The World Economic Forum thinks there is a correlation between democratic freedom and commitment to renewable energy. But their green metric gives coal burning China a pass, and their freedom metric puts the USA behind Australia, Europe and Argentina.
The colour of democracy is green: Why a clean energy transition is also vital to safeguarding liberty
Jul 11, 2022
Edward B Barbier
University Distinguished Professor, Department of Economics, Colorado State UniversityClimate change and the decline of democracy are two global crises that have come to a head in recent years.
Transitioning to green energy is key to both tackling climate change and creating sustainable economies.
Collective action on a green transition is thereby not only good for the climate but also vital for protecting democracy.
Two global crises have come to a head – climate change and the decline of democracy.
If global warming is to be kept below 1.5 oC, the world must act now to reduce carbon emissions. Achieving this objective requires substantially lowering fossil fuel use through a clean energy transition.
For the past 15 years, democracy has been in decline worldwide. To protect and promote freedom, leading democracies must strengthen their economies and safeguard liberty.
These two aims are not mutually exclusive but complementary. Reducing reliance on fossil fuels and transitioning to low-carbon alternatives also make democratic economies more sustainable. Major democracies should work together to achieve these two goals.
…
The leading democracies of the G20 should collectively commit to phasing out cost and tax breaks for the production and consumption of fossil fuels. They should also phase in more efficient pricing of fossil fuels through taxes or tradable permits to cover the costs of local air pollution, global warming, and other economic damages.
…
Read more: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/colour-of-democracy-clean-energy-transition/
WEF founder Klaus Schwab was born in NAZI Germany in 1938.
I’m not sure how imposing a new regime of trading permits and forcibly phasing out cheap energy equates to democracy.
I also question giving a high green score to China, which burns more coal than anyone, or a high freedom score to Canada, where police horsemen were filmed trampling unarmed protestors last February, and Australia, where rubber bullets were fired at unarmed protestors in 2021.
The lower freedom score for the USA is suspect in my opinion. In the USA people are protected by a strict bill of rights, including the right to free speech, and the right to bear arms for self defence. Not so much in countries like Canada and Australia. People in the USA also get to vote for town sheriffs, attorney generals and other important executive positions which are appointed jobs in most other countries.
Australia and Canada scoring top marks for freedom is questionable. Australia is not as repressive as countries like China, but Australia has no bill of rights, so the treatment of citizens is at the whim of politicians – as we discovered during the 2021 protests. Canada has a bill of rights, but going by recent treatment of protestors in Canada I’m guessing the Canadian bill of rights is more of a guideline than an inalienable guarantee.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
E. Barbier is likely a person who presumes in advance what he intends to find, and then carefully paws through his data to prove it. Any number of academics are like him. Why are people fooled by them? How do they get hired? How do they win awards? Why does no one call out their circular reasoning?
I don’t disagree with him that democracy seems to be on the decline. But it is just possible that when we speak of democracy we, E. Barbier and I, are speaking of very different things. I rather like a republic in which we get to vote directly on a number of proposals, but in which the levers of power are isolated from rash, venal, and demented people. I like that the levers are very difficult to operate. Making momentus and far reaching decisions should be very difficult. Schumpeter at one time said that most of the world’s problems stem from men of ability who lack the will to wait.
And the concept of accountability should be, in my humble opinion, that people with the greatest power should be held to the very, very highest standards. Sell influence in public office, directly or through a family member — go to prison forever. My views of course are upside down from those of Schwab. Perhaps too from those of Barbier.
E. Barbier’s idea of democracy could be that people he agrees with get to make sweeping decisions with a “pen and phone” and can’t be held to account. This, I suspect, is the root cause of democracy’s decline.
Canada is firmly in the clutches of the Schwabists cult. The consequences are the curtailment of fundamental human rights, the Government using the court system to promote political persecution, the collapse of state medicine to the point of dangerous disfunctionality, huge wait times for of all government services (months to deal with passports, tax returns, etc., delays at border crossings, failing infrastructure at each administrative level, soaring costs, etc. In the above the countries seem to have been ranked in freedom by the degree to which their leaders were in the thrall of the Schwabists. Canada is wholly in their thrall and like every socialist experiment and kleptocracy before, the destruction is terrifying.
According to the chart, the UK, Canada, and Australia are have more freedom than the US, even though they have strict gun control and the UK doesn’t even have any freedom of speech that an American would recognize as “freedom of speech”
To a socialist, freedom means not having to pay for stuff yourself. You can live in a total police state, but as long as medical care is free, then so are you.
‘Freedom score’ and ‘green score’?! We’ve seen some absurd stuff come out on climate change over the past 20 or so years, but this has to be one of the most absurd of all.
Academics can’t surely be taking this stuff seriously.
The WEF is Marxism on steroids. Klaus Schwab is a huckster who has convinced elites that they will have a bigger place in history and at the table of the One World Government if they follow him. ESG is the tool he uses to measure compliance with his dictates …. literally, scaled from 1 to a 100. These are people that money means nothing to because they can buy/have anything they want except lasting homage as the saviors of the world and Schwab promises it to them. Until they are no longer needed and then they will be cast aside. One World Government means equal poverty for all.
