Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Guardian Columnist George Monbiot, if we treat future generations not yet born as having equal rights to the living, property rights will have to be radically adjusted; we’re all effectively tenants, holding land in trust which will be passed to future generations who enjoy the same rights as us, even before they are born.
Capitalism is destroying the Earth. We need a new human right for future generations
George MonbiotThe children on climate strike are right: their lives should not be sacrificed to satisfy our greed
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At the heart of capitalism is a vast and scarcely examined assumption: you are entitled to as great a share of the world’s resources as your money can buy.
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So what should take its place? It seems to me that the founding principle of any just system is that those who are not yet alive will, when they are born, have the same rights as those who are alive today. … “Every generation shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.”
This principle is hard to dispute, but it seems to change everything. Immediately, it tells us that no renewable resource should be used beyond its rate of replenishment. No non-renewable resource should be used that cannot be fully recycled and reused. This leads inexorably to towards two major shifts: a circular economy from which materials are never lost; and the end of fossil fuel combustion.
But what of the Earth itself? In this densely populated world, all land ownership necessarily precludes ownership by others. Article 17 of the Universal Declaration is self-contradictory. It says, “Everyone has the right to own property.” But because it places no limit on the amount one person can possess, it ensures that everyone does not have this right. I would change it to this: “Everyone has the right to use property without infringing the rights of others to use property.” The implication is that everyone born today would acquire an equal right of use, or would need to be compensated for their exclusion. One way of implementing this is through major land taxes, paid into a sovereign wealth fund. It would alter and restrict the concept of ownership, and ensure that economies tended towards distribution, rather than concentration.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/capitalism-destroying-earth-human-right-climate-strike-children
Are the climate change strikers in tune with Monbiot’s thinking? I suspect so. Their manifesto seems to boil down to a demand that their parents provide them with free stuff. Like Monbiot they don’t appear to recognise that the effort others have put into improvement provide those others with any entitlements, or that they have any personal responsibility for their own upkeep or wellbeing.
As for Monbiot’s idea that we should accommodate the rights of future generations, frankly we have no idea what future generations will need.
The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 is a classic example of panicking over future problems which never manifested. Cities were covered in vast piles of stinking horse manure, and the rotting corpses of dead horses. Projecting known population growth, city planners were aghast at the looming crisis – in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”
The solution of course was Henry Ford, and the foundation of Ford Motor Company in 1903; a technology shift which wasn’t obvious in 1894, at least not to the Times.
In just a few short years nobody wanted horses anymore. Clouds of smoke from primitive engines and exhausts were far preferable to vast stinking piles of renewable horse manure.
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This “overcrowded planet” bit is getting a bit tedious.
At the current level of population, every person alive could be allocated about one-quarter acre of land in Australia which leaves the whole of the rest of the planet for whatever else you need it for.
Just because the Brits can’t bear not to be in commuting distance of London and the Americans prefer the east and west coasts to the bits in between, this does not mean the planet is overcrowded!
‘No non-renewable resource should be used that cannot be fully recycled and reused.’
OK, take that back to Adam and Eve and where do we end up now?
NO Guardian newspaper.
Perhaps not all bad then.
“… a circular economy from which materials are never lost, …”
In other words the future he envisages is simply treading water, there will be no progress. At least he is being honest, if only inadvertently, with renewable energy such as wind and solar that is the best prospect available.
There are no property rights in a mere expectation, established common law principle. Monbiot’s thesis falls on this point alone!
The mass killings in New Zealand actually brought some perspective to the children’s climate march. Ironically the children’s march because of the timing barely rated in the news. Even the media which has been complicit in the global warming scam realised that such an atrocity as occurred in NZ has priority. Whilst problems ( especially imagined ones) of the future are important in planning our future behaviours what matters to most people including most kids is the here and now. It’s much , much so much more important that one can go to a place of worship without fear of being killed rather than wondering whether an unproven theory about future global temperatures is true and weather if it is true we can actually do something about it.
When ClimateGate erupted, Monbiot covered his ass, by throwing Phil Jones under the bus and switching his focus temporarily to the CAGW evil twin, the BioDiversity agenda.
Is it realistic that Monbiot didn’t know the shenanigans practiced by UEA and other climate charlatans, given Monbiot’s close association to Crispin Tickell, CAGW Godfather Himself??
Climategate: George Monbiot’s Lament
One of Europe’s most ardent and best-known global warming alarmists, George Monbiot, is in anguish over the unfolding climategate e-mail scandal and is calling on Phil Jones, one of the climate scientists at the heart of the fiasco, to resign
https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/6757-climategate-george-monbiots-lament
Sir Crispin was President of the Royal Geographical Society from 1990 to 1993 and Warden of Green College, Oxford, between 1990 and 1997, where he appointed George Monbiot and Norman Myers as Visiting Fellows. Green College merged with Templeton College in 2008 to become Green Templeton College, located at what was previously Green College
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin_Tickell
Crispin Tickell: CAGW Godfather
Nigel Lawson: Global warming has turned into religion
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/11/was-climate-change-alarmism-always-about-fears-of-overpopulation/#comment-2623744
Examples would necessarily be anything made of materials mined or derived from fossil fuels; clothing, electronic devices, automobiles etc.
