Category Archives: Economics

Why Britain’s water industry stinks

The sewage crisis is a damning indictment of the water firms and our state bureaucracy.

Article by James Woudhuysen, who is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University.

Excerpts:

The smell around the water firms could hardly be more pungent. At the same time as they dump effluent into our rivers, the chief execs are earning hundreds of thousands of pounds in bonuses alone. They can even top up these salaries by sitting on the boards of each other’s companies.

So how did we get here? The blame cannot be placed on the water companies alone. The corporate failures are undoubtedly legion. But they have been compounded by an opaque web of state regulators and non-governmental organisations who also manage and monitor the water industry.

[…]

One thing that binds the regulators and the water companies together, and more or less ensures that problems go unsolved and the public’s needs are ignored, is an obsession with climate change.

The corporate water sharks and the bureaucrats agree that climate change is at the root of all evil. And as we have seen recently, both dry spells and heavy rain can be blamed on climate change. Regulators and companies tell us to save water when it’s dry – because of climate change. And then when it suddenly gets wet, the sewage overflows are also our fault – because we’ve failed to do our bit to stop climate change.

[…]

The first step to ending the outrage of sewage spewing into our waters is to reject this self-serving narrative, to reject the intimate relations between the state, water companies and environmentalists, and to hold all three fully to account. Britain’s bloated and ineffectual water bureaucracy – not climate change, nor the people – is the real problem here.

Back Off, Oh Masters of the Universe

Big corporations like Deloitte are leading us down the path to totalitarianism, says Jordan Peterson

Deloitte have produced a study about climate models and say that urgent action is needed. Psychologist and polymath Jordan Peterson has an appropriate answer.

A written version is here:

https://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/2022/08/15/peddlers-environmental-doom-have-shown-true-totalitarian-colours/ [close the gap between “telegraph.” and “co.uk”]

Excerpts:

And what will it take to do so? Here’s the most alarming part: nothing more than “a coordinated transition” that “will require governments, along with the financial services and technology sectors to catalyze, facilitate and accelerate progress; foster information flows across systems; and align individual incentives with collective goals.”

A clearer statement of totalitarian inclination could hardly be penned. 

The one thing the Deloitte models guarantee is that if we do what they recommend we will definitely be poorer than we would have been otherwise for an indefinite but hypothetically transitory period.

Yet any reduction in economic output (however “temporary” and “necessary”) will be purchased at the cost of the lives of those who are barely making it now. Period.

Why eco-alarmists are wrong about almost everything

The Great Barrier Reef is not dying, and the world is not coming to an end.

Article by Brendan O’Neill.

Excerpts:

The ‘somewhat surprising’ news about the reef’s good health – as one newspaper diplomatically describes it – is a very serious blow to the apocalyptic scaremongering of the eco-elites. 

[…]

Eco-alarmists aren’t only wrong about the death of Earth – they’re wrong about life on Earth right now. The message they constantly send is that everything is dire. The big, disgusting ‘human footprint’ on poor Mother Earth is causing heatwaves and storms and death on an unprecedented scale, they say. It is all so overblown. We are actually safer from nature’s violent whims than we have ever been. The number of people dying in natural calamities fell from around 500,000 a year in the 1920s to 14,000 in 2020. That’s a 96 per cent drop. The percentage of human beings living in poverty fell from more than 80 per cent at the start of the 19th century to less than 20 per cent in the 2010s. Deaths from disease and war have also declined dramatically in the modern era. Child labour, too. Life expectancy, meanwhile, has shot up. In Europe, it went from 34 years to 79 years between 1770 and 2019. That is, at the exact time that mankind was having industrial revolutions and allegedly being a plague on the planet, the health and prospects of humanity improved in a way our ancestors could only have dreamed of. It’s almost as if modernity is good for us.

We must never let the anti-industrial rage of the elites blind us to how brilliant our impact on the planet has been. We haven’t destroyed Earth – we have tamed it and civilised it; we have unlocked its secrets; we have transformed this wild and unpredictable ball in space into a planet that can happily host eight billion people, and more besides. Occasionally bleached coral is a very small price to pay for the liberation of humanity from death and drudgery, wouldn’t you say?

