Essay by Eric Worrall
I wonder if Prime Minister Modi and the parents of students know the University of New Delhi teaches that capitalist growth needs to be replaced by “cleaner, gentler and more sustainable economic models”.
Climate change is political and we must treat it that way
Global warming is still far from being an election issue — and therein lies the problem
BY ROBERT MIZO
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Apr 17, 2024…
Furthermore, addressing the climate crisis requires a fundamental rethinking of how humans interact with nature — especially how we procure, produce and consume the means of our existence. It necessitates cleaner, gentler and more sustainable economic models.
…
For instance, former President Donald Trump, not long after assuming office in 2017, withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement to “promote national economic interests.”
If we invoke Marx’s definition of politics as class struggle, climate change is indeed a site of contestation not only between competing interests, but also conflicting modes of production, or economic systems. The dominant classes — the political and economic elites — have so far resisted overhauling the system that caused global heating in the first place, namely industrial capitalism.
A much-needed economic restructuring is an intensely political question with no viable prospects in sight. The irony, however, is that unlike other issues, climate change is yet to figure on the manifestos of political parties in many major democracies and rarely do politicians promise to take climate action in their campaigns. This, in part, is because there is little demand from citizens to put this issue at the center of the agenda, barring some sparse civil society-led movements.
…
Read more: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/04/17/world/climate-change-is-political/
Greens like Professor Mizo are absolutely right that communism would likely reduce emissions. People who are scrounging for grass seeds and trying to figure out which pet they should cook next don’t have the discretionary money to purchase luxuries.
But who in their right mind would actually want to live that way? Even China, which diluted economic communism to preserve political communism, still has hundreds of millions of people who live in abject poverty.
You only need to look across the Taiwan Strait to see what China could have been, had Chiang Kai-shek won the civil war on the mainland, and had China fully embraced Capitalism from the start. China would have become like the United States, a powerhouse for good in the world.
Last time I was in Taiwan, a government official asked me to follow her when I was out one night enjoying one of their food markets. Asked, not demanded. I followed, and the people at the government department explained they needed my help for a publicity campaign. At every stage I had the option of saying no. Of course I helped, they asked nicely. Taiwan is that kind of place.
When I visited, Taiwan was clean, the people of Taiwan love and care for their nation. China was filthy, the streets were covered with dust and litter, with only the more visible places swept clean.
I have also stood on the border between North and South Korea, and there too the difference couldn’t be starker. On the South were farms packed with bustle and productivity. On the North was a half finished land, empty overgrown fields, and starving soldiers waiting under camouflage for a war which for them never ended.
China under Deng Xiaoping diluted Mao’s hardline communism by allowing grass roots Capitalism, and saved their economy, but President Xi Jinping appears to be rolling back Deng’s economic reforms, and is threatening to plunge China once again into Communist poverty.
India, like China, stands at a fork in the road. Prime Minister Modi has given Indians a taste of prosperity and good government, after lost decades of failed socialist policies, but Modi is an old man.
Will Indian students whose minds have been ensnared by green neo-Marxism reject Modi’s legacy?
Given the overwhelming evidence that capitalism and ever rising resource exploitation is the main force for good in the world, bettering lives wherever they are embraced, I think people in India and elsewhere should have a really long think about the alternatives, before they listen to the siren promises of those who advocate the mirage of “cleaner, gentler and more sustainable” alternatives. All the historical evidence indicates that nations which embrace systems other than capitalism for whatever reason inevitably suffer tyranny, starvation, degradation, poverty and ultimately ruin.
Update (EW): Fixed a few typos.
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I think the attraction to college students intending to be apparatchiks is that Marxist-Leninism gives power to the apparatchiks. In much the same way political Islam gives power to the mullahs.
Marxism provides simple answers for people with simple minds.
The real world is complex, full of competing interests and too many interactions to count, much less understand. Marxism tells people that all of their problems can be solved, if they just give the Marxists enough power.
There, fixed it.
The desire to be an apparatchik is only partly about getting power- I think, since I know so many of them, that what they really want is an easy job – much easier than working in the private sector.
Remember, people who want to lower your standard of living are not your friends.
Especially when they want to lower yours but not theirs.
Here in Wokeachusetts, I as a now retired forester, fight with enviros who want to end all forestry- so the trees will have only one function, sequester carbon. Of course they already own nice wood homes with lots of nice wood furniture (often from rare tropical hardwoods) and tons of paper products.
There is no reason harvesting and regrowing forests as has been done in Europe for centuries isn’t a valuable contribution to humanity.
It’s been going on in this country, and Canada, for centuries as well. At least it was until the enviros decided to shut the industry down.
Some stands in Germany have records going back 1,000 years.
“A much needed economic restructuring is an intensely political question with no viable prospects in sight.”