The concepts of cost and value are lost on idealists like AOC or Monbiot.
Recycling takes additional labor and energy. If the value of the resulting material is less than the cost of those resources, then under their scheme the difference would have to be made up in the price of the original item.
Since most of our clothing, electronics etc are not easily recycled (because of mixed materials for example) the price of those everyday items would skyrocket; with many becoming unaffordable.
(I know, that’s their “anti-consumerism” objective, even if they haven’t explicitly thought it out. I bet AOC still expects her next laptop, new suit, or TV to be available at today’s prices.)
CAGW-Climate Change-Climate Disruption- Extreme Weather- Capitalism? Whatever will they think of next or was that what they were thinking all along. Duh!
I had the misfortune to see Monbiot live on BBC Politics Live programme yesterday. I truly believe the man is insane and switched off after a couple of minutes.
This is a man whose philosophy would mean that there is no future. There would be no innovation and human existence would be dragged down to the level of mere animals (and not the comparatively comfortable existence of farm animals).
People like Monbiot are a much bigger risk to the future of the planet than any of the manufactured risks that he and his ilk scare impressionable people with.
In an engineering economics course I asked students what they could offer as a one sentence definition of ethics. One was so amazing it is now permanently etched in my memory. “Caring more for the needs of others than you do for yourself.” I simply replied that it could not be used to organize a stable or just society. Monbiot’s statement is similarly vacuous.
Monbiot, the little tool of Sir Crispin Tickell, the former chairman of… the Thomson Reuters Foundation…
Hypocrite.
Man-Bot is right – but only from his perspective. The “Elite” must control the unwashed, crushing them when necessary, in order to ensure their and their children’s (the Elite’s) thriving survival.
Oddly Moonbat can never offer an ‘socialists’ state or any type of state other than capitalists,who have a better record on the environment than several capitalists states such as Sweden who are regarded as having very good environmental records and have for a long time.
Indeed states such has the USSR , Venezuela , China have bloody awful records on the environment no matter how much of their ideology Moonbat admires.
What does that even mean, “lost”? In the universe where I have spent most of my time, we have a law called conservation of mass.
Why was it not a problem when CO2 was “lost” over the eons of fossil fuel and carbonate rock formation?
Matter is neither created nor destroyed. If burning fossil fuels caused us to lose some of the hydrogen, carbon, or oxygen atoms to space, then we would have a real problem.
Apparently in Moonbat’s world, it’s unacceptable to have change of any sort? Or is it that coal, oil, and natural gas has some sort of metaphysical value when it is in the ground where nobody can see it and it serves no practical purpose? If we turn all the fossil fuels back to carbon dioxide and water, how is that a problem compared to the supposed requirement to leave them in the ground? Either way, future generations won’t be benefitting from them. It’s like refusing a gift of a billion dollars because if you get used to spending a million dollars a week, in a couple of decades you’ll be broke.
How can we rely on solar power when the sun only has a couple of billion years left? It’s not sustainable.
Has anyone else noticed that there are never trolls when the discussion is about the real reason for AGW (ie communism/world control)?
Monbiot would impress me more if he could get the Gruaniad to run at a profit. Until such times he should go away and hide under a rock and let the rest of us get on with our lives and not try force us to live on planet Guardian. No doubt he believes that Centrifugal Force exists, that the dominant terrestrial green house gas is Carbon Dioxide and the Earth is flat.
The Guardian is supposed to have gone back to its roots to save money, to Manchester. For our American cousins it used to be called the Manchester Guardian.
Some of us in this country used to refer to The Guardian as the “Maoist Guardian.” Except now, with the likes of Monbiot, it should probably be referred to as the “post-modernist-Maoist Guardian.”
“…the founding principle of any just system is that those who are not yet alive will, when they are born, have the same rights as those who are alive today.”
Not taking sides here but does their position make them pro or anti abortion?
Pro abortion so as to minimize the population of future rights holders or Anti abortion because those unborn are entitled to the same rights as those born?
Seems to mean this line of reasoning is inane.
The Monbiot Mental Midget appears to be offering just another, but stranger, alternative rationale for the imposition of a brand of Marxist socialism/communism. He thinks he is doing better, but he is not. Monbiot makes Stalin and Mao look like pikers, and I suggest Monbiot would be willing to kill millions of currently born in order to advance his ridiculous theory.
Funny thing, too: Monbiot favors some kind of imaginary “right to own property” vested in the unborn. Except that he probably supports or sympathizes with the unlimited right of abortion now practiced and advocated in the United States, along with the less-extensive but nevertheless pernicious abortion laws that exist in Europe. Couple that with the declining birth rates in Europe and the U.S. (because people like AOC suggest, like many other millennials, that maybe it’s not right to bring children into the world now), it makes a right of the “unborn” such as Monbiot suggests a complete contradiction to the rest of his (perverse) world view. Such is the function of post-modernist ideology and its reigning ideologues.
