Essay by Eric Worrall
Green British academic pushing a non GDP measure of social progress which gives a high score to Cuba.
Green growth or degrowth: what is the right way to tackle climate change?
Published: November 27, 2023 6.20am AEDT
Mark Fabian
Assistant professor of public policy, University of WarwickNearly all the world’s governments and vast numbers of its people are convinced that addressing human-induced climate change is essential if healthy societies are to survive. The two solutions most often proposed go by various names but are widely known as “green growth” and “degrowth”. Can these ideas be reconciled? What do both have to say about the climate challenge?
…
… We need to shift priorities away from GDP and towards frameworks and budgets – such as those used in New Zealand, the Australian Capital Territory and other places – that do a far better job than GDP does of measuring whether we are using our resources effectively to advance human wellbeing.
And many of these wellbeing goals can be achieved using a fraction of the wealth of advanced nations. For example, Cuba, with about an eighth of the GDP per capita, has similar life expectancy and literacy rates to the United States.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/green-growth-or-degrowth-what-is-the-right-way-to-tackle-climate-change-218239
By some estimates, around half a million people, 5% of Cuba’s population, has fled political oppression, riots and hardship since 2021. Cuba is also reportedly suffering triple digit inflation.
Do you think it is possible the Communist regime might have lied about their social achievements? And that gullible academics in far away Britain might be accepting these lies at face value?
The Cubans who remain, there are plenty of stories of young men and women selling themselves, trading their bodies for a decent meal or cash pittance.
I think I’d rather stick with GDP as a measure of prosperity and success. Many Cubans obviously feel the same, given how many of them have voted with their feet and relocated to the high carbon economy of the United States.
Would anyone expect any other type of theory from one of these self-styled climate/environmental academics? I guess this largely stagnant Cuban economy is one of the reasons that so many of the country’s former citizens have emigrated to the US.
That’s right, all of the good Cubans (Luis Tiant excepted) are already in Florida, and the ones I have met are working and not on welfare. Remember when Cuba sent about a hundred Medical Doctors to help Venezuela and they all defected and disappeared? That would be a clue.
That car in the head image! ’52 Chevy, I think. I could maintain that. Fuel+air+spark. Battery and coil ignition, carburetor with nothing else hanging on it, drum brakes.
It sure would be a pain though, compared to how modern vehicles start and run so well for so long without the fuss.
Almost looks like it comes with NY State plates, too. Very appropriate.
Thanks for the ’52 date.
My folk’s first car was a ’49 or ’50 basic black Chevy. I traveled many
miles in the back seat with my sister. Next car was a green ’55.
My dad bought a green and white two-door ’55 and drove it back and forth from western NJ to Newark Airport where he flew as a flight engineer for Eastern. I remember when he came home banged up from falling asleep and wrecking it. The car was totalled.
If the push for EVs continues, we may be seeing images of that sort in the US, as those of us with ICE vehicles keep them going long past their intended life span. And this comes from someone who keeps cars to over 300,000 miles.
And there are probably no EVs in Cuba either, nor is there the electricity to run them.
Gov Murphy just proposed banning the sale of new ICE vehicles in NJ.
As goes Cuba, so goes New Jersey. Thank goodness I no longer live there.
That is exactly the prospect that motivated my comment!
I urge all greenies to move to Cuba…it is your kind of place.
It’s time for these people to declare themselves as climate refugees and flee the slavery of capitalism to a peaceful, ecological haven (and appropriately low GDP!) such as Cuba.
Stop protesting, unglue yourself from the road and wipe the tomato soup stains from your sleeves -freedom awaits you in glorious Cuba!
They could take their Kerry and Gore sized CO2 Footprints with them along with their Low Ideals of what makes a society great…they make it grate
In a healthy economy, money circulates through the general population and businesses large and small. Increasingly in western economies, money circulates through politicians, big business and media. Note that in command economies, like China for example, politicians, big business and media are effectively a single group. In other words, that is where the west is increasingly headed.
So, while GDP is indeed a good measure of the health of a country’s economy, we really do need another measure – one that tells us where the money is circulating.
Big business is generally a symptom of being very good at what they do. But I agree more could be done to help small businesses, starting with a red tape bonfire.
A great deal of legislation and regulation, perhaps a majority, gives advantages to large business organizations over smaller ones.
I would argue that this is the main reason for the existence of said red tape. How many small businesses have the resources to run a lobby group presence in Washington?
True in the farming world too. I watch Dr. Berry’s videos. He strongly believes you’re healthier eating REAL food like meat, eggs, dairy products and local grown veggies:
Behind the Scenes With Dr. Berry in Camden, TN Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hS6sG2Qs6c&t=286s
Human-induced climate change does not exist, except in the minds of a few activist academics!
And the Virtual Reality of climate model space
A lot of the reality currently confronting modellers residing in the northern hemisphere is coloured white.
