Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Steve Keen, a Fellow at University College London, believes fellow economists are biased towards believing “capitalism can handle anything”, and that a “war footing” is required to correct the “total misrepresentations” of economists.
‘War’ footing needed to correct economists’ miscalculations on climate change, says professor
PUBLISHED SUN, MAY 23 20219:55 PM EDT
Karen Gilchrist…
Mainstream economists “deliberately and completely” ignored scientific data and instead “made up their own numbers” to suit their market models, Steve Keen, a fellow at University College London’s Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security, told CNBC on Friday.
Now, a “war-level footing” is required to have any hope of repairing the damage, he said.
“Fundamentally, the economists have totally misrepresented the science and ignored it where it contradicts their bias that climate change is not a big deal because, in their opinion, capitalism can handle anything,” Keen told “Street Signs Asia.”
Keen said the repercussions of climate change were foretold in the 1972 publication “The Limits to Growth” — a divisive report on the destructive consequences of global expansion — but economists then and since failed to heed its warnings, preferring instead to rely on market mechanisms.
“If their warnings had been taken seriously and we’d done as they’d suggested, changing our trajectory from 1975 on, we could have done it gradually using things like carbon tax and so on,” he said. “Because economists have delayed it by another half century, we are, as a species, putting three to four times the pressure on the biosphere.”
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Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/24/war-footing-needed-to-correct-economists-climate-change-failings.html
Part of the problem of course is academics like Steve Keen are way too timid when describing their position. “The Limits to Growth” strongly suggested population growth and economic growth are linked. I’m sure we would all have loved to hear more about Professor Steve Keen’s plans for limiting global population. Sadly Steve doesn’t appear to have explained any of this to CNBC, or perhaps CNBC decided not to publish that part of the interview.
Of course, “The Limits to Growth” is not without critics. Peter Passell, Marc Roberts and Leonard Ross’ 1972 response probably single handedly popularised the phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out“.
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The book is “The Limits to Growth,” and its message is simple: Either civilization or growth must end, and soon. Continued population and industrial growth will exhaust the world’s minerals and bathe the biosphere in fatal levels of pollution. As the authors summarize, “if the present growth trends.. continue unchanged, the limits of growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years.”
“The Limits to Growth” is a product of an interdisciplinary M.I.T. team led by Dennis Meadows. It is financed and publicized as part of the “Project on the Predicament of Mankind,” an activity of the Club of Rome. The Club of Rome is a four‐year‐old international organization of 75 technocrats and businessmen selfdescribed as an “invisible college” dedicated to probing “the complex of problems troubling men of all nations,” including poverty, degradation of the environment, alienation of youth, rejection of traditional values, and monetary disruptions. These “seemingly divergent” problems are, says the Club, in reality part of a single “world problematique,” which can now be analyzed with the help of computers. Using techniques developed by M.I.T. systems‐engineer Jay Forrester, the Meadows team claims to have limned the underlying fallacy of industrial expansion.
“The Limits to Growth,” in our view, is an empty and misleading work. Its imposing apparatus of computer technology and systems jargon conceals a kind of intellectual Rube Goldberg device—one which takes arbitrary assumptions, shakes them up and comes out with arbitrary conclusions that have the ring of science. “Limits” pretends to a degree of certainty so exaggerated as to obscure the few modest (and unoriginal) insights that it genuinely contains. Less than pseudoscience and little more than polemical fiction, “The Limits to Growth” is best summarized not as a rediscovery of the laws of nature but as a rediscovery of the oldest maxim of computer science: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/02/archives/the-limits-to-growth-a-report-for-the-club-of-romes-project-on-the.html
“The Limits to Growth” advocate Steve Keen seems like a fascinating character. According to Wikipedia he applied for voluntary redundancy in 2013, after The University of West Sydney shut down their economics programme. Since then he appears to have found his spiritual home with far left post Keynesians in London, where he is now Head of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University. No doubt Steve wields significant influence over the course material studied by students entrusted to his care.
Steve Keen appears to have quite a following on Patreon, a platform for giving money to people. He wrote a very long essay about how wonderful it is people give him money, thanking people who support his efforts to overturn blind faith in Capitalism.
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IYI’s – our universities are full of them.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/24/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/#comment-3253757”
SITUATION ASSESSMENT
[excerpt}
It’s ALL a leftist scam – false enviro-hysteria including the Climate and Green-Energy frauds, the full lockdown for Covid-19, the illogical linking of these frauds (“to solve Covid we have to solve Climate Change”), paid-and-planned terrorism by Antifa and BLM, and the mail-in ballot USA election scam – it’s all false and fraudulent.
