Here’s a scary clip produced by some green Marxists at the German Federal Office of the Environment, who seem to have taken it upon themselves to tell the rest of us how to live. If this represents the government’s view and the target it has in mind for its citizens, then it’s awfully spooky. (Clip is in German – main points are described below).
It’s back to central planning, housing project living, and being told exactly how to live – all the failed experiments of the past, all combined and packaged as a religion that promises salvation.
Remember how the communists promised paradise for workers? This is the same pipe dream. The problem with all of it is that it is not based on the fundamental laws of economics, and so it will definitely fail. Many of the diagnoses offered in the first half of the clip are not even true, and the remedies proposed thereafter contradict each other.
The makers of this clip are sure that the world’s problems are because we are all behaving badly, and that we have to be made to behave differently – dictated – in a way that suits their world view. The world is threatened, says the film, by population growth and our consumption, and demands a system of redistribution.
Here are some of the main points:
1. We are all spoiled. We cannot, or simply do not want to, go without the things we use daily. We are using more than what nature is capable of giving. We are using much too much. We are living way beyond our means.
2. We are addicted to a huge array of products that we believe make our lives easier. We are leading lives of profligacy, which requires gigantic amounts of resources like, water, raw material and energy. The planet will soon be depleted.
The disgruntled among us have been saying this for at least 2 centuries. Yet, everyday we keep finding more than we need. Things are better today than ever.
3. The guilty parties are North America and Europe. The industrialised countries use more than their fair share. Each German uses 60 tons of material annually, Americans 130 tons. This can no lonager be tolerated.
This is called prosperity. Obviously a concept that the clip’s makers have an aversion to. Note that most material is not consumed – but used. It doesn’t disappear.
4. By 2030, 20% of the most important raw materials will reach their production limits.
5. All this consumption is leading to many things, particularly climate change and species extinsction.
6. Expanding deserts, multiplication od disaeases, wars and resource shortages are threatening future generations.
The clip doesn’t say which materials. And actually deserts are shrinking. They tend to grow when the planet cools.
7. People in industrialised nations are only able to be so wasteful because people in other poor countries have to go without raw materials.
8. Our level of prosperity is not possible for everyone.
That’s false. It’s people in developing countries that need to learn how to use raw materials. This comes with free markets and education. Any normal person with a 4th grade education or more knows that the planet gets destroyed in undeveloped countries, and protected in developed countries. The solution is for the rest of the world to live like we do. The clip claims:
9. We have to change our thinking radically. Only through a drastic reduction in our consumption of resources through dematerialisation will we be able to sustainably secure our future. We have to consume less.
10. For example, many of the things that we seldom use can be borrowed among friends. Things like the electric drill, lawnmower. We have to redesign our tools so that they have longer lifetimes, or can be repaired, easily dismantled and to recycle.
This is so stupid – economic ignorance now in full display. Imagine if we designed a long life copy machine to last 20 years. It would be obselete in three years, and so it would wind up consuming too much energy and operating too slowly during the remaining 17 years. This film was made by technical and economic illiterates. The clip then suggests we need to:
11. Use public laundermats, buy second hand clothes, ride bicycles and have fun at “sustanaible parties”.
WTF? Yeah right, When I was young I worked years with the target of getting away from having to do that. This is back to Soviet living. And the clip says we ought to think about using kooky ideas like:
12. Wind-powered ships, wind-powered buildings.
13. Powering everything with renewables.
Get ready to pay a fortune for an unreliable and primitive source of energy. Indeed get ready to fork it all over. The film then has the temerity to say:
14. Today’s prices do not reflect the ecology. That has to change.
15. Taxes on resources have to go up!
Yes, they want to take everything away from us. Everybody has to get along with much less – except for the state, of course. For them it’s more! more! more! Now we know what all this is about – state power. Power and wealth to the state, and not the individual. This clip is an example of the propaganda, one that despises humanity, that we are getting in Germany for our tax euros.
Folks, you’ve got to start talking to your local and regional politicians and business leaders about this. The higher-ups are all drugged up with their “let’s-take-over-and-save-the-planet” fantasies. It has to start from the botrtom up, like the tea party candidates.
It’s not the people that “need to drastically change their thinking”. It’s the intoxicated politicians that do.
Jut like celebrating earth hour, this clip is promoting
ignorance, poverty and backwardness.
We should send the producers a clear message! Oh, you just did.
Great – around 0:50 – “all of this (consumer goods) consumes too much – water, raw materials, land…” – completely unlike wind farms, n’est-ce pas?
Don’t expect anything less from the German Umweltbundesamt. On average, Germans have no grasp of the economy at all, it doesn’t get taught in school. They don’t teach us about technological progress, product design, marketing, free-market principles like supply and demand, or the benefits of competition. We never hear of free-market thinkers like Adam Smith, Hayek or Ayn Rand in school, but a lot of German romantic poets like Schiller and Goethe and crazy philosopher-revoluzzers like Marx and Hitler.
Concerning economic knowledge, the people at the Umweltbundesamt are of course even below this abysmal average. Largely busying themselves with finding out about the CO2 footprint of some household item and other inanities. They are Beamte – officials you can’t fire – so they will never have to survive in the marketplace.
You can’t expect to hold them accountable for the devolution propaganda they’re issuing. They are all Malthusians.
Near the end: “Animation: Morphium Film GbR”. (Morphium=Morphine)
Yeah, that’s exactly how it looked like. Berlin-based. David Bowie called Berlin the Heroin capital of the world in the 70ies, i guess Morphine should be available as well.
http://www.morphium-film.de/
And BTW, when you call a German a Malthusian, he usually doesn’t know what you mean. They think of themselves as being so informed and smart and advanced yet they don’t even know they’re just parroting Ehrlich and Malthus and the WWF’s propaganda.