Now they are claiming the models have always predicted more snow in a warming world. Except those silly enough to get publicity by stating the children will not know what snow is.
So the question for modellers – if the earth continues to warm, how much more snow will there be and when does more snowfall exceed what can be melted in the next year before the snow comes again? My prediction is 170 to 200 years from now. So far it is only happening on Greenland.
Warm => snow => increased reflection => cold
And yet, lack of snow to melt is often a major blame for diminished water supplies.
They really do have very mixed-up idiocies, don’t they.
Very hard to keep SO MANY LIES straight and consistent !
global warming will end as another snowball Earth! /sarc
Re snowball earth
In his written evidence in support of six UK Greenpeace activists, on trial for causing damage at the coal powered Kingsnorth power station, Hansen said the following:-
“Another ice age will not occur, unless humans go extinct…… only a small amount of human-made GHGs are needed to overwhelm any natural tendency toward cooling.The long lifetime of human-made CO2 perturbations assures that no human generation that we can imagine will need to be concerned about global cooling………It is a trivial task for humanity to avert an ice age”
Based on this and other testimony the 6 were cleared of any cases of criminal damage!
hmmm… seems little relationship between what Hansen said and whether or not the 6 broke any laws
And their solution is literally Communism.
Yet they’ll call you a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist if you point out that they (the greens) are just Communists with a coat of green.
Watermelons
The notion that a green UK academic embraces Cuba as a climate role model is beyond irony. Ridicule richly deserved.
Now for the government to defund HIM to the tune of 80% of his income so HE can start living NOW like he wants US to live SOON.
Communists have always had a strong pitch to certain types of academics, by styling themselves as a government of experts, where the right people have a real say in how things are run – unlike the disorderly populist rabble which run republics and democracies.
I am proud of the many thousand tons of precious, life-giving, beneficial trace gas CO2 that I have gifted the atmosphere and I hope to contribute much more to our greening planet.
Maybe I’ll go fire up my 6.2l supercharged Hemi and help with the contributions.
No wonder why many Cubans prefer to emigrate to Florida by swimming and boating across the ocean waters after all it IS hard to live in Socialist Utopia.
Snicker……..
Is Mark Fabian a pen name of Justin Trudeau?
I have never seen them in the same room together. Just sayin’.
What is the right way to tackle climate change?
DO NOTHING.
What’s the right.way to tackle climate change?
Give it the ball and let it QB for Minnesota.
I’ve been to Minneapolis three times in the 1980s to visit Control Data Corporation.
I follow the Minnesota teams progress , mainly the Vikings. I live in hope of success, but 65+years of following St Johnstone FC has taught me patience is what’s needed more than anything else.
Patience is also needed when dealing with those who think we can influence the climate globally
CDC. Wow, that is a blast from the past.
As the criminals atop the US government work to enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense of the middle and working classes, one can expect to see more and more Americans forced to keep older model ICE vehicles running to maintain their mobility and freedom.
So I guess all those years I’’ve spent restoring and maintaining 70s and 80s pickups and SUVs may really come in handy now. Socialism looks good at a distance to the untrained eye; mature deliberation and clear vision expose its myriad traps and pitfalls!
I remember when NY stuck people that had Covid in nursing homes.
Long before that Cuba was sticking people that had AIDS in … “Camps”.
Anyone believing statistics from a communist country is the type who also believes in homeopathy and voodoo acupuncture and global warming.
Another example of how vacant the intellectual pool is of the CAGW crowd. What an embarrassment to academia.
An ESG index is another “non GDP measure of social progress”. Dont’ we want to be more like Sri Lanka?
There are still some Canadians who marvel at Cuba’s version of state medicine.
As to admiring Cuba, after the FLQ crisis of 1970, the kidnapers were allowed to flee to Cuba after releasing over James Cross to the police.They enjoyed the communist republic of Cuba (and their easy and fulfilling lives chopping sugar cane) so much that within two years they were pleading to be allowed to return to Canada even if they had to complete short prison sentences. By 1982, all of them had fled their sanctuary in Cuba and were back in Canada.
Should any of these ‘academics’ actually visit Cuba they would probably get the same treatment as Xi in California recently.
Cleaned up streets, move the homeless to anywhere as long as it is away from their eyes then fete them with lavish parties claiming this is how the majority of the people live in their green wonderland.
Sadly for Mr Fabian’s hypothesis, the recently elected government in New Zealand will immediately abandon the “well being budgets” instituted by the previous administration that did nothing to improve anyone’s well being, instead only massively increasing debt and lowering living standards
Most Western economies have “taxed to the max” and an increase in some tax or other just results in less government revenue somewhere else, short of impoverishing the populace with broad based tax increases.
They don’t really have any choice but to borrow money allowing banks to buy government debt instruments, thus issuing new money that they hope they will never have to pay back, or possibly inflate the debt away over time, or manage to overcome with economic production the rest of the world wants to buy that they hope can be developed (like green tech or fusion).
