From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
JANUARY 16, 2023
By Paul Homewood
The downfall of capitalism will not come from the uprising of an impoverished working class but from the sabotage of a bored upper class. This was the view of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter believed that at some point in the future, an educated elite would have nothing left to struggle for and will instead start to struggle against the very system that they themselves live in.
Nothing makes me think Schumpeter was right like the contemporary climate movement and its acolytes. The Green movement is not a reflection of planetary crisis as so many in media and culture like to depict it, but rather, a crisis of meaning for the affluent.
Take for example a recent interview with Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Ehrlich is most famous for his career as a professional doom monger. His first major book, The Population Bomb, gave us timelessly wrong predictions, including that by the 1980s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death and it went downhill from there. Ehrlich assured us that England would no longer exist in the year 2000, that even modern fertilizers would not enable us to feed the world, and that thermonuclear power was just around the corner.
“At the “Climate Action Summit” in 2018, two dozen billionaire-backed foundations pledged 4 billion dollars for climate-change lobbying. Some of them, like the Hewlett Foundation, are directly funding journalists at the Associated Press for “climate reporting,” while foundations associated with the Packard and Rockefeller families have been backing the journalistic endeavor “Covering Climate Now,” which “collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories” and is financing hundreds of media outlets.”
Ehrlich, who recently turned 90, is in the lucky position to have witnessed the complete failure of all his predictions—only to double down on them in his 60 Minutes interview Ehrlich has been wrong on every public policy issue he pontificated on for almost 60 years, yet the mainstream media still treat him like a modern oracle.
The best answer to this question comes courtesy of New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in 2019 famously said that, “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right.” In other words, no matter what nonsense one spews, as long as it is “morally right,” it does not matter what the facts show.
Full story here.
I posted this before and I promise I won’t go Griff, ie posting the same Guardian article over and over. I really feel, as a response to the “climate” propaganda, this should be the direction forward. Your thoughts?
As someone with an engineering and computer background, I enjoy reading the discussions concerning the fallacies of the “climate” debate. Unfortunately the general public will never take the time to read them. If an article is longer that two paragraphs, doesn’t contain a picture of a celebrity or a sports figure and also contains a simple mathematical equation it won’t be read. The NYPost is the template for this type of reader engagement.
My personal opinion is; to turn the tide we should begin to use a KISS (keep it simple stupid) paradigm. The reason the “ban the gas stove” initiative failed so spectacularly was that every middle/upper class person saw the restaurant grade gas stove as an aspirational or status item.
If 30 second tik-tok/youtube/twitter videos could begin to be posted which illustrate the REAL WORLD, results of the “just end oil”and “Nut50” obsession, this would quickly result in the loss of popular support among the influencer/aspirational class for this supposed “green new world.” It would fall out of fashion and fade into obscurity in a couple of years. A few examples;
No petroleum products = No make-up, lipstick or contact lenses.
No Plastics = No Botox injections or cosmetic surgery.
No synthetic fabrics = No Paris or New York fashions.
Off shore wind turbines = Dead whales and no lobster.
Enormous solar farms = Dead cute bunnies, prairie dogs and song birds.
New England wind turbines = No artisanal cheese and boutique antique stores…because you killed the picturesque little towns and farms.
George Orwell has already identified the target audience, we should go after it.
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”
The Climate Howlers are against burning petroleum products but have not directly said they are against manufacturing perhaps 6,000 products with petroleum. They are not that stupid.
But the existing oil refineries do not have the flexibility o change the product mix by mor than perhaps 5 percentage points. So they must produce mainly gasoline to stay in business. The Climate Howlers don’t realize that, because they don’t realize much. Not a group of brainiacs.
The biggest problem for leftists could be the end of production of lipstick and makeup. You might think men wouldn’t care about that. But not in the Biden Maladministration Cabinet of Incompetents. Some of the men there wear lipstick and makeup — they would be very upset without those products,
A ban on drilling would stop manufacturing petroleum products, wouldn’t it?
https://electrek.co/2022/12/02/los-angeles-bans-new-oil-wells-will-shut-old-ones-down-by-2042/
Just Stop Oil wants a ban on new projects:
It describes itself as “a coalition of groups working together to ensure the government commits to halting new fossil fuel licensing and production.”
Maybe I’m not aware of something, but I don’t see how stopping oil production results in anything other than stopping manufacturing of petroleum products.
They may not call for it directly, but they call for it. Almost certainly due to ignorance, as you note in your second paragraph (at least the foot-soldiers. Pretty sure the PTB behind it know what they’re doing.)
