Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon, Climate Depot; Sustainability scientists from the University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, ETH Zürich and University of Leeds in Britain have outlined their solution to global warming.
Their plan involves wealth redistribution, public ownership of businesses and a cap on how much money people are allowed to have, with starring roles for eco-feminists and anarchists in their vision of a radically restructured society.
Scientists’ warning on affluence
Thomas Wiedmann, Manfred Lenzen, Lorenz T. Keyßer & Julia K. Steinberger
Abstract
For over half a century, worldwide growth in affluence has continuously increased resource use and pollutant emissions far more rapidly than these have been reduced through better technology. The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions. We summarise the evidence and present possible solution approaches. Any transition towards sustainability can only be effective if far-reaching lifestyle changes complement technological advancements. However, existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change.
…
It is well established that at least in the affluent countries a persistent, deep and widespread reduction of consumption and production would reduce economic growth as measured by gross domestic product (GDP)51,52. Estimates of the needed reduction of resource and energy use in affluent countries, resulting in a concomitant decrease in GDP of similar magnitude, range from 40 to 90%
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The reformist group consists of heterogeneous approaches such as a-growth80, precautionary/pragmatic post-growth52, prosperity42 and managing85 without growth as well as steady-state economics86. These approaches have in common that they aim to achieve the required socio-ecological transformation through and within today’s dominant institutions, such as centralised democratic states and market economies52,77. From this position it often follows that current, socially vital institutions, such as the welfare state, labour markets, healthcare, pensions and others, need to be reformed to become independent from GDP growth52. Generally, bottom-up movements are seen as crucial, leading to value and cultural changes towards sufficiency42,47. Eventually, however, significant policy changes are proposed to achieve the necessary downshifting of consumption and production42,77,86and/or the reduction of environmental impacts through decoupling52,80. These include, among others, stringent eco-taxes or cap-and trade systems, directed investments in green industries and public institutions, wealth redistribution through taxation and a maximum income, a guaranteed basic income and/or reduced working hours42,77. Although these policies already seem radical when compared to today’s policies, the proponents of reformist approaches are convinced that the transformation can be achieved in current capitalist economies and democratic states42,77,86.
The second, more radical, group disagrees and argues that the needed socio-ecological transformation will necessarily entail a shift beyond capitalism and/or current centralised states. Although comprising considerable heterogeneity77, it can be divided into eco-socialist approaches, viewing the democratic state as an important means to achieve the socio-ecological transformation51,65 and eco-anarchist approaches, aiming instead at participatory democracy without a state, thus minimising hierarchies54,87. Many degrowth approaches combine elements of the two, but often see a stronger role for state action than eco-anarchists50,51,88. Degrowth is defined here as “an equitable downscaling of throughput [that is the energy and resource flows through an economy, strongly coupled to GDP], with a concomitant securing of wellbeing“59,p7, aimed at a subsequent downscaled steady-state economic system that is socially just and in balance with ecological limits. Importantly, degrowth does not aim for a reduction of GDP per se, but rather accepts it as a likely outcome of the necessary changes78. Moreover, eco-feminist approaches highlight the role of patriarchal social relations and the parallels between the oppression of women and exploitation of nature89, while post-development approaches stress the manifold and heterogeneous visions of achieving such a socio-ecological transformation globally, especially in the global South90.
Degrowth advocates propose similar policy changes as the reformist group50,80. However, it is stressed that implementing these changes would most likely imply a shift beyond capitalism, e.g. preventing capital accumulation through dis-economies of scale and collective firm ownership, and thus require radical social change59,62,91. Eco-socialists usually focus more on rationing, planning of investments and employment, price controls and public ownership of at least the most central means of production to plan their downscaling in a socially sustainable way65,77.
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Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16941-y
Central planning, rationing, price controls, punitive wealth taxes and wealth redistribution. The glorious future climate concerned scientists are planning for us.
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Socialists pretending to be scientists.
And this is from the group who think they are just tweaking capitalism a little bit. This reminds me of something Cicero said “There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not considered it.”
Where is Karl Marx when you need him?
Perhaps a copyright infringement suit could be filed, each time they trot this out it is plagiarized from the last time it was trotted out.
Where is Karl Marx when you need him?
Don’t forget, this time it is going to be different! (Sarc)
There is an old folk tale. I think it might be Russian but I’m not sure.
This fisherman catches a magic talking fish. The fish pleads with the fisherman “please throw me back and I’ll grant you one magic wish.” The man is of course startled at a talking fish but he agrees to the deal and throws the fish back into the water.
“What would like for your magic wish?” asks the talking fish.
“Well my neighbor in the village, he has two strong healthy cows. And I only have one old sickly cow. It isn’t fair that he has more than me. He has more milk and cream and butter and it ‘s just not right.”
“So” the fish says “You want me to give you a second cow?”
“No, no” says the fisherman, “I want you to take away his cows.”