Of course things are far from perfect. We’re heading into a serious economic and energy crisis. It will hit the working classes in the West and the people of the South hardest of all. But this crisis is not an indictment of modern human society. On the contrary, it’s an indictment of the elites’ turn against modern human society. Decades of eco-doom-mongering, of fury against fossil fuels, of constant demands for a slowing down of economic growth and for a violent shrinking of the ‘human footprint’, have unquestionably helped to drag us into this worrying new reality of energy crisis and shortages. It isn’t the ‘human impact’ on the planet we should be worried about – it’s the establishment’s hostility to the ‘human impact’ on the planet. Mastery of nature is essential if we are to continue improving human life. It will also help us to look after nature itself, including its greatest wonders like the Great Barrier Reef.

Green Myths and Hard Realities: Sri Lanka as a Warning

What you get when you mindlessly hand over power to distant technocrats

Article by Joseph Solis-Mullen.

Excerpts:

With Sri Lanka’s short-lived green revolution of 2021 having quickly devolved into a real revolution just one year later, complete with the ouster of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s incompetent and authoritarian government this past week, now is a good time to hammer home not only why the effort failed, but why so-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) policies and the green energy movement more generally are hopeless and destructive wastes of time.

That modern life is totally reliant on carbon-emitting fossil fuels is no reason to lose one’s head. And even though human-caused climate change is a virtual certainty, that is no reason to mindlessly hand over power to distant technocrats who promise to fix anything if only given the authority to engage in their dubious to morally outrageous social-engineering projects. Nor is it any reason to plow money into so-called ESG funds, which are thinly veiled shams, featuring virtually the same equities as most general S&P index funds but with substantially higher fees.

[…]

Demand reliably produces supply. Already many entrepreneurs and corporations are pioneering devices that will help to mitigate or even reverse the effects of climate change. Things may get worse before they get better. I don’t know what the future holds, and neither does anyone else. Respecting the limitations of knowledge and of the human ability to control things is central to allowing free exchange, the foundation of the capitalism that has made us all richer and better off than we would otherwise have been. The alternative is looking like Sri Lanka.

“The successful reliance on voluntary activity”

What collectivism is destroying

In his “The Road to Serfdom”, the Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek (1899 – 1992) described the many virtues that the burgeoning collectivism was destroying:

“There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, non-interference with one’s neighbour and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.”

What he doesn’t mention is that it was mainly churches that carried the voluntary activities.

Jordan Peterson’s message to CEOs

Ditch the evil, satanic "woke" stuff, the DIE and the ESG

He rains down fire, brimstone and pro-free market slaps in the face. He quotes Jesus to them: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (but then mistakenly seems to say that this is from the Sermon on the Mount – it’s not, it’s from Luke 12:48, but that’s just a minor quibble).

Here it is, the full 25 minutes in all their glory.

These farmers are fighting for us all

We are witnessing a global revolt against the irrationalism of the elites.

Article by Brendan O’Neill.

Excerpts:

It is truly bizarre that pressure is being put on farmers to cut back on emissions, which really means to produce less food. This captures just how entrenched, and unhinged, the cult of green thinking has become among the new elites. So much so that they now prefer to larp as saviours of the planet from a fantasy doom than they do to think carefully about how to generate enough food and wealth to ensure that everyone can flourish. This is where it becomes clear that the otherworldliness of our rulers is not only annoying and often free of fact and reason – it is dangerous, too. An elite that spends more time fantasising about an environmental Judgement Day than it does thinking about how to meet the needs of the population, which sees sunny weather as a sign from Gaia that we must sacrifice things like farming and food production to appease the angry gods of climate change, is an elite that has lost the moral plot. It is an elite that can no longer be trusted.

It isn’t only farmers who are rising up. And it isn’t only the Net Zero derangement that is concerning people. Dutch fishermen and truckers have joined Dutch farmers in solidarity. People in Ghana are protesting against shrinking fuel supplies and power cuts. Cab drivers in Italy are taking to the streets over fuel prices. Farmers and other workers in Poland, Spain and Albania are protesting, too. People are fuming over the cost-of-living crisis, the economic impact of lockdown and the glaring inability of the elites to provide for all. Worse, the glaring inability of the elites even to acknowledge that providing for all should be the priority of society, and that it should matter far more than their own self-indulgent fearful fantasies.

This is why the global farmers’ revolt and the rising up of working people really matters. These rebels are not only demanding that their right to work and to live comfortably should be respected. They are also brilliantly confronting the delusions of the elites, who have got so lost in narratives of fear around climate change, lockdown and everything else that they can no longer see what is real and what is important. The shattering of the elite’s luxury apocalypticism should be seen as one of the key tasks of the 2020s.