On the plus side, you can easily take advantage of them when they throw their stocks on the market, panic-stricken by some minor mishap.
The logo of Morphium Film GbR is a chimpanzee committing suicide with a handgun. Kind of distills the spirit of German creative culture rather splendidly, i’d say. (I’m allowed to say that – i’m a native and i know some “creative” people…)
http://blog.morphium-film.de/category/produktionen/page/2/
It doesn’t look good
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12876083
Looks like the Greens may be running the state of BW. Looking bleak for the German economy if this trend continues. (It likely will).
Yes, they have to sit it through but after that they will be wiped from the charts because….. you know, spending other people’s money and all.
Besides that, the greens are against bio ethanol, shale gas, wind mills, coal plants, nuclear plants etc. How far do you really think they will get?
It will be fun to watch how the economy of Badem-Württemberg will now have to make do with wind and solar power, sustainable parties and the erection of small wind turbines on top of the office towers of Stuttgart. I foresee an enormous wave of enthusiasm. 😉
Wikipedia: “Morphine is the most abundant alkaloid found in opium”. Hmm – didn’t somebody coin a phrase about the “opium of the people”?
Good observation, Ulrich.
The minister president of a German Bundesland, BTW, has primarily two competences: education policies and the police in his land. In the case of BW, they also recently acquired EnBW, the local utility, so that’s owned by them and the Greens can now prove their mettle by switching off the nuclear reactors of EnBW, two of which were already ordered off by Merkel.
There is not much wind power in BW – it’s a hilly landscape with little wind; most of the wind power is in Northern and Eastern Germany, and not enough transmission lines down to BW; one of the reasons they had a bit of nuclear power.
It will be interesting to see what the Greens will actually change.
First post-election rioting at the construction site of Stuttgart 21, the planned new central rail station. (The old government wanted to push the project through; greens and other leftists were rioting against it over the past months)
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hJO4-roXOzC78F3jn32hgjrqFXRw?docId=CNG.e0fbdd59ea2f43a95f10ec7dfd9f7b35.b61
The project is, of course, now dead and the land will have to pay enormous damages to the companies involved. The first step towards its own emasculation.
Are they having a laugh?
Or, if they are serious, then there is no hope for some of the human race [ a minority I HOPE!].
Mind you, the latest election news from [Exit poll showing] Baden-Wurttemburg, I dunno whether to cheer or cry!
It’s a mad, bad world and it’s getting madder.
If a sustainable party is what it sounds like – when and where does the next one start? Are the wines and beer all German?
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Oh, have these bright lights never heard of the Simon-Ehrlich wager?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
. . . another one of the many failed ideas of Paul Ehrlich.
It is not a commonly known story in Germany. My teachers, for instance, mentioned Limits To Growth but they never mentioned the various rebuttals; and that was already in about 1982 where we should have run out of various raw materials already, which we didn’t.
Germany is a kind of cultural afterburner to the English speaking world… We live with a phase shift of at least 5 years. The fun thing is, the eco-renewable movement in Germany considers itself the worldwide avantgarde. If they had at least stalinist aesthetics…
http://alannothnagle.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/the-renaissance-of-stalinist-art-in-africa/
then it might at least be impressive…
Pierre wrote:
“Note that most material is not consumed – but used.”
Well, the Engineer in me won’t even accept “used”. “Converted” is a better word to describe what happens to a material or energy when it goes through a process. The process produces primary and by-products. There is no “waste”. Not even the heat that goes into the cold-sink of a thermal process.
What others call “waste”, Engineers call “by-products without further, local processing potential”.
Just watched the whole video from the Bundes-Märchen-Amt.
The meter pegged at 100 lies/minute.
Equating resource production with resource availability is ludicrous.
The claim that no country has the resources to be self-sustaining is laughable. The simple fact that international trade exists is why domestic resources remain unexploited. International trade with less-prosperous nations which enablesthem to become more prosperous.
Trade was “invented” many thousands of years ago because some people were able to produce something better than others. Producing a surplus allowed them to exchange that surplus for goods and services that others are better able to provide.
“Renewable energy” sources require far more raw materials per TWh of reliable power generated than do gas-/coal-fired or nuclear power stations. They conveniently forgot about that.
“It’s not the people that “need to drastically change their thinking”. It’s the intoxicated politicians that do”.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/28/bombshell-conclusion-new-peer-reviewed-analysis-worldwide-temperature-increase-has-not-produced-acceleration-of-global-sea-level-over-the-past-100-years/#more-36776
EU: Ban all gasoline and diesel cars by 2050
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12879566
Ron was faster than me.
It is telling that a German paper, even though it is not exactly leftist, does not criticize the plan for its dictatorial nature.
http://www.focus.de/politik/weitere-meldungen/verkehrsfahrplan-2050-eu-will-verkehr-schneller-besser-und-sicherer-machen_aid_613003.html
We have no support, neither left nor right – there is not a hint of freedom on the continent.
Note to self: reconsider emigration again. Get out of Europe while they let you.
Der Focus notes that the plans of ex-communist EU Commissioner Kallas do not go far enough in the eyes of environmentalist organisations. Which shows clearly that these environmentalist organisations are stooges of the EU; ordered to protest for even more strangulation. The financial ties are there, i’m too lazy to google for them now… The EU controls the protesters that demand ever more reduction of personal freedom.
In the middle decades of the last century in the UK, “green” was a term of mockery, generally meaning useless, as in “wet behind the ears” or “doesn’t know his arse from his elbow”.
Ah, the good old days.
I’ll bet none of these twits is old enough to remember life in the DDR.