BUT, plastic is poisoning the planet. What are we to do?
From what I’ve seen, life has colonized the plastic floating in the sea, making a floating coral island reef.
If people are upset about trash, then PICK IT UP and do a better job of keeping it out of the biosphere – not cancel one of the most useful material humanity has ever created.
no, no. Haven’t you been listening, we need to end plastic. Flint was good enough for our ancestors.
My personal opinion is; to turn the tide we should begin to use a KISS (keep it simple stupid) paradigm.
__________________________________
1. More rain is not a problem.
2. Warmer weather is not a problem.
3. More arable land is not a problem.
4. Longer growing seasons is not a problem.
5. CO2 greening of the earth is not a problem.
6. There isn’t any Climate Crisis.
That little list could be expanded to show that most indicators of “Climate Change” i.e., storms, sea level rise, polar bears, coral reefs, etc. are about the same as they were decades or centuries ago.
There is no climate crisis.
Unsettled: Climate and Science | Dr. Steven Koonin | EP 323
https://youtu.be/reaABJ5HpLk
Jordan B Peterson Podcast
A link to 163 three pod casts with Jordan Peterson airing his tonsils for well over an hour isn’t in step with the spirit of “Keep It Simple Stupid” As over the counter sleep aids go, Peterson beats ZzzQuil® by a country mile.
Too much rain can definitely be a problem.
The rest I agree with.
I foresee a lot of banned videos coming out of that approach.
I have been banging on about this for years. There are numerous ways of looking at it but my perception is, every person on earth has a single vote no matter what their educational standard (assuming Democratic societies).
Probably less that 10% of the planets population has a higher science/engineering degree.
Include anything but the most simple scientific /engineering in arguments about the climate and people just don’t get it, and I include all but the simplest of graphs in that philosophy.
Everyone understands propaganda as its designed to appeal to everyone. It largely uses the repetition of fear.
If 90% of the world turns to propaganda because they can’t understand science/engineering then no amount of science/engineering will ever capture their vote.
Climate science is persuading ‘climate scientists’, 10% of the voter base.
Politicians understand this equation very well. If a critical mass of humanity is to be reached in order to make our argument an electable platform we must adopt our own ‘propaganda’.
US has around 4.2 million engineers, which might be 1% of the population. Those with science degrees maybe 4%.
For the planet you would have a fraction of 1%
Actually no, we need no propaganda. We need only reveal to them the cliff they’re running towards, and keep pointing it out until they realize it’s not in their interest to keep running towards it.
perhaps an appeal to common sense might be also another possibility – the amount of CO2 from man’s industrial and transportation activities is something like 1 one hundredth of 1 % – and as Professor Lindzen (MIT) says – it takes “magical thinking” to believe that such a tiny, miniscule amount of CO2 somehow magically controls the earth’s temperature and its climate
no no, protesters have it right. CO2 is now the dominate, most pletiful part of the atmosphere. Many of them have said so.
Or as someone famously said “It’s not a Pandemic, it’s an IQ Test!”
Well when you have finally established yourself as part of the New Elite the last thing you want is smelly little people having the same comfortable lifestyle as you.
That’s why designer clothes suddenly increased fivefold in the mid-90s. Too many regular people were able to buy designer items so how would the elite set themselves apart?
make the garments thinner and thinner?
It may be boredom, but a lack of meaning or purpose in one’s life after gaining great public successes financially or politically is a big part of it I think. People that are used to being in control or in the public eye may often lack a certain measure of humility too.
As I’m learning, the earth’s atmosphere is marvelously complicated and is interconnected with other aspects of (and acting upon) our planet. A good place to start is to look towards our Creator and see how wonderfully good and even resilient our planet actually is.
Stuart: very well said.
The reason slebs™ are committed virtue signallers, is that by and large their adulating fans are left wingers who are always looking for GloriousLeaders™, Saints, and other phantasmagorical figures to genuflect to and look up with fawning admiration. So they play along by seizing on IssuesOfMoralSignificamce.
I knew a RichBitch once – from a very old US family of pirates brigands and profiteering industrialists – who affected great concern over the Environment. She had even been on a cruise to the Arctic and SeenIceMelting!
Not the brightest bulb in the box, and guilty because she loved being able to buy the world with an Amercian Express card, but was just smart enough to understand that some people resented the fact that she had done nothing in her life to deserve any of the wealth she owned.
Melanie summed it up
I think she is completely right., there ARE a lot of people more concerned about being morally right, than being precisely, factually and semantically correct.
