Global warming is a scam and I’ll explain exactly why. As human societies developed, many facts of life changed. One huge feature of civilizations that changed is the gap between the extreme rich and the extreme poor narrowed considerably. For example in the USA, even a very poor person has most of the things a wealthy person like Taylor Swift enjoys. The poor man has roughly the same life expectancy as the rich and he’s not worried about dropping dead from periodic famines. Better yet, he has most of the same luxury items as the rich. He has a cell phone, a car, a TV, etc. He doesn’t own a private jet, but he can book a flight almost anywhere relatively cheaply. The list of items of conspicuous consumption is shrinking rapidly as time goes on. The majority of humans are enjoying a quality of life unimaginable to past generations.
And there is absolutely nothing else in the world that angers the rich like having the filthy, disgusting, pathetic, worthless poors share the same standard of living.
Not only is true conspicuous consumption getting harder to flaunt, there’s clutter. If Taylor Swift wants to hop in a $10 million Lamborgini and drive to one of her mansions, she still has to drive on the same roads as the disgusting poors, which causes delays. There might even be traffic jams. Being slightly inconvenienced by the clutter of disgusting poors is so aggravating, Taylor Swift takes 13 minute flights on her private jet to avoid them. But there’s really nowhere Taylor Swift can go to avoid the poors. She can jet off to Italy, France, Switzerland, or almost anywhere else, and there’s probably at least a few disgusting American poors there too, daring to enjoy a relatively similar vacation as hers.
The only way to reduce the clutter of conspicuous consumption is to just make those things illegal for poor people to enjoy. Maybe not explicitly illegal, but priced in a way that it is unattainable. You want to vacation in Paris? Too bad, all air travel is illegal unless you can buy a carbon offset, which is deliberately priced to be unaffordable to anyone except the rich. You want to buy a nice country home with a long commute? Okay sure, if you’re willing to pay the exhorbitant mileage tax, which like everything else, is deliberately priced so only the rich can can use it freely. Oh speaking of mileage, you want to buy a car? Only if it’s a $40 thousand Tesla, I hope you can afford that. You want to go to a restaurant and have a nice ribeye steak? Too bad, you have to eat bugs like a 13th century serf.
As poverty becomes a thing of the past, our elites have to replace it with artificial poverty. There is no other reason for this except they hate us and think we’re disgusting.
Ian Kummer
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Hi Ian, unfortunately, here you’re not right. Well, in a sense, you are. Anyway, global warming as a scientific phenomenon is not a scam (contrary to the extreme amount of bs you may hear). Science (I mean Natural Science, the S in STEM) is not a thing that you can just dismiss out of hand. Furthermore, science is (in a very broad sense) politics neutral (nothing is neutral but I don’t want to get into this now; suffice to say that eg. the laws of thermodynamics are very hard to be politicized).
So science says that what we are experiencing here is really dangerous. It will very likely change various parts of the Earth in an extreme way extremely quickly. Some parts will become literally uninhabitable (like parts of the Persian Gulf will likely experience, at least seasonally but for long intervals, temperatures above 50C). The only way we can avoid the extreme part here is reducing fossil related carbon output to zero as quickly as possible. Again, this is what science says, and again, you can’t just dismiss it. And please spare me from the WUWT and similar bs. That’s really bs.
The “what we can do with it” part is a bit different. Capitalism is completely and utterly unable to answer to any challenge we face, this is why you hear about “consumption”, “EV”, and “renewables” etc. These are the bs solutions, the things that are harmless but look like we’re doing something. The problem is structural, and on that level nothing is happening at the moment. By the way, climate change denial is very likely the only anti science campaign nowadays that has actual huge finance, from, of course, the extremely rich. These guys think they can get away with this, and what happens to the poor is irrelevant.
Hi Nyolci,
I won’t dispute your points as I’m not a scientist, hence why I don’t directly comment on data. I just question the premise of “the world is ending and the only way to stop that is if YOU make sacrifices.”
Also, I have yet to find even one liberal who is willing to end all wars (even at a disadvantage) in the name of fighting climate change. If someone is not willing to stop the single most polluting activity, then he doesn’t actually believe the things he’s preaching.
“I just question the premise…” And this is part where we don’t have any disagreement.
