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If you'll just fork over the global economy and then some...

21 Jun 2023 | OP ED Watch

It’s hard to contain the panic over climate alarmists’ fiscal plans, and ignorance, when Scientific Communism blares “Rich Nations Owe $192 Trillion for Causing Climate Change, New Analysis Finds”. We could waste considerable ridicule on the unresisting imbecility of thinking you could calculate such a number to three or more places rather than going “Yeah, like $200 trillion, dudes”. But why bother when global GDP for 2021 is estimated at $96.51 trillion by Google, so the idea is for a few rich countries to seize everything produced anywhere for two years and give it to a host of tin-pot dictators, addled populists and other corrupt and incompetent politicians to save us all from it getting slightly warmer. Or to expropriate and turn over everything their own citizens make for a decade or so and again toss it into those grubby hands, and hope people just carry on producing even though they have literally nothing to eat. Next cunning plan please.

We really wish Scientific American and other publications dedicated to popularizing science would stick to telling us stuff about science. Like how to save fireflies, especially since National Geographic says the answer is to stop with the lawn monoculture and light pollution and make some space for nature which we were doing anyway. But if they’re going to get outside their area of competence, they should try to get new competence.

Actually this is yet another piece from E&E News, not the inhouse SA staff. And it credits something called “CLIMATEWIRE”, which babbles:

“A major question has emerged as the world strives to reduce greenhouse gases: How much money should rich nations pay to poor ones for raising Earth’s temperature? Scientists have found an answer.”

Aaaargh. What have scientists to do with this economic question? Unless of course you’re inviting informed people to range broadly, for instance having historians weigh in on climate. And not a moment too soon, because historians could also tell you a thing or two about the impact of reparations geopolitically. It’s not good. They breed resentment and undermine prosperity.

As for “scientists” it’s a bit hard to pinpoint these authors. One is with the “Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Oxford, UK” and the “Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK” and holds a PhD in “Policy Options for Sustainable and Equitable Economies” (so not what you’d normally call a “climate scientist” or an economist) and the other is with the “Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain” and the “International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK” and is “an economic anthropologist whose research focuses on ecological economics, global inequality, imperialism and political economy” with a PhD in the core climate science area of… um… anthropology.

Anyway, rich countries bad, poor countries good, carbon pollution, give us all your money.

Unless you are, say, India or China, currently #3 and #1 in the emissions race. According to Fanning:

“It is a matter of climate justice that if we are asking nations to rapidly decarbonise their economies, even though they hold no responsibility for the excess emissions that are destabilizing the climate, then they should be compensated for this unfair burden.”

Climate justice. Another academic specialty heard from. Too loudly, perhaps.

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