Hans Schellnhuber’s Social Contract For Sustainability‘s real economic and social impacts would be incalculable. This has never been attempted before, and its approach completely contradicts all fundamental economic and scientific principles. Moreover, it is to be implemented without first having a public debate, and to be done so at warp speed. This in itself makes the plan reckless, callous and extremely dangerous. It especially puts the poorest among us at risk. And with its authors having castigated our modern society time and again, it is de facto a Declaration of War on our current system.
That’s the conclusion I have reached having read in more detail Hans Schellhuber’s Social Contract For Sustainability, which he himself dubbed “a masterplan” for radically transforming society. It is truly baffling that this scheme could get so far.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
And when one considers the arrogance and the scientific dogma that propels Schellhuber’s Social Contract for Sustainability, even the notion of good intentions disappears. From Schellnhuber’s and his peers’ expressed views, one senses the genuine spite they must harbour for today’s modern democratic society and our system of prosperity and freedom. Anyone else would certainly use a different approach to bring about change.
Their manifesto not only calls for a radical overhaul of society, and especially the energy systems that support human life on the planet, but also of our politics and even the way we think. On page 1:
…the requisite transformation encompasses profound changes to infrastructures, production processes, regulation systems and lifestyles, and extends to a new kind of interaction between politics, society, science and the economy.”
Especially disturbing is Schellnhuber’s use of fabricated, junk-science-based horror scenarios for justifying a takeover of today’s democratic and free market system. Although there is a huge body of science showing that CO2 has only a minor, easily manageable impact on climate, Schellnhuber writes on page 1:
This drastic change in direction must be accomplished before the end of the current decade in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to a minimum by 2050, and thereby to maintain the possibility of avoiding dangerous climate change. Hence, time is of the essence here.”
Like the Pope Declaring The Islamic World Is To Convert To Christianity By 2020
Worse, the plan callously disregards all the obvious huge risks involved in this great social engineering experiment. The plan ignores science and violates every fundamental economic principle, and so poses a threat of an unimaginable scale to the humankind, society and the environment. The Social Contract to Sustainability is equivalent to a Chilton’s How To Replace Jet Engines On An Airbus 380 Over To Propellers While In Flight And In Just 10 Minutes. Or, a plan from the Vatican to convert the Islamic World to Christianity by 2020.
More worrisome is that this Green Masterplan is now in the hands of every European Environment Minister, who are drooling over all the power it promises to bring them. It won’t work without something going horrifically wrong. We saw similar results with the Soviet Union.
Not only do the masterplan’s authors want to skip debate and necessary public discussion, which normally precede proposed public endeavours in democratic and open societies, they also insist that it all has to be done ultra-rapidly, “before the end of the decade”, without debate and always with the fictitious gun barrel of imminent climate catastrophe at our heads. This is a sort of psycho-terror.
Except for their dubious computer models, there is no scientific data to suggest any sort of urgency. It is pure Malthusian paranoia. Don’t let the fuzzy warm platitudes about democracy and human rights in the text at the beginning of the Contract fool you – that’s sheep’s wool over the wolf. In fact the poor will get slammed the hardest.
Denying the poor cheap energy
This is probably the worst part of it all – the plan’s schemes to deny the poor cheap and plentiful energies that would lift them out of their abject poverty. Many poorer countries are planning to use nuclear energies to power their futures, but the masterminds oppose this. Page 3:
Several countries are currently planning to increase their use of nuclear energy. The WBGU urgently advises against this, above all because of the not negligible risks accompanying cases of serious damage, the still unresolved issues concerning final storage, and the danger of uncontrolled proliferation. Existing plants should be replaced by sustainable energy technologies as soon as possible, and, in the case of evident safety deficiencies, be closed down immediately. However, the phase-out of nuclear energy must not be compensated by renewed or intensified brown or black coal based energy generation.
Because it’ll be brutal enough for the richer countries to bear the high costs of renewable energy, you’d think the poor would get a pass be allowed to burn the cheap available energy beneath their feet. Nein! – says Schellnhuber. The council denies them fossil fuels as well, adding later on page 3:
The requisite decarbonisation of energy systems means that the pressure is on to act, not just in the industrialised countries, but also in the dynamically growing industrialising and developing countries. Even the poorer developing countries must veer towards a low-emission development path in the medium-term. The era of fossil energy carrier reliant economic growth must be brought to an end.”
Schellnhuber’s eerie attempts to bring an end to the carbonised society would in fact likely bring about the premature end to millions of lives.