I call them ArtStudents™.
They have taken over the West, massively funded by an alliance between the KGB and big business. Who have sold them Russian gas, and ‘renewable energy’, respectively.
And are now raking in billions.
She is right because you reversed her argument?
What was that quote where someone said that it doesn’t matter if CAGW is true or not, we have to support it because we’d be doing the right thing? (Or words to that effect)
“morally right” Whose morals?
“Morals” based on what? Situational Ethics? If I remember correctly, her campaign paid her boyfriend a million bucks to do … something. Yet she still hasn’t paid off her college loans.
There is nothing “morally right” about policies that needlessly increase the costs of essential energy consumption that disproportionately burden the less well-off.
The surprise is an article critical of the climate religion appeared in Newsweek, which I have not read since the 1970s.
But the professor makes no sense. Leftists are not bored. That s data free opinion.
Leftism is based on the belief that the world would be a better place if run by leftist “experts” who know better, on all subjects, than the riff raff (that would be us).
That belief in “experts” has been true for over a century. Rule by “experts” requires a lot of political power. Leftists get that political power by abusing a real crisis (Covid epidemic) or creating a fake crisis (climate change) to scare people. People with fear demand that their government “do something”. And with a leftist government, “do something” always leads to more government spending and mandates = more government power. Which has been the goal of leftists for over a century.
The author has expressed an opinion without seeking any data. That’s the easy way to write an article. The author did not bother to survey Climate Howlers and ask them why they believe in the climate religion. I have asked friends in Michigan about this for the past 25 years — all of them leftists of course. Conservative friends are not believers.
Here in Michigan the winters are much milder than in the 1970s. We have greatly benefitted from global warming. Everyone here with a brain realizes that. Last winter we had the least snow since I moved here in 1977. This winter so far has had even less snow — it rained last night.
The friends I have questioned are not bored people. They are busy people, with most still earning a living even after age 65. I retired at age 51, by far the earliest retirement in my crowd,
They all have a common characteristic: The Appeal to Authority logical fallacy. They all believer what leftist politicians and governments tell them about the future climate. And about Covid vaccines being safe and effective (they are the opposite). And everything bad claimed about Donald Trump. People smarter than richer than me, including millionaires and MIT computer engineering graduates — all repeating whatever the government tells them like trained parrots.
When I tell them their Michigan homes were under an ice glacier 20,000 years ago, which had melted by 10,000 years ago, NOT FROM CO2. they look at me like a deer in the headlights. And then change the subject. Cognitive dissonance — they can’t have that. When I tell them the current CO2 level is unusually low based on the CO2 range during the history of our planet, and that C3 plants prefer at least twice as much CO2 in the air, they don’t believe me. When I tell them greenhouses CO2 enrich to at least 1,000ppm CO2, they never heard of that.
In summary these generally bright people, almost all wealthier than me, living in bigger homes than me, and busier than retired lazy bum me, know nothing about climate science. All they “know” is climate scaremongering — predictions of climate doom, which are data-free, junk science. And it appears they will never find 10 minutes to learn any real climate science. They have all been brainwashed by climate scaremongers in the government and media.
Here in Michigan the winters are much milder than in the 1970s…. Last winter we had the least snow since I moved here in 1977. This winter so far has had even less snow — it rained last night.
________________
And on the other side of the lake from you, (Milwaukee) it’s the same story and the same rain clouds.
Read (or watch) “Animal Farm”.
More tea vicar? I’ll put the kettle on….
Bored and uneducated. They’re expressing opinions and directing dollars to projects and policies about which they know nothing beyond the headlines in the similarly know-nothing popular press.
Social inbreeding.
They’ve taken the seeds of truth and planted fields of lies and hate.
We don’t live in a capitalist economic system. It is a centrally controlled socialistic style controlled from the top down economy with an enormous amount of rules and regulations. You can’t have a capitalist system in a Big Brother power structure like we have today where they can lock you up in your own house.
According to most of the leftists I have dealt with, anything short of pure communism is some form of capitalism.
From the article: “At the “Climate Action Summit” in 2018, two dozen billionaire-backed foundations pledged 4 billion dollars for climate-change lobbying. Some of them, like the Hewlett Foundation, are directly funding journalists at the Associated Press for “climate reporting,” while foundations associated with the Packard and Rockefeller families have been backing the journalistic endeavor “Covering Climate Now,” which “collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories” and is financing hundreds of media outlets.””
