Links tagged “goverance”

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."

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a Portuguese socialist urged: "A New Global Deal, based on a fair globalization, on the rights and dignity of every human being, on living in balance with nature, on taking account of the rights of future generations, and on success measured in human rather than economic terms, is the best way to change this."

Update: Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore responds to study: "How does this garbage get published? I have never seen the forests and wild lands so lush with growth. The CO2 fertilization effect is real, 35% increase in growth, caused by affluence. Can’t we teach them just one thing, that the CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere came from there in the first place? That fossil fuels were made from plants?"

Eric Worrall at WattsUpWithThat: "Central planning, rationing, price controls, punitive wealth taxes and wealth redistribution. The glorious future climate concerned scientists are planning for us."

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New study in the journal Nature Communications - June 2020: "The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts." Propose "far-reaching lifestyle changes."

"We provide evidence from the literature that consumption of affluent households worldwide is by far the strongest determinant and the strongest accelerator of increases of global environmental and social impacts." - "These solution approaches range from reformist to radical ideas, including degrowth, eco-socialism and eco-anarchism."

Study laments that "low-income groups are rapidly occupying middle- and high-income brackets around the world. This can potentially further exacerbate the impacts of mobility-related consumption, which has been shown to disproportionately increase with income." - "Affluence needs to be addressed by reducing consumption."

'A shift beyond capitalism': "It is clear that prevailing capitalist, growth-driven economic systems have not only increased affluence since World War II, but have led to enormous increases in inequality, financial instability, resource consumption and environmental pressures on vital earth support systems"

New goal: "Avoid or to reduce consumption until the remaining consumption level falls within planetary boundaries, while fulfilling human needs." ...Avoiding consumption means not consuming certain goods and services, from living space (overly large homes, secondary residences of the wealthy) to oversized vehicles, environmentally damaging and wasteful food, leisure patterns and work patterns involving driving and flying."

Propose ‘sustainable consumption corridors’, i.e. minimum and maximum consumption standards.'

"Eco-feminist approaches highlight the role of patriarchal social relations and the parallels between the oppression of women and exploitation of nature."  ... "Strengthen equality and redistribution through suitable taxation policies, basic income and job guarantees and by setting maximum income levels, expanding public services and rolling back neoliberal reforms (e.g. as part of a Green New Deal)."

'Setting maximum income levels': "The transformation of economic systems can be supported with innovative business models that encourage sharing and giving economies, based on cooperation, communities and localised economies instead of competition"

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Note: The journal Nature likes touting 'degrowth.' See: STUDY in Nature in 2018: Global wealth redistribution, economic ‘degrowth’ needed to fight ‘global warming’

C.S. Lewis warning: "I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value."

Legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions for individual German ministries are a danger to democracy, says the Christian Democrat MP Andreas Lämmel. He is warning of a “dictatorship of climate law”.

MP Lämmel: 'We have overcome the dictatorship of the proletariat here in East Germany, and now we are facing a dictatorship of the climate law. I do not consider this law to be compatible with a market economy.'

Christian Democrat MP Andreas Lämmel is the CDU chairman of the Economics Committee in the German Bundestag

Flashback 2009: ALERT: German Climate Advisor 'proposes creation of a CO2 budget for every person on planet!'