No. USA isnot “green”
Burning question; Does anyone have actual access to publish the algorithms for calculating the “Green” and “Freedom” scores?
I can’t seem to find it! I live in the inner-south-west of Sydney, 4 miles from Center-Point tower, and my fingers are cold, I’m sitting in an un-heated (except by LED lights and a PC) double-brick free-standing house, in the middle of the night in a typical Australian winter. The main room is 13C, (55.4F).
Knowing that mysterious WEF algorithm would certainly warm me up!
Climate POLICIES are the crisis, not climate “change.” And any “decline of democracy” is directly due to the imposition of tyranny in the name of “saving us” from the purely imaginary “climate crisis.”
There IS NO “green” energy. If the idiot is talking about “wind and solar,” those are 100% dependent on fossil fuels for their existence. You know, like everything else. There is nothing “sustainable” about “transitioning” to a less effective, less efficient way to produce electricity from fossil fuels – and the “green energy” being promoted will do far more environmental damage than all the fossil fuel use by humanity has EVER done.
There is no “green energy,” and therefore nothing to “transition” TO. This idiot believes his own hype, apparently. And the top-down government DICTATION of this “transition” to NO energy is the antithesis of “democracy.” Also note the use of “collective,” along the lines of “if you like your democracy, you can keep your democracy.” (Now where have I heard something like that before?!)
Repetition much? But then that’s how you keep the “message” in the mind of the “sheep” you’re trying to herd, I suppose. Again, the first is no “crisis” and the second, to the extent it is, is directly caused by the efforts to “fix” the nonexistent “climate crisis.”
First, an increase in temperature of a lousy 1.5 degrees from the Little Ice Age, the coldest period during modern human civilization and a period of misery, suffering, disease and starvation is cause for celebration, not “bad news.” Second, the notion that we can not only control(!) the climate, but specifically limit the amount by which it will change, and all through adjustments to our minuscule emissions of CO2, which has never been empirically shown to have ANY influence on the Earth’s temperature/climate in ANY amount, is laughable – AND delusional.
And how does this buffoon think that “economies” will be “strengthened” by depriving them of ENERGY?! And how does this buffoon think that “liberty” will be “safeguarded” by depriving people of their basic needs?!
There is nothing “sustainable” about “low carbon” anything. And again, democracies must “work together” to achieve this “goal” – apparently through “global governance” (that whole “working together” thing) to, you know, “save” democracy. Reminds me of Rudolph’s Hermie – “Let’s be independent together!” You can’t make this up!
Never have I seen such an unmitigated spew of such absolute twaddle. There is clearly a disconnect from reality at our institutions of “education” that needs fixing!
Liberals in the US have a new definition for the word “democratic”. To them it is a measure of how hard you push for the goals of the Democratic Party. They love to try to change the definition of words.
Democracy is when they win.
Fair is when they get what they want.
From a dark funded, unelected and unaccountable organization like the WEF, that has arrogated to itself powers that nobody has given to, and whose slimy repugnant leader boasts of having under his control more than half of the Western rulers, the word “democracy” can only be assumed to refer to “adjectival democracies”, either in its “totalitarian” or in its “popular” version, hence the praise to “green” chinese “popular democracy” a.k.a. commie dictatorship, or to totalitarian democracies like Australia or Canada, the later with the little bastard of Castro at the head, in which the freedom of their citizens is conspicuous by its absence, displayed by the minion author of the article as “beacons of democracy”.
We only have to remember how the Australian government violated with impunity the constitutional rights without any judicial intervention, locking its citizens in concentration camps during the pandemic created by globalism, or how the government of the
caribbean blooded autocrat, seized the funds of citizens who protested against his mad & hysterical policies, again without any judicial control and showing afterwards that curtailing the freedoms of citizens pose no problem for this totalitarian “democrats”. The impunity of the new autocrats prove how degenerate these totalitarian democracies have gone.
Demos-cracy is ideally white, democracy/dictatorship is a dual construct, perhaps green, often blue or red, but because of past, present, and progressive diversity [dogma] it is often a rainbow of rarefied color judgments and class-based bigotry.
???
Again, while brevity can be useful, its overuse combined with riddles is not. At least you didn’t try to work “hand made” into this one.
I think the ‘hand made tale’ is implied by now!
I always enjoy n.n’s comments – they’re like a pebble dropped into a pond; the pebble might not be anything special but the ripples radiating outward can be magnificent!
The perception of freedom is often very subjective. You make very good points, thanks.
Whoops — Sheriffs are law enforcement for Counties, not towns/cities.
Sheriffs are elected. City ‘Chiefs of Police’ are appointed, generally by the City Council, or in some places by just the Mayor.
What utter bollocks.
Countries with vaccine (actual or defacto) mandates, lockdowns etc move to the left please.
Oooh what is that emerging; High green index linked to other inhumane freedom suffocating tendencies? Who’d-a-thunk-it