…
The purported “science” of global warming catastrophism has been disproved numerous ways over the decades. Every one of the warmists’ very-scary predictions, some 80 or so since 1970, have failed to happen. The most objective measure of scientific competence is the ability to correctly predict – and the climate fraudsters have been 100% wrong to date.
There is a powerful logic that says that no rational person can be this wrong, this deliberately obtuse, for this long – that they must have a covert agenda. I made this point circa 2009, and that agenda is now fully exposed – it is the Marxist totalitarian “Great Reset” – “You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy!”
The wolves, proponents of both the very-scary Global Warming / Climate Change scam and the Covid-19 Lockdown scam, know they are lying. Note also how many global “leaders” quickly linked the two scams, stating ”to solve Covid we have to solve Climate Change”- utter nonsense, not even plausible enough to be specious.
Regarding the sheep, especially those who inhabit our universities and governments:
The sheep are well-described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the landmark text “The Black Swan”, as “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot” or IYI – IYI’s hold the warmist views as absolute truths, without ever having spent sufficient effort to investigate them. The false warmist narrative fitted their negative worldview, and they never seriously questioned it by examining the contrary evidence.
CLOSURE
The policy incompetence of Western governments over past decades is appalling. By attempting to appease extreme leftists who seek to destroy our economies and our freedoms, governments have adopted a failed strategy that makes us weaker, poorer and at much greater risk.
Steve Keen is a native of the world’s loony bin; Australia.
Needless to say he’s rabidly anti-capitalist. Apparently, Keen’s work focused on refuting the neoclassical theory of the firm, which argues that firms will set marginal revenue equal to marginal cost. Keen noted that empirical research finds real firms set price well above marginal cost: they charge a markup, often cost-plus pricing.
A markup! Gosh what a bright spark.
He figured this out all by himself?
From the above article: “Part of the problem of course is academics like Steve Keen are way too timid when describing their position.”
The rest of the “problem”—the overwhelming majority of it, in fact—is that academics like Steve Keen cannot even define what “climate change” really is.
To wit, is “climate change”:
— the world getting hotter in summers, or colder in winters?
— the world suffering from flooding, or from droughts?
— the world suffering from too much CO2, or too little CO2 for optimum crop growth to feed humanity?
— the world suffering from too much cloud cover, or too little cloud cover?
— the world suffering from too much or too little atmospheric water vapor (the predominant greenhouse gas)?
— the world suffering from its oceans shifting very slightly in average pH (range of 8.2-8.1)?
— the world suffering from too many insects (pests), or too few insects (species extinction)?
— the world suffering from too many El Ninos, or too many La Ninas?
— the world suffering from too much wind (claimed increase in storms of all types) or too little wind (for windmill power farms to be reliable)?
— the world suffering from currently being in an interglacial period, as opposed to being in a glacial period?
— all of the above, or none of the above but something else?
Furthermore, what is the ideal global climate that all humans need, so as to fight against having any future changes in that climate? And who, or what organization, is to make that determination for all of humanity?
Until one can answer the above questions, it’s all just a big waste of time and money “fighting climate change”, even allowing for human hubris that thinks that is remotely possible.
I have yet to find an alarmist that can even articulate and defend what the optimum global average temperature should be.
And then articulate how this number represents climate.
I often ask that question of warmunists.
IF they formulate an answer, it is pre-industrial temperatures. I will then point out that they are referring to the end of the Little Ice Age and should the earth cool that much, they are likely to realize that current times is a lot closer to the earth’s sweet spot for temperatures. And don’t confuse them by citing the increase in arable land in what was previously permafrost and desert. They simply will not understand how the world’s deserts are shrinking. It’s against their religion.
‘Mainstream economists “deliberately and completely” ignored scientific data and instead “made up their own numbers” to suit their market models,’
The scientific data is also made up to suit bogus climate models and as far as I’m concerned, SINO’s (scientists in name only) fabricating pseudo science that will enable the destruction of Western economies for no legitimate reason is far worse then economists ignoring the same BS.
Solving a problem that does not exist is always difficult because the solvers cannot know what they are dealing with except what they want it to be.
“[A] ‘war-level footing'” … when there is no war is insanity!
Shower clouds by howitzers launching 25″ shells … only to fall on cities?
Blitzkrieg the Sun by missiles loaded with SARS-CoV-2?
