflakes ?
And, finally, who hears the little snowflake that melts if there are no other snowflakes to hear them ?
Its natural to share and we still do with close family, give to more distant relatives and friends and donate to charities. One reason for less sharing with extended family is that we pay taxes and the government provides for others in the community.
Natural is for small family clans to share but as usual, the ones providing more meat or protection to the clan gets preferential treatment. Clans in a tribe cooperate and might be looked after if in trouble but not shared with equally.
Australian aboriginals traded amongst tribes, not just clans. Even in a very primitive society with little manufacturing and trade, they still found time to process tools, tobacco and possibly smoked eels, then trade these, not give them away.
dementalermagerd-
“Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867.”
“Slavery is a legal or economic system in which principles of property law are applied to humans allowing them to be classified as property, to be owned, bought and sold accordingly, and they cannot withdraw unilaterally from the arrangement.”
Normal, rational people with basic English skills can determine the difference between those two words. Since those with student loan debt are not employed by, or being compelled to work FOR the student loan companies it is not peonage. So stop it.
DMD
“Didn’t say it was an ad hom”
Your link is referring to it specifically-
“One of the things people notice about me is that I focus on the arguments that someone presents and not the person; also known as playing the ball not the man.”
Ad hominem is Latin for “to the man” and is a logical fallacy as I defined and explained earlier. Your lack of familiarity with (or disregard for) the rules of logic is part of your problem here.
Am I “implying” that capitalism is not “natural” but living in a commune is? Nope. Capitalism is an economic structure, not a social structure, and hundreds of millions of capitalists live in “communties” and we all pay for and share water systems, power, roads, schools, and other things. Communities have councils that discuss community issues and help resolve problems. Communities have food banks and charities that help those who need help. Human families in the US don’t have to live in tight formations anymore to survive BECAUSE we have the money and ability to build secure homes (rather than tents) to protect ourselves (for now) and laws that punish thieves and raiders and kidnappers. Our poor are still well off when compared to underdeveloped countries.
Do you have any evidence to support your delusion dental?
Everything I have read about the Native Americans is that they owned and protected from others their private property.
That’s not communism.
It’s remarkable how shallow the socialist climate doomsayers understanding of history is. Their view is simplistic that it is reasonable to say they know nothing.
The solution for them is simple. sell their sh!t, buy a farm and some animals and make a go of it. I have a feeling though they may not realize the reality of what “working the land” means. Especially giving up powered farm machinery and continuous dependable energy.
It’s amazing how often leftists confuse their models with reality.
Be it their models of how the climate is supposed to work, or their models of how the economy is supposed to work.
Alx and MarkW:
It’s amazing how rightists always pretend their ideology has some possibility of working in reality.
In reality, fasc1sm has always failed and it always will fail.
And their deliberate attempts to pretend socialism is like their and other forms of totalitarianism (e.g. communism) would be amusing if it were not loathsome.
Richard
Mark & Alx,
It sounds like you’ve been labeled as fasc1sts
venezuela la la
all that oil and a shortage of electricity
only socialism could do that.
DonM-
Richard lives in an imaginary world in which he “pretends that his ideology has some possibility of working in reality as well. It doesn’t matter how beautifully it could be modeled, it’s impossible to get society as a whole, to voluntarily act in the manner required for “socialism” to benefit everyone equally.
How come the media doesn’t expose the massive illegal immigration problem in Venezuela and North Korea?
I am sure these nations are inundated with millions of folks yearning for the utopia Malm describes.
I agree that fascism has always failed, all forms of socialism fail eventually.
Socialism will always require a great deal of force, because those who work for a living don’t like having the products of their labors stolen in order to buy the votes of those who don’t want to work.
It really is fascinating the lengths socialists will go to justify their desire to steal from others.
I’m still waiting for Richard to defend his belief that capitalism can’t work.
DonM, Richard labels anyone who disagrees with him regarding the wonders of socialism a fascist.
MarkW:
NO! I “label” fas1sts” as being fasc1sts.
And, as all fasc1sts do, you try to pretend socialists are communists and H1tler was not a fasc1st.
Richard
Andreas Malm is a very radical leftist whom I have great problems with taking seriously.
A vision which holds as its ideal the death resulting from uniformity and conformity as practiced in North Korea. Just picture the horror of the entire planet reduced to that level. The die off of the Middle Ages from the plague would seem mild in comparison.
You first, buddy. If you want to lower your standard of living and live like a caveman, then you are free to do so. Why must you pull everyone else down into the abyss with you?
He’s lonely?