In 2015, a conglomerate of the Center for American Progress, World Wildlife Fund, Cargill, Mars, and CNA, came together to war game, if you will, a potential scenario that included evolving structural problems in the global supply chain, severe weather events like droughts and floods, food shortages, and general civil unrest. It is an interesting document that is getting a bit of traction in conspiracy minded communities just based on some of the related shocks that are featured in the document. Notably, along with the previously mentioned scenario parameters, the government of Pakistan and Ukraine are both overthrown in the course of the game.
I will not delve too deeply into the weeds on those (but it is a document worth reading); rather, I want to focus on a single aspect that participants in the game try to achieve — an aspect that seems to be the entire basis for Canadian and western policy these days regardless of where you look: the use-reduction of carbon.
Here is an excerpt:
The link between climate and food security was well recognized across the wide
variety of global leaders who played the game. Many of the teams’ actions reflected
players’ acknowledgment that food system vulnerabilities are further exacerbated by the unpredictability of climate effects. Agricultural production can also contribute to negative environmental outcomes, and yet agriculture is often the first sector to experience the consequences of environmental degradation. Recognizing the potentially destructive nature of this feedback loop, players looked to increase agricultural productivity through sustainable and climate-smart practices. In addition, teams agreed to price environmental services, price carbon, support the development of a market for carbon trading, and cap global emissions levels. Teams entered into negotiations regarding a global carbon cap, carbon taxes, carbon “shadow pricing” through regulations, and carbon trading early in the game, but did not agree on implementation actions.
For some reason, governments around the western world are obsessed with the idea that the reduction of carbon is the correct way to respond to a global food crisis. In economics, even the infamous John Maynard Keynes had the wherewithal to argue that we should spend more in bad times and save more in good times. But when it comes to climate science, there is only one theory: We should always cut emissions, no matter the circumstance!
Uck.
Regardless of what ones’ stance is on the impetus behind climate change, a handful of tenuous assumptions are required to believe that any of the suggested changes including a global carbon tax would have any impact on the food security that stems from those changes. We are required to believe, say, that the models are more-or-less correct and humanity has finally figured out the Earth’s ideal climate and, by some divine stroke of luck, it happens to be the climate that occurred in the late 20th century. Furthermore, we must ignore the fact that climate exists within an extremely chaotic system in order to believe that we know the one lynch-pin that causes climate shifts (ie., carbon). Then we must believe that the temperature can be stabilized and all it takes is prudent (yet excessively aggressive and apocalyptic) government policy to do so — and neither “developing countries”, nor the world elite need to make sacrifices to achieve this stabilization. Finally, we must believe that the benefits to food security from stabilizing the climate outweigh the costs, such as less food security that comes from the inability to grow agricultural products that are climate intensive to name just one example. And, of course, if that sounds ideological to anyone, they must be swiftly labelled non-believers and punished appropriately.
Listen. I’m sympathetic to some of the arguments from the climate change crowd. The excesses of modern society are pretty obscene — I mean, do we really need to extract an exceedingly absurd amount of rare earth minerals for phones that cannot be easily repaired and most people replace every year or two? Could there be a free market green solution to our energy needs, which would also serve the function of decentralizing the power grid to some degree, thereby limiting government control over the populace? Does Jeff Bezos really need to gallivant around Earth’s atmosphere for a few minutes at a time just to fulfill some childhood fantasy?
And Tesla’s are pretty damn cool; although, it’s unclear to me whether electric vehicles lead to a net savings in carbon. Properly accounted for, they may even lead to an increase in carbon use. In any case, our current power grids are certainly not anywhere near as robust as they would need to be to support a large amount of electric vehicles without a huge baseload of fossil fuels.
But my sympathy does not go much further. The broad reaching, ideological view that many of the climate change crowd are using to achieve an unclear end result will inevitably lead to disaster. We don’t need to inject climate change into everything and people that do so need to start defending their assumptions in non-ideological terms. When people begin to starve, finding ways to eat by any means possible will be their ideology. There may be a very hungry world full of people in the coming months and years, and I don’t expect they will take too kindly to the climate change crowd.
Uck is right. I remember a few years back, a professor from UBC (I think) lost her position for telling Kindergarten children the polar bears are all right. She had the research to support this, but that was not good enough for the cult of climate change.
I teach JK to college. The indoctrination is deep and tough to counteract. When tech students present research on wind turbines, I am sure to question them about the cost of mining the metals, transportation to the site, de-icing by fuel powered helicopters in Canadian winters, the chemicals to de-ice, and the ultimate disposal of the turbines, not to mention the cost to local wildlife. Most appear shocked with the questions.
Likewise, solar panels have their uses, but as recently learned in Canada's far-north, also have their limitations.
It's hard to wake them up the believers from the spell, though, and my friend and I have often discussed the parallels with the C19 hysteria.
The education system, media, and vote-peddling politicians have much to account for on this file too.
I'd rather see more attention paid to other aspects of keeping the Earth pristine. For example, focus on companies that pollute unimpeded into waterways, or companies who are free to take water for bottling from communities who then suffer drought (Ontario). Or, as you point out, more focus on how long items last and how they are re-cycled or disposed. We are living in a throw-away world. I still have my parent's freezer from the late 70s, and it works like a charm. Meanwhile, my husband and I have been through multiple appliances since we married in the 90s.
And then there are all of those medical masks lying around on the ground...uck is right!
Exploiting resources in such a way that the resource is destroyed is bad.
Polluting is bad.
Some changes to environment which we can cause, we can't correct.
It's really not harder than such simple principles. The rest is just legalese. Easy way to regulate import of chinese vendor trash, and get industries back to western nations with good systems forwaste handling? Change existing tax structures to target distance of resources, parts and goods travelled - this means both tariffs and internal taxs: it's insane that it is cheaper and more profitable due to swedish taxes to import meat from South America and New Zeeland than to be a cattle farmer (in Sweden).
Also, change VAT to a tax targetting the quality of the product. Very simple example: one of my axes is made in Sweden. The head is 150+ years old. Iron, not steel, so needs sharpening more often. The blade for my scythe is even older, just half an inch wide (was probably 1½" when new) and you sharpen it not with a whetstone but with a hammer, gently tapping the edge sharp every once in a while. My grandmothers now 75+ years old sewing machine is good as new, replacing the belt every 15 years or so is the only repair necessary. Yet, the taxes are the same for producing such quality as for importing and selling chinese shit which falls apart faste than you can say "Fu Manchu".
Lots of nitpicky details of course, but western nations could change their structures for taxation like that. Of course, that would mean lower profits for the politician's owners - lower profits in the short term that is, and lower profits from making money from speculation and from other money (i.e. the market's printing press instead of the state's).
That's my två öre anyway.