Schellnhuber’s Plan Is Dangerous Social Engineering Adventurism – Denies Cheap Energy To The Poor

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.