“It is in the character of very few men to honor, without envy, a friend who has prospered.” – Aeschylus
The only reason these people have these worthless careers is because of affluence.
As long as there are many people in the world who are lazy or greedy or envious of what others possess this will never work.
“lazy or greedy or envious ”
You’ve just described the kind of people that push this kind of nonsense.
The pie has a fixed size; so anyone who gets ahead does so at the expense of others. No room for growth or more efficient use of resources. Typical lefty/democrat constrained “thinking.”
The same goes for their view of economic growth.
All they can imagine is more and bigger stuff. That’s why they equate economic growth with more resource depletion.
The reality is that in the first world, economic growth comes more from having better stuff, not more stuff.
Compare the energy, resource usage of a modern computer (3 GHz, 5Tbyte hard drive, 12Gbyte of memory) with a computer from 20 years ago (200MHz, 500Gbyte drive, 200Mbyte of memory).
Most families had two cars decades ago. However modern cars have more bells and whistles, get better gas milage and last longer than did cars from 2 decades ago.
And so on.
In the early 1990s I was a director of a small graphics design company that did desktop assembly as a (very profitable) sideline. This was in the days of Windows 3.1 and the Intel 486 processor. The Pentium arrived just about the time I left for other work.
There was major celebration the day our supplier phoned to say he could get us hard drives at under £800 a megabyte. That is not a misprint! The last HDD I bought for ‘The Beast’ before I went permanently onto laptops was 1Tb and cost less than £50.
Some people have very short memories!
It was in 1998, when I first saw an add for computer memory where the price finally dropped below $100/Mbyte.
It was in 1988 when I got my first desk top, it ran on a 6MHz 80286, had a 10Mbyte hard drive and 740K of RAM. We looked into buyinig 260K of RAM in order to get me up to a full MByte. The cost was almost $4000.
In the days before cell phones, most homes had 2 or 3 landlines. Compare the size of those phones to the cell phones of today. Those things could only make calls, nothing else, the cost of long distance was something like 10 to 20 cents per minute. This was at a time when a bottle of coke cost 15 cents.
How many kids out there even know what a CRT is? My first computer had a 12 inch CRT monitor. Monochrome.
Bells and whistles? Your analogy is bollox.
You will find your answer to your so called “more and bigger” = simply more bloat!
There is nothing I find in most modern cars that is better designed, lighter, made to last longer, or is not a total show stopper if it goes wrong, than anything from the late 80s.
In fact lean burn engines from the 80s still beat the pants off any modern power units with catastrophic subvertors, and don’t have acres of electronics that cost fortunes to replace while leaving your stranded on the roadside…
+
It’s usually the case, if a car is 25% lighter it uses less energy to accelerate it.
It’s well know the automotive industry is a perfect example of going backwards.
The vast majority of cars have got much heavier in the last 20yrs.
Anyone driven a 1970-80s Lotus will tell you that!
Your analogy with the computer is also pretty wayward.
We simply didn’t need the gigantic resources you are citing, because OS were light, faster and had very little bloat, with excellent design skills & few kludges, which is of course why tru64bit Unix or 64 bit Linux was some 20yrs ahead of its time.
Even Torvalds is moaning about mega bloat in linux now!!
The fundamental error made by the Socialists/Communists: wealth cannot be created, only acquired by exploiting someone else.
The term heterogeneous says it all as it is incommensurable making the whole article vacuous gobbledegook with dangerousness political connotations.
In summary: We who are more equal than others grant freedom to those who do precisely what we say.
Yes, absolutely, lets all get poor and hungry again together. That always makes the environment healthier. Nearly 8 billion people who know what a successful industrial society looks and feels like are sure to passively accept their gradual eradication without lifting a finger because some brain-dead academics who’ve never lived in the real world or solved a real problem in their life say it seems like a good idea based on their computer models and economic projections. And of course none of those billions will be upset to see the future of their children and grandchildren disappear in a puff of green smoke and their health and nutritional status dwindle to a premorbid precipice. All those people certainly won’t scrape the earth for every last morsel of protein to stay alive and feed their children, burn every scrap of wood and vegetation for heat and protection or resort to continuous armed conflict over the dwindling resources as humanity descends into oblivion.
My only suggestion to enhance this plan is that the proponents lead the way as they are so certain a of the beneficence of their advice. The rest of us should stay on the sidelines and watch till we have mastered the skills of these intellectual giants from watching them in action. There is probably a nice place in Antarctica where they can start which will certainly be toasty warm and comfortable by now due to out of control hum,an induced global warming.
“Well, I didn’t see that coming!” said no one on WUWT.
It has been clear to many that environmentalism in general and climate change in particular are just false-flag operations, designed to divert the attention of the masses from the left’s real target, which has always been the destruction of Western Civilization and its replacement with a socialist dictatorship. The only thing surprising about this paper is it’s honesty.