Cost: $1 trillion PER YEAR, and significantly higher after 2030:
Even though many western governments are hopelessly caught in the unsustainable trap of massive debt, printing presses will likely be fired up to print money to pay for it all. The costs even by the masterplan’s admission are staggering. Page 4 states:
Globally, the additional investment required for transformation into a low-carbon society, compared with the cost of ‘just carrying on as we are’, probably lies somewhere in the region of at least 200 to up to 1,000 billion US dollars per year by 2030, and would significantly exceed this amount between 2030 and 2050. These investments will be offset by later savings of a similar size, and the avoidance of the immense costs of dangerous climate change.
This is all to avoid fictitious future “immense costs”. Now one gets a sense as to why this would border on a social and humanitarian folly of unprecedented dimensions.
It won’t work. Printing money to pay for it won’t work because inflation will just increase the costs beyond what the stacks of worthless paper will pay for. Increased debt won’t pay for it because no one can or will buy the debt for a price (interest rate) that can be sustained. The only way to get more money is to build the economies involved. The only way to do that is to allow market forces to dictate the cost of energy, the basis of all economies. The laws of economics, like the laws of physics, cannot be broken. The four horses of the apocalypse are being saddled up.
Ed, it is funny that every journalist can explain how the oil price shock of the 70ies lead to an economic crisis (rather obviously when one thinks about it) yet nowhere, not even in financial papers, do i find the connection made between the ruinous energy policies of the EU and the collapses of the PIIGS states. (Portugal produces 45% of its energy with renewables; something i picked from the wikipedia but NEVER saw mentioned in the thousands of articles about Portugal and its financial crisis i’ve read).
I give them 10 years to be able to explain it as something that everyone should have seen coming.
Oh, and we had 10% inflation in Germany for a few years after the oil price shock.
…make that “45% of its electricity”; we don’t want to sink to the accuracy level of journalism…
As with Socialism, the reasoning backing up the Dictatorship of the Ecotariat has becom unfalsifiable, since now cold and snowy winters are incontrovertible proof of increasing Global Warming. If the climate does not collapse, these people are vindicated because they Saved the World; if there is any temperature divergence up or down (even if it’s only a stastitical artifact), everybody must redouble their efforts, again and again. Dissent among the Proles and the inability to supply them with the bare necessities of life can only be the work of saboteurs and unbelievers. The avowed aim of Socialism was to overcome the working conditions of the early Industrial Revolution (“Manchester capitalism” in the sense of the caricature that Engals and Kautsky painted of it) and Feudal power structures, and it ended up (re)producing both in a nightmarish measure that was never present in the original. I wouldn’t be surprised if the implementation of the Morgenthau 2.0 – sorry, the Schellnhuber Plan produced climate disruption on a scale undreamed of by Al Gore and Lord Stern.
Karl Popper’s ‘The open society and its enemies’ applies perfectly at these totalitarian plans, but the element of ‘dangerous climate change’ makes them almost surreal. Whether Schellnhuber’s horror story comes true, has to be seen, but we need a huge library to our madhouse in order to save these reports for future historians.
” These investments will be offset by later savings of a similar size,”
Fat chance – given that Schellnhuber et al freely confess that they know nothing about economy and don’t want to know anything about it.
I half pity the poor post-docs they exploited to produce their pamphlet, half do i think the post-docs have chosen their own fate and so deserve their descent into oblivion, which will be a certainty. The only good thing that will ever happen to them are a few taxpayer-funded Margeritas in some exotic tourist trap on one of the inevitable Climate Change Conferences.
First Global Revolution cloaked by good green intentions.
This traitor belongs in jail, together with all the other insane hacks in support of the green doctrine.
People should connect the dots between the immigration issue, the financial crises and the incredible amounts of debt we’re stacking up, the absolutely green power BS and the reduction of our military capacity.
They are all part of the same scheme. WAKE UP
http://rarereaders.seablogger.com/2011/04/us-deficit-sky-rockets-16-in-6-months/
Oh. Now i see where “liberal” comes from. From “liberal spending”. 😉
From wikipedia:
“Schellnhuber was ‘coordinating lead author of the synthesis chapter of Working Group II’ of the Third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”.
There is no doubt that for climate alarmists the goal has always been to transform society into the model that they prefer. They are much more interested in social engineering than climate science.
They’re not just denying energy. Also toilet paper!
http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20110413-34349.html
🙂
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