Links tagged “development”

"Today, we live some 100 times better than did our ancestors at the end of the 18th century.  The luxuries that we take for granted — abundant food on demand, clean running water, electricity, electronic communications and media, advanced medical care, inexpensive clothing, home and office heating, rapid transportation, universal basic education, free libraries, and dozens of other important advances — are linked to warming temperatures that have afforded enough surplus food to support educators, scientists, inventors, technicians, physicians, and the suppliers of so many of our modern conveniences." ...

"Global food production has exploded since 1970, due in part to a favorable climate.  For the first time in human history, we live in an age during which it is not necessary for large numbers of human beings to go hungry."

C.S. Lewis: “I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in.”

Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961: “We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."  - Eisenhower: "A government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity” and “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever-present and is gravely to be regarded.” 

The World Economic Forum has called for “a Great Reset of capitalism” due to COVID and to help fight climate change. Klaus Schwab said the virus has given us an “opportunity” to pursue “equality & sustainability.”  - "The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions," Schwab explained.

Thomas Sowell: “Experts are often called in, not to provide factual information or dispassionate analysis for the purpose of decision-making by responsible officials, but to give political cover for decisions already made and based on other considerations entirely." 

“A flu d’état.” “A takeover of our supposedly democratic political process by unelected & unaccountable administrative state medical bureaucrats."

Peter Hitchens: "All the crudest weapons of despotism, the curfew, the presumption of guilt and the power of arbitrary arrest, are taking shape in the midst of what used to be a free country."

David McDermott Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of Energy without Conscience: "For a while, let’s eat a cold dinner here and there. Continuity costs too much. Climate change kills, and it kills vulnerable people first. Intermittency saves lives, and it saves vulnerable people first. Let the pause take its place in continuous climate activism...What applies in the pandemic also applies—and also with desperate urgency—in the climate crisis. We can live with some intermittency and rationing—at least until batteries and other forms of energy storage are up and running everywhere." 

"The United States has built a vast infrastructure for generating, transmitting, and consuming it—all almost entirely based on planet-destroying fossil fuels and nuclear power." - "Renewables can provide that plenitude—and already do through wind and solar farms in Texas and California—but not necessarily all the time. The sun shines at us constantly, with more energy that we can possibly use at any moment, but the Earth’s rotation puts us in shadow at nightfall. And wind, of course, can simply stop. As a result, the leading fossil- and nuclear-free sources of energy bounce from feast to famine, raising the possibility of more frequent and longer power cuts. Critics—often supporters of natural gas—say wind and solar power are “not ready.” Renewables, they warn us, pose an “intermittency problem.” ... "For those seriously concerned about climate change, the inverse—the demand for electrical continuity—may be the real problem...We ought to consider enduring much more than six hours of electrical downtime every year for the sake of transitioning more rapidly away from fossil fuels."

Michael Shellenberger: "It was economic growth that lifted Thunberg’s ancestors out of agrarian poverty, raised life expectancy from 40 to 70 years, and liberated women and girls from feudal patriarchy. Without Sweden’s economic growth, and the fossil fuels upon which it depended, the person who is Greta Thunberg would not exist...in the name of fighting climate change, powerful first-world organizations including Sierra Club and Greenpeace, whose annual revenues nearly total $500 million, have forced World Bank and other banks to divert lending from cheap and reliable energy sources like hydroelectric dams and natural gas power plants to expensive and unreliable ones like solar panels and industrial wind turbines. And, last year, Thunberg and other student climate activists even sued Brazil, where per capita incomes are just 25% that of Sweden, for supposedly not doing enough to restrict greenhouse gas emissions..."

"Increased wealth from manufacturing is what allows nations to build the roads, power plants, electricity grids, flood control, sanitation, and waste management systems that distinguish poor nations like the Congo from rich ones like Sweden."

"Two years later, an Indian village made worldwide headlines after it rebelled against the solar panel and battery “micro-grid” Greenpeace had created as a supposed model of energy leapfrogging for the world’s poorest people. The electricity was unreliable and expensive.  “We want real electricity,” chanted villagers at a state politician, “not fake electricity!” Children held up signs saying the same thing. By “real electricity” they meant reliable grid electricity, which is mostly produced from coal. The village was shortly thereafter connected to the grid."

Such a fall would remove some of the projected strain on natural resources but would present governments with stark policy choices over migration and the economy. The world’s population will peak at 9.7 billion in 2064 and decline to 8.8 billion by the end of the century, according to research led by the University of Washington in the US and published in the Lancet. It says some countries, including Japan, Spain and Italy, will see their populations halve, while sub-Saharan Africa’s population will triple in the next 80 years. ...

The number of older people will overtake the young, with 2.4 billion people over the age of 65 forecast by 2100, compared with 1.7 billion under the age of 20. The major factors in shrinking the population are widening access to contraception and improvements in educating women and girls. If those trends are curtailed, higher growth will ensue.