Drive “nails” into the tectonic plates to stop them?
Bloody insanity.
To borrow from our opponents’ playbook — Steve Keen is not a scientist. Why listen to him? His opinion means nothing.
Snark aside, Steve Keen is a great example of the authoritarianism that pervades the left. If people can’t be convinced to do the ‘right thing” voluntarily, then force them to.
Translation: I need a new Mercedes, therefor I need to think up a way to get more grants.
Once again, the climate alarmists are justifying their desire to go towards full blown communism.
And WTF “damage” is supposed to have occurred, exactly?! There IS no “damage” caused by higher CO2 levels – higher CO2 levels are entirely beneficial.
By extension you must know that the researchers at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized in Nov. 2019 because of……… imported climate change.
World population estimates in millions:
1972 3,852
1980 4,458 +11.6%
1990 5,327 +19.5%
2000 6,063 +13.8%
2010 6,843 +12.9%
2020 7,764 +13.5%
After the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” in 1972, world population growth was strongest in the decade between 1980 and 1990, then has slowed to an average of about 13.4% per decade over the past 30 years, which would result in a doubling in 55 years.
Despite the world population having doubled over the past 48 years, there is less hunger and malnutrition now than there was in 1972. This is primarily due to improvements in agriculture, much of which can be traced to the use of fossil fuels in farming equipment and in fertilizers. There may have been a significant contribution by the increase in CO2 concentrations in the air, which speeds up plant growth, but no adherent of the Club of Rome would ever admit it!
As for worries about “bathing in pollution”, much of the air and water over developed countries (including the USA) is actually cleaner now than it was in 1972, mostly because of environmental laws that incentivized businesses to capture as much pollution as economically feasible at the source.
Birth rates have declined in most countries since 1972, but the population continues to increase because people are living longer on average than they did then, with fewer deaths than births. But old people will eventually die, and if birth rates are below “replacement level” (slightly over 2 births per woman) the population will eventually stabilize, or perhaps even decline. People who already have more children than they can afford to support to adulthood will naturally tend to avoid having more children.
The major problem with efforts of “Club of Rome” elites who want to limit population growth is that THEY want to decide who lives and who dies, and how many children each couple is “allowed” to have. Their agenda is not truly to “save the planet” from damage to the biosphere, but to be those who enjoy the benefits and dominate everyone else.
Eye candy for the climate crusaders
Steve Keen needs a swift hind end footing.
And a little educating about the benefits of Free Enterprise.
The “Moral Equivalent of War” returns every so often.
John Dewey wanted to conscript young men in peacetime to do special industrial work for the state. In 1979 Jimmy Carter wanted to wage the moral equivalent of war on the “energy problem”.
“Carter then launched into his energy policy plans, which included the implementation of mandatory conservation efforts for individuals and businesses and deep cuts in the nation’s dependence on foreign oil through import quotas. He also pledged a “massive commitment of funds and resources” to develop alternative fuel sources including coal, plant products and solar power. He outlined the creation of a “solar bank” that he said would eventually supply 20 percent of the nation’s energy. To jumpstart this program, Carter asked Congress to form an “energy mobilization board” modeled after the War Production Board of World War II, and asked the legislature to enact a “windfall profits tax” immediately to fight inflation and unemployment.”
Read the rest at
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jimmy-carter-speaks-about-a-national-crisis-in-confidence
Sound a little familiar? And all before CO2 became the progressives’ obsession.
We will hear the stories of the heroic self sacrifice needed to save the world from carbon dioxide and white supremacy (how they’re connected should be fun to hear). Soon we’re going to see conscripted youth bang the drums for Climate Change, Racial Equality and Social Justice. Big business will cheer the new waves of money flowing over them while their smaller competitors are crushed by regulations and taxes. A Brave New World all wrapped up in one totalitarian package.
No totalitarian movement can survive without censorship and forced labor. They go hand in hand. We’re close to censorship now, can conscript labor be far behind?
When you hear calls for war, it’s not the callers who intend to work and die in the trenches.
Correction it was William James not John Dewey who wrote about “The Moral Equivalent of War”. I always get those two confused.
The only solution to excess CO2 in the atmosphere is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and we have the technology to do it with no problems!!! Also we should switch to Thorium Nuclear Powered Electric Generating Stations…..Problems solved……
“Mainstream economists “deliberately and completely” ignored scientific data and instead “made up their own numbers” to suit their market models”
Ironically impaired, this one.