Not to mention that Monbiot completely forgets about the “tragedy of the commons.” If everybody (including future generations) owns everything, it means nobody owns anything. No one has any incentive to create, innovate, or do anything else to develop, use, and husband the world’s resources. Government does everything at that point? Ha! Government will have nothing to tax, or do, before long, because in the course of redistribution of existing wealth (for the future “benefit” of a mythical “unborn”), no new wealth can be created, sustained, or husbanded.
It is a prescription for a totalitarian leviathan of the sort that Hobbes, Marx, Lenin, and Mao could only have dreamed of.
Concerned about future generations?
Considering the current state of abortions, future generations have bigger problems to worry about than the use of fossil fuels.
Just wait until they decide to do something about those “useless eaters” at the other end of life.
No I think it is more like ppl in the Western world have no interest in having children at all. Abortion is a small piece compared to the ’35, not married, no spouse in sight, could I possibly manage to make one’ lot.
For men the challenge is to be well-doing enough that women take an interest. It’s a law of pairing that a man may marry an uneducated woman, but the contrary is rare. So the more educated women are compared to men, the less options ppl have. And among men, there are more who have reading difficulties and college drop-outing. Some men excel, but women generally trump men in education.
‘Sorry Grok, stone is not renewable, so you are not allowed to use it for your stone axes. According to the Stone Axe and Other Dangerous Assault Weapon Prohibition Act, you are fined for 50 squirrels and punished with two weeks in detention cave.’
I wonder are socialists are a side product of the modern world, or had cave people and Qin dynasty their own?
With all do respect to Monbiot, especially in consideration of past experience of mine with Monbiot at Guardian, I got to say, and hopefully I am wrong with this,
but Monbiot seems to have reduced himself to a junky drug addict, as almost all of MSM stars have, due to the course of reality…and heavy strains there.
Hopefully me being wrong, but in case of the smallest chance there, got to say, that no much value on taking the leading, education, schooling or following from junky drug addicts of MSM…
Maybe too harsh, and maybe too unacceptable, but hey Americans when you look at Young Turks MSM panel, you looking at a very much junky and drug addict panel…completely under drug dependency, which makes a guy like me question the Monbiot position in regard of drugs… when considering the far gone beyond any safety of the young junk Turks at large…
Hopefully wrong, but all MSM stars all over there could no do what they doing unless under influence and support of drugs, in heavy dependency as from such as, as far as I can tell.
Again hopefully I am wrong with all this…but hey, free expression of the mind in my part, let the dogs lie, where they may be.
Time only will tell, at this point in time, as far as I can tell, in consideration of the whole plethora of MSM and it’s open engagement and dependency in drug taking…almost in all given environment , more than ever before,
somewhere more and somewhere less, but still the same in basics.
Junky, drug addiction at best of it…in the best attempt to resist against the odds, as per means of psychopathy clause…the only and the main means to suppress the feelings, at the most possible.
Sorry again, if too harsh,,, especially apologies to Anthony, in this one point here.
Really, really, really sorry, if too inconvenient with this..but got to say it.
cheers
What are we really passing on to future generations? Some decaying infrastructure which is too little for even current needs. Some decaying ideals about democracy, freedom, and all that. A whole lot of international disputes and the weapons to fight them. Other than that, what?
A whole lot of debt which can never be repaid, and more coming…
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/behind-the-budget-gimmick-that-could-help-secure-trumps-border-wall.amp
Save the earth too? Good luck with that.
It’s probably been said before, but Monbiot, like Figueras (sp?) know that their particular type of socialism is doomed, especially after Venezuela, so they need to take advantage of ‘climate change’ as a means to an end. Let’s face, if idiots like AOC can get elected, apart from the loss of superiority people like Monbiot must suffer as a result, he must think his argument stands a chance.
But that’s the problem, if you treat the populace as idiots too, they will fight back at the insult. Although, now they are recruiting school-children to their cause – having managed to get their socialist teachers to fail to teach them anything about …. anything,
…furthermore (I repeat myself): If Monbiot thinks we should all be equal (ie: socialists) he has not understood Solzhenitsyn’s apercu that: we are all born with different abilities; those who are free are not equal; those who are equal are not free.
The logical fallacy of George’s “unborn future generations have the same rights as the living” is that under this assertion, the dead of previous generations have the same rights as the living. What he is asserting is that time no longer exists for the purpose of defining rights. Next year, this year, last year are not different.
Hey George, you are living on the land, and infringing the rights, of dead people. Get outta there! Give it back!
If THIS generation must be denied resources because of the “future”, exactly which future generation WILL be allowed to use them? Because EVERY generation looks to the future. It’s just an argument against resource use altogether.
It’s also a demand that future generations be born into poverty. Do you think they will thank us for that?
Typical of the anti-capitalists, Monbiot has no idea how wealth is created, assuming – despite all historical eveidence to the contrary – that capitalism is only about concentrating and destroying wealth, not building it.