Unfortunately Western economies have given away their consumer manufacturing, followed by large scale petroleum and petrochemical projects, followed by giving away intellectual property of a technical nature, soon to fade will be military manufacturing…..this loss of jobs results in the government needing to simply take a bigger part of the economic pie themselves, plus spend a lot more on social programs and administration of same.
We don’t know where the path leads folks…but we can see some writing on the wall…
The best way to describe The Australian Capital Territory is a society of leeches. They suck the lifeblood out of the Australian economy and bestow it on themselves.
They believe they run the region on 100% “renewable” energy because they have contracts for outside wind and solar farms to provide the electricity needed. This whole system relies on subsidies from the rest of the country both directly through the RET and indirectly through power system stability and back-up supply.
If ACT was cut off from the rest of Australia it would not survive a week. The produce nothing but hot air and rules for the rest of us.
They carry less the half the burden of other States and territories of new immigrants to Australia.
New Zealand has become a basket case. They have a balance of payment problem and rising net international debt with 60% of debt in foreign currencies. The only country in the world that has no regrets over international debt is the USA because the debt is denominated in USD so can always be repaid with new money created from nothing. The crunch will come for USA when China wants payments for the stuff the manufacture in CNY rather than USD. With Biden guiding the ship, it could be sooner than most think:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/16/china-yuan-renminbi-us-dollar-currency-trade/
A country so awesome that people build ramshackle rafts out of garbage to float across shark-infested waters to escape. Yes, definitely a model to emulate. You first.
I imagine he’s taken comments on Cubans ability to keep ICE vehicles going for 50+ years as a way to avoid EVs and built on that.
One of the reasons for the longevity of tropical vehicles is the lack of the rust caused by salt on frozen roads in colder climes.
I moved to Ohio from California with a 45-year old IH Scout. I naively thought the 400,000 miles of road dust mixed with engine oil would protect the undercoated frame and body. It only took about 5 years for all the oily dust to disappear and another 5 for the factory-galvanized body to develop a half-dozen holes. When the gas tanks and brake lines rusted through, I decided it was time to give up on an old friend.
“towards frameworks and budgets – such as those used in New Zealand, the Australian Capital Territory and other places – that do a far better job than GDP does”
As someone that lives in the ACT, I can assure you that the place only continues to function with the constant importation of other people’s money. Everywhere you look, from the roads to the bridges and even parks you can see the inevitable degradation resulting from a socialist government.
Mention Cuba and a deluded Marxist is not far behind.
I would guess that Mark Fabian has a second home in Cuba that he goes to periodically to breathe in the air of a country whose people are truly enjoying a high state of well-being. As opposed to quick trips over to Europe. Odd how all of these promoters of sustainable lifestyles are heavily tilted towards the “Do as I say” quadrant of humanity.
Great idea!
But I’d want to be sure that the new measure of “prosperity and success” includes programs to prevent a nationwide plague of locust. (Or was it Leprechauns?)
/sarc
A young friend of mine was born to parents who fled the Cuban Revolution to settle in Guatemala. She thus never knew Cuba, or Communism, but still had aunts, uncles, and cousins who weren’t as lucky, and had not escaped from Cuba.
Under the Obama administration, it became possible for Americans to visit relatives in Cuba. My friend did so, and her story upon return was remarkable. A whose system had arisen for these visits. Air travel to and from Cuba was on a specially outfitted Boeing 737, modified to carry much more baggage than usual. This was to allow people to carry supplies to their relatives in large quantities.
Here is what the Cubans most requested their American relatives to bring: Toothbrushes and toothpaste, dental mirrors and picks, topical oral anesthetics, band aides, bandages, gauze patches, medical adhesive tape, aspirin, Tylenol, ibuprofen, naproxen, liniments, triple antibiotic ointment, isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and needles and stitching thread. I may have forgotten some of what my friend listed, but in my mind it added up to “first aide kit stuff.” This, desperately needed by people who lived in a country supposedly having the best health care system in the world.
My friend’s description of the living conditions of the average Cuban, which her relatives were, was stark. Every house she saw everywhere in the country shared one feature: there was no glass in any window. The houses people had pre-revolution were in the same condition as before, and whenever a window broke, which they did in the often severe weather, that was it. No glass was available for replacement during the 56 years between then and when my friend related her experience.
There was much more to her story, none of it positive save for the character of her relatives – their warmth and generosity with whatever they had to offer. Some of them were subsequently allowed to emigrate to the United States. I don’t know of anyone who has expressed a desire to emigrate in the other direction.
Interesting that this guy’s name is Fabian. I guess he is a descendant of the major Socialist group of the same name.
Define “healthy.” It never occurred to me to get rid of my new car and replace it with the first car I ever owned, while in high school. I guess I’m just a little slow. At least I’m not half-fast like these interdimensional, out of touch with reality pundits.