It’s crucial to understand what we’re up against

A global type of totalitarianism based on technocratic and transhumanist ideologies

A discussion between Patrick Wood and Dr. Joseph Mercola.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

> It’s become absolutely crucial to understand what we’re up against, globally, and who’s responsible for the rising totalitarianism and their ultimate intention

> The COVID pandemic was a coup d’état by the technocratic cabal that is behind the global takeover agenda, referred to as The Great Reset

> The Great Reset was introduced by the World Economic Forum, which is tightly coupled to the United Nations and the World Health Organization. Their agenda is to implement a global type of totalitarianism based on technocratic and transhumanist ideologies. Part of that plan also includes reengineering and controlling all life forms, including humans

> While the outward expression of technocracy will appear as totalitarianism, the control center is not an individual. Rather than a single person ruling by the decree, technocracy relies on control through technology and algorithm. This is a very important difference. In short, there will be no individual to blame or hold accountable. The “dictator” is an algorithm

> Technocracy is an invented and unnatural form of economics that expresses itself as totalitarianism and requires social engineering to work. Technocrats in the past defined technocracy as the science of social engineering. Controlling the populace is crucial for the system to function

Continue reading here. (Includes two videos.)

From Finite World to Infinite Growth

The Malthusians decided in their hubris and arrogance that because they couldn’t see a solution to a problem they’d defined, that solution did not exist.

Tom Luongo has written a piece called “From Currency Resets to Limiting Infinite Growth“

In it, he writes:

In a recent article on this blog, I did a quick and dirty takedown of the globalist talking point about infinite growth in a finite world.   That gaslighting was at the core of the conflict in the big story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe of films, which centered on Thanos coming to bring balance by destroying half of the life in the Universe.

Davos has gaslit two entire generations of westerners in the Malthusian talking point that you can’t have infinite growth in a finite world. All of their economic dogma is predicated on this.

It doesn’t matter that this talking point is predicated on an inane premise, truth is, after all treason, at this point in the economic and cultural cycle. But, to try and explain quickly for the slow-witted. GDP growth is not necessarily real growth. It’s just spending. It says nothing for the quality of the spending or whether, in real terms, the people spending the money are materially better off than they were at a previous point in time.

What isn’t measured by GDP is VALUE. Value is what we crave, the ability to plan further into the future, using our ingenuity to find better mousetraps to build and more efficient, and yes sustainable, ways of deploying scarce capital and time.

When you have a monetary system and regulatory regime designed to thwart that to stop growth then you have the world we live in today. That infinite growth is a subjective, not objective, measure…. not in GDP terms but in the ‘alleviation of human misery’ terms.

Davos absolutely doesn’t want this because a world where everyone gets maximal value for their time is a world without our need for them.

Thanos in the Marvel films makes the same mistake Davos and Huxley made, deciding in their hubris and arrogance that because they couldn’t see a solution to a problem they’d defined, that solution did not exist. This justified their acquisition of power unlimited to re-make the world in their image.

I liked his conclusion in particular:

At that point you will then see what the real growth rate of the world is.  Gary North used to say that prior to the early 1800’s the real rate at which wealth compounded was ~1% annually.  Then something changed and it doubled to 2% and that scared the bejeesus out of the elites because too many people were getting rich too quickly to need them to look out for their interests.

Now you know why the Club of Rome began in the 1850’s, why central banking was so bitterly fought over here in the US then. It’s why Marx’s insane ideas were adopted by those with generational power.  It was to STOP our growth as a species, not keep it from destroying the planet, but their system of unearned privilege.

There is no climate emergency

Consider Signing the World Climate Declaration

From the “Climate Intelligence” website:

>>>>>

A global network of 900 scientists and professionals has prepared this urgent message. Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

Warming is far slower than predicted

The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.

Climate policy relies on inadequate models

Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.

CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.

Global warming has not increased natural disasters

There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.

Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities

There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.

Epilogue

The World Climate Declaration (WCD) has brought a large variety of competent scientists together from all over the world*. The considerable knowledge and experience of this group is indispensable in reaching a balanced, dispassionate and competent view of climate change.

From now onward the group is going to function as “Global Climate Intelligence Group”. The CLINTEL Group will give solicited and unsolicited advice on climate change and energy transition to governments and companies worldwide.

* It is not the number of experts but the quality of arguments that counts

World Climate Declaration plus all signatories in pdf

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