Mizo’s sentence contains three propositions.
The energy dance would be funny if it wasn’t so damaging. For two decades the main thing holding back the green revolution has been the utter inability of advocates to make it work.
Having said that a new factor has arisen which could sweep it all away, I cover that in the next scheduled WUWT article.
I sincerely hope you are right, Eric. Sooner is better than later.
He’s operating from a false premise: That there is a climate crisis.
He needs to prove that there is before we go any further.
_________________________________________________
It’s and election issue for me.
I get that.
I worked in water treatment. Coliform is tested for as an “indicator” for whether or not the water might be contaminated by other water born pathogens.
In politics, particularly the more local the office, I look at “indicators” such as gun control, global warming solutions support, labor union endorsements, etc. to get an idea of where that candidate really stands and what they might do in office.
yep, but most coliform positives are benign… something that touched something else has touched your water.
those candidates to which you refer are fecal positives and are promising that, if given a chance, they will do their best to crap in your water.
Just to clarify the coliform comparison for those who aren’t familiar with water treatment.
“Coliform” bacteria are all over the place. Mostly harmless. But the disinfection processes, such as chlorination, should kill it. If a positive for coliform in a sample is found, then further test for “e-coli” is done. E-coli can cause problems.
Most, almost all water-born pathogens like cholera and typhus and e-coli (plus others), will be killed before coliforms are killed.
Therefore, if there is no coliform positives, not likely any pathogens are present.
(Additional regs have been put in place (Surface Water Treatment Rule) to deal with those resistant to, but not immune from, chlorination or. (Cryptosporidium, Giardia).
As far as politicians are concerned, The Bill of Rights as written, what I said above etc. are my main “indicators”.
(I also try to look at what they said and did AFTER the last election and don’t give much weight to what they say during the current election year unless the after and during line up.
Me too. Out with Biden, in with Trump. Idiot Biden just cancelled oil drilling on half the Arctic Petroleum Preserve in Alaska. The natives are up in arms.
Class struggle has been replaced by identity politics. What we have is neo-feudalism
Neo-feudalist tribalism.
So the identity politics are still part of the game.
I think we still need to face a mathematical reality that 2-3% per year compound growth of energy (ignoring other resources) is not sustainable even in a couple century time frame. At some point we need to deal with the question of how to live well on less resource. HOWEVER, I don’t see that as a political “problem” to be solved from the top, but rather as something academics, theologians, inventors, lifestyle experimenters and so forth should be putting on their radar. The default, which who knows, might be best, is to let rising prices drive the innovation when the time comes, but often rapid adaptation under pressure (and often political pressure) produces inferior results to long term experimentation on small scales at first. Sadly, our modern world has deeply imbedded in it the idea that only political action can “solve” anything.
There is no evidence we will ever run out of resources. Project Orion, a conceptual space drive powered by atomic bombs, demonstrated there is a feasible path to affordably moving large chunks of material around the solar system using current technology.
I’m not advocating atmospheric nuclear explosions, I’m sure more eco-friendly technologies will be developed such as giant coil guns for launching stuff into space, but the Project Orion option is our backstop, our proof that we never need to fear running out of resources.
Have you looked at SpaceX and the Starship. There is the very real possibility of lifting 200 tons to low earth orbit at less than 5 million $ US.
I would think coil guns would just produce too high a G force making anything you send to space, other than raw materials, much more expensive to make.
Depends how long the coil gun is. a 100 mile coil gun should be a comfortable ride.
The problem with coil guns is that they require the space craft to be travelling many times orbital velocity, down here where the atmosphere is the thickest.
Say orbital velocity is 18,000 mph. Then you have to add in how much the spacecraft will slow down as it climbs to orbit. Then you have to add in how much velocity will be lost due to atmospheric drag.
At those kinds of speeds, your space craft will be incinerated long before it can get out of the atmosphere. Coil/rail guns can only work when being used on a world without an atmosphere.
Hmm….detonating nuclear bombs every few seconds impacting a giant flat plate connected to a crew cabin by a kilometer long shock absorber strut isn’t a “feasible path” Eric…
Using a nuclear reactor to power an ion drive sounds much more workable.
As you allude, it’s not going to be a problem for several hundred years, at least.
If anyone wants to use less because they are concerned about the future, you have that option.
If anyone wants to try and invent something that helps people to use less energy, more power to you. If you can make something that costs less than the energy it saves, you will have a guaranteed market.
The more the market grows, the more money people have.
The more money people have, the more money is available for research into just about everything.
Try comparing the technologies that were available 200 years ago, and compare it to what we have today.
Now try to predict what kind of technologies will be available 200 years from now.
Then consider that for the last 100 years, the rate of technological advancement has been accelerating.