I am sceptical of the climate change thing, partially because of the reasons Ian pointed out – it isn’t King Charles or Claus Schwab or Bill Gates who has to give up their life of luxury and convenience – it’s us.
However, the climate change political movement has based its campaigning on “scientific” models which consistently fail. For example, at school (around 1990), we were taught in the climate change portion of the Chemistry GCSE course, that climate change would mean the Maldives would be underwater by 2000. I know someone who went there last year. They are definitely NOT underwater. The predictions of disaster have turned out to be wildly inaccurate, which means the “science” on which the models are based is also wildly inaccurate.
It possible that the climate change people are like the boy who cried wolf. They are BSing us for political reasons now, but there is actually a wolf there, which is why I am sceptical, not totally disbelieving. However, it seems strange that many climate scientists seem to change their tune at the end of their careers, when they no longer need to chase research grants dished out by organisations pushing the climate change agenda.
Another thing that should be considered is that the climate changes anyway and has done so quite radically in relatively recent times, at least on the geological time frame. A few thousand years ago, The Sahara was savannah, much of it wooded, with rivers and large lakes. One theory is that the 2 degree oscillation of the earth on its axis every 41000 years might be the cause – nothing to do with humans.
Even CO2 levels might not be the cause of temperature change in historical records. Bubbles of air trapped in ice sheets indicate that CO2 increase FOLLOWS pre-historic temperature increases after a few thousand year delay.
Finally, and I admit that this might seem a weak argument to many, but the actions of the political wing of the environmental movement do not seem to reflect a deep belief in the truth of the claims they make. I used to be a member of the Green Party in the UK. After the referendum to leave the EU, the Green Party and its only MP seemed to completely forget about the environment. The only issue that seemed to matter to them was trying to stop the country from leaving the EU (the same EU whose policies it had castigated in their 2010 election leaflets for the devastating effects they had on fish and insect life). In short, they gave me the distinct impression that they didn’t really care about the environment, that was just green-wash for their essentially pro-Establishment, pro-EU position.
Another example of this is the Green Party in Germany – what do they bring to the table except extreme Russophobia? How is encouraging Poroshenko and now Zelensky to kill Russians in the Donbass tackling climate change? It isn’t – they don’t care about climate change. And if they don’t, why should I?
“on “scientific” models which consistently fail” and “The predictions of disaster have turned out to be wildly inaccurate”
This is simply false. Scientists are very circumspect in their predictions but we rarely read them directly. To be honest, it’s very hard to read them directly. Unfortunately, what we get is how journalists translate these. Add to this a very well financed and conscious denial campaign that is actively obfuscating the issue. I’m a long time reader of one of the leading bsing sites, WUWT, and I can see with my eyes how extremely easy it is to confuse non-experts. Actually, I have noticed that it’s easy to confuse even experts if their expertise is outside the narrower field in question. It’s not an accident that the “Nobel disease” is a thing.
Again, the actual _scientific_ predictions have been validated, and the thing is that we have enough data now to say that climate change is out of what we can consider “normal”. In other words, we have enough data to scientifically claim that what we have today is _not_ normal variability, not the “climate is always changing”. This is the “consensus” what you can hear a lot of bs about in the WUWT and other places.
This is the science part. The politics part is entirely different, and I can understand why people find that disgusting.
It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, or if it is primarily man made or not. Turning back the clock is not possible. We have to power through it.
Strongly disagree.
The most egalitarian societies were tribal & nomadic.
There was no property beyond personal effects.
The concentration of wealth in today’s world is orders of magnitude greater than at any time in the past.
There is almost 20 years difference in life expectancy between the lower and upper quintile of today’s society.
In the past, the wealthy were also vulnerable to famine, war, draught, cold, and disease.
It is true that almost everyone has a bank account and a cell phone, but you cannot earn a living or participate in society in a meaningful way without it.
Poverty is not a matter of a dearth of stuff, and never has been.
Poverty is a man-made social artefact, in which some live in deprivation among plenty, excluded from normal social congress.
And what is the point of being wealthy if not to be able to tell others to act on your behalf?
