Pirate's Cove

I’ve seen plenty of criticism over the years why I write something like “Warmists want to live like it’s 1499”, claiming that the climate cult doesn’t want to move backwards, they want to move forward. And that they are hardcore socialists, who want the economy to shrink, with the Government in control. The degrowth movement from the climate cult is out there, and it’s a lot bigger than Vox thinks

Can we save the planet by shrinking the economy?

Most of the world is very poor. Billions of people go hungry, can’t afford a doctor when they get sick, don’t have adequate shelter and sanitation, and struggle to exercise the freedoms essential to a good life because of material deprivation.

But for all the immiseration around us, one thing is undeniable: For the past several centuries — and especially for the past 70 years, since the end of World War II — the world has been getting much richer.

That economic boom means a lot of things. It means cancer treatments and neonatal intensive care units and smallpox vaccines and insulin. (snip)

But an increasingly wealthy world also means we eat more meat, mostly from factory-farmed animals. It means we emit lots more greenhouse gases. It means that consumers in developed countries buy a lot and throw away a lot.

In other words, it means a lot of good things and certainly some bad things as well.

They mean the climate crisis (scam)

But to a vocal slice of climate activists, that approach seems increasingly doomed. The degrowth movement, as it’s called, argues that humanity can’t keep growing without driving humanity into climate catastrophe. The only solution, the argument goes, is an extreme transformation of our way of life — a transition away from treating economic growth as a policy priority to an acceptance of shrinking GDP as a prerequisite to saving the planet.

At the core of degrowth is the climate crisis. Degrowth’s proponents argue that to save Earth, humans need to shrink global economic activity, because at our current levels of consumption, the world won’t hit the IPCC target of stabilizing global temperatures at no more than 1.5 degrees of warming. The degrowth movement argues that climate change should prompt a radical rethinking of economic growth, and policymakers serious about climate change should try to build a livable world without economic growth fueling it.

The degrowthers are generally Warmists who refuse to give up their own modern lifestyles, they just want others to be forced to do so.

It’s a bold, even romantic vision. But there are two problems with it: It doesn’t add up — and it would be nearly impossible to implement.

Addressing climate change will take genuinely radical changes to how our society works. Stirring as it might be to some, though, degrowth’s radicalism won’t fix the climate. Degrowth is most compelling as a personal ethos, a lens on your consumption habits, a way of life. What it’s not is a serious policy program to solve climate change, especially in a world where billions still live in poverty.

Of course, being Vox, it is a long, long article attempting to shoot down degrowth, but, it entirely misses the point, namely, that degrowth is a way for the Government to take full control of the economy, private entities, and people’s lives. It will dictate what people can buy (if they can afford it), where they can live and how big their home is, how much energy they can use, where, how, and when they can travel, what they can eat, where they can work, what kinds of businesses are allowed, and so much more.

One big problem with degrowth is this simple fact: In the coming decades, most carbon emissions won’t be coming from rich countries like the US — they’ll be happening in newly middle-income countries, like India, China, or Indonesia. Already, developing nations account for 63 percent of emissions, and they’re expected to account for even more as they develop further and as the rich world decarbonizes.

Even if emissions in rich countries go to zero very soon, climate change is set to worsen as poorer countries increase their own emissions.

And this is a big part of the degrowthers beliefs: that all those icky minorities in 3rd world nations should be stopped from developing. It’s a rather bigoted/racist position, but, then, the uber-white 1st World climate cultists have always been that way. They’re happy to let “minorities” into their countries, attempting to create voting blocks, as long as the “minorities” stay away in their own segregated communities.

Dear lord, this is a long piece. Skipping to the end

We don’t have very long, and we need to decarbonize quickly. We have technologies that have made a big difference already, and they must be made available on an unprecedented scale. We have more speculative solutions, technological and societal, and we should be prepared to try those, too. The scale of the problem is such that we need to act now — and we need to be clear-eyed about which ideas truly move the needle.

But, see, it’s all one movement, and the only way to accomplish stopping the climate crisis (scam) is with Government, because Warmists darn sure won’t practice what they preach.