There is IMO no such ‘mathematical reality’. The economy is shifting slowly to less energy intensive. Simple example—recycled steel and glass need much less energy than primary production. Sure, all fossil fuels have eventual finite limits. But we have nuclear, and the present ability to convert natgas or coal to liquid petroleum products via catalysis when cost justified. Hybrids consume less gas than ICE, without the BEV complications.
Solving problems ‘now’ that only exist decades or centuries ahead does not allow for scientific and technical progress. Whale oil was a bad future bet given Rockefeller and Edison. Solve problems as they arise, not before,
RE: recycled steel
I drove by one of the work/storage places for a large orchard and by looking between the buildings one can see a abundant amounts of steel waiting to be recycled. The location is here (47.223322,-119.940304) on Google Earth. Most things appear to be old trucks, autos, and farm machinery. And another, a few miles to the east: 47.212512,-119.854852.
There is an older/nice house hidden by the trees – I can’t tell what the place otherwise is.
Perfectly true but that won’t get the activist an urgently desired bullet-point on their CV today. I don’t know a lot of progressive/activist types but all the ones I do are primarily focussed on getting noticed for “doing something”. They don’t much care what the something is, but it must be done today.
I maintain that the Peter Principle and the Precautionary Principle are intrinsically joined.
When bureaucrats are promoted to their level of incompetence (Peter Principle), their only reaction to a situation is to do way too little (under react), or way too much (over react) (i.e. the Precautionary Principle).
Not enough space here to list all the examples of my observation.
“HOWEVER, I don’t see that as a political “problem” to be solved from the top, but rather as something academics, theologians, inventors, lifestyle experimenters and so forth should be putting on their radar”
Sounds like you are suggesting the “recognized” elite by those at “the top” (there will always be those who want to claim that spot) should be calling the shots rather than those being shot at.
PS I remember a “theologian” back in the ’60’s or ’70’s declaring that “God is Dead”.
His reasoning being that God is Love and since there is Evil in the world, God must be dead.
He must not have read the Bible much. (Even just John 3:16-21 puts the lie to his claim!)
The Climate Alarmists won’t be satisfied, even when the plants are starved of CO2 and billions die of starvation in the dark and cold. They are fanatics, with deep faith that they are the only ones with “Truth”.
Marxism/Socialism explained: Steal from those who have succeeded and give to those that haven’t until everyone is equally miserable. There hasn’t been one Marxist regime that didn’t rely on Capitalism for its’ beginnings.
If Professor Mizo believes that Communism will reduce emissions he has failed to study the Soviet Union and China. Both are and were environmentally filthy countries running high emission inefficient industries blacking their cities and their people. It seems that he does not have an enquiring mind.
“People who are scrounging for grass seeds and trying to figure out which pet they should cook next don’t have the discretionary money to purchase luxuries.”
But their leaders do. That’s why Communism exists–to give the ruling class everything luxurious and keep the rest miserable. Climate change is a scam, and the useful idiots are buying it.
“The dominant classes — the political and economic elites — have so far resisted overhauling the system that caused global heating in the first place, namely industrial capitalism.”
Not in the actual world we live in. Here the climate clowns are the billionaires boy’s clubs.
Of course Eric is right. I think one problem with capitalism and free markets is the difficulty in wrapping our heads around them and explaining them. I don’t see them so much as a system but rather freedom. Not freedom for the government to do as it chooses rather freedom for the citizens. Freedom to win or lose. With all those different people looking for a better way we move forward. Not every idea is good, that is a good thing. We are free to try something and if it doesn’t work we move on to something else. It is not a bad thing because now we know what we don’t want to do. The wonder is that there is no one in charge directing what we do, I think there is a majority who have a hard time accepting that.
Well said Bob. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a great way to end up with no eggs. Diversity, everyone having the freedom to try different stuff, with the rewards going to the person who makes the best choices, is the only path to advancement.
Jack London did an excellent job of explaining the results of capitalism in his book “the people of the abyss”. Not much freedom there unless it is the freedom to starve.
Read Dr. Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules For Life” to gain a perspective on individual choices for a path of order in your life or chaos.
Why am I not surprised that you buy into yet another myth completely and uncritically?
Capitalism requires people to cooperate with each other. It’s socialism where the law of the jungle rules.
If you want poverty and starvation, socialism and communism are the systems for you.
If you want prosperity for all, then capitalism is the way to go.
It’s impossible to impose your will on others under capitalism, where as that is required under socialism and communism.
Collectivism always ends in poverty and starvation.
Your welcome.
You’re
They never do say how it’s supposed to work after the restructuring. If not capitalism, then what? Do we go back to lords and serfs? Capitalism may have failings, but it’s the least worst option we’ve come up with so far.
Of course they do it because they know they can get away with it with little risk of punishment.