I think this is the main problem. The Climate Change Alarmist Network has way too much money and they are using that money to propagadize the public into believing something that has never been proven, i.e., that CO2 is dangerous and needs to be regulated and reduced.
Are there any skeptic billionaires out there? How about a little help debunking the climate alarmists? The climate alarmists have the field practically to themselves.
Yes, I used the word “field” and if you don’t like it you can go to hell. Wacko leftists are not going to define my vocabulary, thank you very much.
I’m bored and you can be too deplorables-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/companies/britishvolt-expected-to-fall-into-administration/ar-AA16qFmN
Here’s a solution.
https://news.yahoo.com/wyoming-lawmakers-propose-ban-electric-201815048.html
The media is going to paint the sponsors of this bill as ignorant flat-earther yahoos. It is more symbolic than anything else. Electric vehicles have the disadvantage in Wyoming that they will barely work, or work not at all about six months of each year. Let’s see electric over-the-road trucks tackle the Snow Chi Mihn trail. Sales of them will be self limiting. I did like their phrasing in the bill about the “misadventure of electric vehicles” though.
In a slightly altered view you could also call it the fall of an empire or dynasty, from the top down.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Shelley
And headquartered in California….
San Francisco reparations committee proposes $5 million to each Black person – Washington Times
They are also proposing income subsidies for low income minorities for the next 250 years.
It is time for all non-minorities to flee that city, while they are still allowed to.
Meanwhile, back real life, they have shlt on the streets.
Climate apocalypse is a matter of conversation in some circles because it indicates serious thinking. The plebs chatter about sports figures, irrelevant royalty and entertainment stars. Serious people are worried about the extinction of polar bears, the size of the ozone hole and Pacific islands disappearing beneath the waves. In fact, conversation isn’t the issue, it’s the actual thinking process. The serious deign to consider that science has been captured by interest groups and rent seekers
“Capitalism” is not a “system” that can fail. It is the understanding of how individuals and entities trade goods and services for their mutual benefit. Even if our current system fails, capitalism will go on as it always has. How much suffering there may be due to denial of this is the variable.
It’s not that the capitalist system failed, it’s that the system stopped being capitalist.
…or more capitalist. There is now an entire industry of cronyism built up around the phony crisis. Many are now capitalizing on that quite well.
That’s not capitalism, it’s trough feeding.
Capital is required to get anything done. If the government doesn’t own everything, than the capital has to come from people who have some excess beyond their immediate needs, whether that be a small cabal or a significant fraction of the general population.
Call it what you will, everything not total government is capitalism. Our current society, however much it is being torn down, has the greatest percentage of the people able to participate of any society that has ever existed.
The propaganda, one should notice, never defines what it claims to despise.
If they gave me a million, I would immediately buy 10-20 acres of good land far from large cities and where it is very dark at night then build a home with a greenhouse front and root cellar in the back end underground.
Then I would build a very large garden area with a big greenhouse and also for Stargazing build a nice observatory with roll off roof and install a 36″ F6 RC Telescope in it.
No way will I be bored when I am busy gardening, stargazing and more.
These Billionaires are pathetic since they waste their time still trying increase their wealth when they should retire to be enjoying life instead and drop the ego stupidity at the nearest garbage can.
On 1 million $? What yesterday are you stuck in?
Well yes, there is that little problem…
No matter the bank account, greed and envy for some people is never satisfied.
(And for some those same drives are for authority and power for their own ends, not the benefit of others.)
It’s not just boredom, many of these “climate elitists” are either socio- or psychopathic! Being raised with a silver spoon is especially conducive to the development of these and othe mental disorders! When someone never has to WORK for anything, they become disconnected and jaded about anything and anyone involved with actual labor, as opposed to the theoretical labors of the Marxist “worker.”
That is what made Trump so unusual! Besides being a bloviating buffoon with many of the characteristics of a sociopath (like most successful business executives,) he somehow acquired a rapport for his employees in particular, and working class people in general. Look at how different the trajectories of the two administrations are; rising wages and lower energy prices under Trump, soaring energy prices and inflation under Obama 3.0! If you don’t think these policies are intentional, you need to put down the drugs and the Koolaid for a while!
It’s a Zen and the Art of Climate Maintenance thing. Classic vs Romantic thought.
This. Right. Here. White, liberal college “educated” women are bored with their empty, vacuous lives.
Almost sounds like the plot of Zardoz from the 70’s movie. One of Sean Connery’s early movies.
AOC thinks “morally right” means anything that agrees with her staying on the political gravy train forever while having no discernible skills or knowledge to contribute.