Apparently, these post-modern, neo-marxist feel that it is safe for them to come out of their closest and reveal who they really are and what they are really up to. And maybe it is! They have done a very good job of indoctrinating the masses with fear and nonsense at all levels of society, so that many ‘unaware’ are openly inviting these ‘foxes’ into the hen house.
This openness has caused some leftists to take the red pill and renounce their old delusions. Karlyn Borysenko is a clinical psychologist who is sharing her ‘red pill’ experience on YouTube, after she attended a Trump rally last fall. She is quite entertaining and a small, but growing threat to the leftist narrative. Also on YouTube, Scott Adams, in his episode 1030, is predicting that there will be a massive ‘red pill’ event coming before the end of the year, but he is not yet sharing any details. I don’t know if his predicted ‘call to reality’ will be something that saves Western Civilization or is just the realization that Western Civilization is already lost. I guess it could go either way.
What do you think?
Back in 2012 I stated that we faced our last chance to save this country, then the Republicans nominated perhaps the only person in the country who couldn’t defeat Obama. The milquetoast Romney.
Did you read the headlines recently about Romney saying that he couldn’t support Trump, because apparently Trump is too mean to the Democrats.
“The Ticks are conspiring about what the cow must eat”.
So that the blood may be sweeter.
Seems that our Parasitic Overload has reached a point where they are unaware of who feeds them.
Career Civil Servants unto the 5th generation.
It produces these fools and bandits,who “Know better than all the rest of us” how we shall live.
Perhaps it is time,in the Americas anyway, to hold a few accountable.
Time to revisit that “Temporary Income Tax”,which allowed the career civil servants to feast.
For most of these “1st world problems” such as The Cult of Calamitous Climate,Gang Green and The UN..will all fade away if we stop funding them.
These useless and greedy freeloaders are using our money to empower themselves,to ends that serve none of the Tax paying citizens.
So chop the money.
Income tax ,a temporary taxation to “pay for the War” has continued for 100 years..Mighty Temporary.
The Tithe lasted for centuries and 1 person administering for every 10 working productively may be affordable.
So Reset time,the useless and clueless are real good at rewarding the clueless ,shiftless and completely inept,with other peoples money.
So we are now awash in Useless,clueless and dangerously incompetent persons.
Maybe we could agree to pay a maximum of 10% net at the local level,then each local can give 10% of their take to the State.
For Government Money,without accountability to any taxpayer ever,is the source of almost all the madness that currently afflicts us.
Fake problems, thrust upon us by dangerously underemployed persons.
I’ve read that many city dwellers think that food comes from grocery stores, electricity comes from wall sockets and money comes from government.
I’m always shocked that people so clearly lacking any reasonable intelligence are actually placed in roles where they can write garbage like this. Democratic countries are the only states that allow them to spew drivel like this. Do they seriously think China will adopt policies like this? They want to burn down the only institutions that actually give them a voice.
Simply more strong evidence that Climate Change has little to do with Climate, and everything to do with wealth distribution and socialism, while bringing the middle class and its affluence into serfdom.
Hey, at least they’re being up front about their ideals. 😉
Mortal gods and goddesses. The philosophers of a Pro-Choice selective, opportunistic, politically congruent religion. Realized through a divergent ideology. In Stork They Trust. Let us bray.
Once science becomes entwined with finance, politics and ideology in this way it can no longer be classed as science. There is no data here, no observations or measurements just a (somewhat biased) thought process and fanciful ideas. The authors, and the publishing periodical, have lost sight of what constitutes “Science”.
At first, I thought the paper was one of those pseudo-papers submitted to journals for fun, to gauge how gullible today’s professional journal editors/referees are.
But no? This is a real paper? A real “science” paper? In a real “science” journal?
Nonetheless, I am still laughing. Jokes tend to have that effect on me.
Karl Marx would be delighted.
This Trojan horse is made of glass.
The problem is that the horse is already inside the gates.
Not only that, it was actually made inside the gates.
Well, in one sense they are kind of right…Implement all of this and no one will care about climate change – natural or not. They will be too busy fighting wars, killing each other, imprisoning and torturing the non-compliant, and starving to death.
Except for the elite socialist government officials (i.e. liberals) who will be living like kings and queens.
“For over half a century, worldwide growth in affluence has continuously increased resource use and pollutant emissions far more rapidly than these have been reduced through better technology.”
The half century ‘problem’ of increasing ‘affluence’ which is just a pretentious word, for more real money per person to spend, in the developing countries, …. Is over.
Unemployed people are not affluent. Shrinking GDP means cities and states and other countries all must spend less, as every level of government prior to the covid event were spending more than revenue.
The Left’s solution for every problem is to spend more money. That option is gone.
Where to cut? Drone, zombie ‘academics’?
So the new problem is how to get the GDP to grow again and put people back to work.
There is one simple rule about the sustainability movement, it rather simple really “there is nothing sustainable in the sustainability movement”. It is to bad the simpletons that buy into this falsehood don’t wise up and learn they are being played by modern snake oil salesmen.