“Poverty is a man-made social artefact”
Exactly. Furthermore, we may live better than the people in the 19th century but the signs are concerning. Life expectancy is decreasing in the US, “school lunch debt” is a thing together with “food insecurity”, etc. Our society is structurally unable to handle anything that is not related to what the ruling class wants.
I am not sure I agree with the noble savage notion, nor would I consider hunter gatherers particularly egalitarian. They’re known to have particularly unfair systems from a modern perspective, especially the distribution of labor between sexes.
A nobleman in his castle is the absolute dead last person to starve in a famine.
Don’t particularly believe in the ‘noble’ savage, but in tribal/nomadic societies there is no inherited privilege and no capital goods to divide unequally. Some people have more influence on decision making, but they cannot easily overturn the opinio communio. Of course the better warriors & hunters had more social status, as did other people with extraordinary talents. And the division of tasks between the sexes was not egalitarian. But neither is Nature.
The nobleman in his castle might be among the last to succumb to hunger & drought, if his knights stayed true (uprisings were common throughout the feudal middle ages, and even more so during the dark ages), but even he could not easily escape. Just as the West is discovering their money does not buy artillery shells. There seems to be some Russian proverb along the lines: Pity the rich, who have nothing to eat but gold;. Lucky for them there are enough peasants willing to exchange some for bread.
Maybe, but it is also much more practical to have some level of egalitarianism when human populations are only a few hundred people. After the invention of agriculture when you have hundreds of thousands or millions of people, stratification becomes inevitable.
True
Hi Ian,
First time commenter.
IMO @nyolci is right. The fact that the elites could shamelessly exploit the unfolding catastrophe called global warming for their own gain does not mean that the catastrophe must therefore be a scam. But it’s a non sequitur, a logical fallacy.
By the same measure, those that profit from instigating war against Russia may well be risking WW3 and therefore nuclear annihilation, including their own, with their actions. Does it make war profiteering irrational? Or a myth, just because it seems irrational? Clearly not.
The elites are positioning themselves to profit from global warming, which is a real catastrophe in slow-motion and for which we humans are not adequately equipped – we don’t really have the cognitive tools to react rationally (or even recognise) risks on the scale and at the speed of global warming. I’m sure you have read Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”, you know how disaster capitalism works.
May I suggest a short documentary called ” The Great Simplification ” by Nate Hagens? It’s on YouTube. He has a full series of podcasts, but I suggest you watch the first documentary that launched the channel. Very science-based and nonpartisan.
Hello, and welcome!
I would be less skeptical of global warming if our oligarchs just said “pollution is bad and we should invest in nuclear energy.” I could get behind that idea. Scientific institutions, like everyone else, are paid by someone, and say what they’re supposed to say.
The second problem – and actually it’s the same problem I have with the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” narrative is that is that these grand calls to action are proposed with no discussion of negative consequences, and that’s a basic principle of risk management. You need to consider the negative consequences of any action you take. De-industrializing the world has MASSIVE consequences, but everyone pretends it doesn’t.
When I visited Yerevan I saw large fields of solar panels. Okay, solar energy is cool, but is that a smart solution for Armenia? Is that something that Armenians are going to be able to realistically maintain (and recycle!) long term? Probably not. It would be much more sensible for Armenia to continue investing in Russian nat gas, which is almost as clean as solar, a lot less hassle, and produces good results.But Russia is bad, and no one in the West actually cares if Armenia has reliable energy or not. And mind you, we’re talking about a country that got so deeply impoverished in the 1990s they had to chop down almost every tree in Yerevan for firewood. That’s how poor they got, and they’re still poor.
I’ll try to take a look at Nate Hagens later this week.
Thanks for your answer, Ian.
Bill Gates is very much pro nuclear, and so are most of the rest of the elites worldwide. It’s normally common people who is against nuclear power.
As to whether nuclear would be remotely sufficient. Well, it wouldn’t. But don’t take my word for it. Nate Hagens had a few guests on his show, none preconceivedly anti nuclear, and the just run the numbers and they don’t stack up.
There is a growing number of coolheaded people who are very worried by climate change who don’t buy the ‘bright green’ narrative at all!
Unfortunately, they don’t have easy solutions to offer (because there aren’t) and so they are ignored by the deniers, and regularly attacked by the green cornucopians.
Hagen’s podcast is a good start.