Pirate's Cove

Because this has everything to do with Science and not politics, right?

Our leaders look climate change in the eyes, and shrug

If you have cultivated an Edgar Allen Poe-like appreciation for the macabre, there is a certain sort of amusement to be had in watching the developed world deal with the insistent onslaught of climate change. Like many horror stories, this one features a main character full of futile determination to maintain a sense of normalcy even as the ominous signs of doom become ever more impossible to ignore. We can chuckle knowing that the monster is going to come for our designated protectors. We stop chuckling knowing that it’s coming for all of us next.

It is easy to imagine that a real live existential threat to our way of life would prompt any society to assume war footing and marshal everything it has to fight for survival. Unfortunately, this response only takes hold in actual war situations, where the threat is “other people that we can shoot and kill in glorious fashion”. When the threat comes not from enemy people, but from our own nature, we find it much harder to rise to the occasion. Where is the glory in recognizing the folly of our own greed and profligacy? Leaders are not elected on such things. We want leaders who will give us more, leading us ever onwards, upwards and into the grave.

See, what they want is dictators who will force everyone to comply. Oh, and hate Capitalism

As overwhelming and omnipresent as the climate crisis is, it is not the core issue. The core issue is capitalism. Capitalism’s unfettered pursuit of economic growth is what caused climate change, and capitalism’s inability to reckon with externalities – the economic term for a cost that falls onto third parties – is what is preventing us from solving climate change. Indeed, climate change itself is the ultimate negative externality: fossil-fuel companies and assorted polluting corporations and their investors get all the benefits, and the rest of the world pays the price. Now the entire globe finds itself trapped in the gruesome logic of capitalism, where it is perfectly rational for the rich to continue doing something that is destroying the earth, as long as the profits they reap will allow them to insulate themselves from the consequences.

Congratulations, free market evangelists: this is the system you have built. It doesn’t work. I don’t want to lean too heavily on the touchy-feely, Gaia-esque interpretation of global warming as the inevitable wounds of an omniscient Mother Earth, but you must admit that viewing humanity and its pollution as a malicious virus set to be eradicated by nature is now a fairly compelling metaphor. Homo sapiens rose above the lesser animals thanks to our ability to wield logic and reason, yet we have somehow gotten ourselves to a place where the knowledge of what is driving all these wildfires and floods is not enough to enable us to do anything meaningful to stop it. The keystone experience of global capitalism is to gape at a drought-fueled fire as it consumes your home, and then go buy a bigger SUV to console yourself.

Surprise? I have to wonder if these climate cultists, who so rarely practice what they preach beyond changing a few lightbulbs, think a system like in Cuba, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Venezuela, to name a few, will work? Will they be good with no more flatscreens, no more TV shows and films except for government propaganda, limited food, and so much more? Will they be upset when the UK Guardian can no longer afford to stay in business?

Capitalism is a machine made to squeeze every last cent out of this planet until there is nothing left. We can either fool ourselves about that until it kills us, or we can change it.

Remember, this is all about Science!

Read: Bummer: Leaders Look At Climate Crisis (scam) And Shrug »

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.

Read: Say, What’s The Climate Cult “Degrowth” Movement? »