The Great Reset holds no fears for me. As someone who has never owned a car and has been working from home since the sixties, I can afford to feel superior as the future tries hard to catch up with me. The private jet set at Davos can preach all they like about the need to downsize. I’ve been downsizing all my life. If I downsize any more I will become a fundamental particle and my half life won’t be worth living.
There are articles everywhere about what the Future Holds in Store once the jab is up and the masks are off. Take, more or less at random, this one from Australia:
Sharing economy: Why we will barely own anything in the future
It doesn’t make sense to own a house full of stuff that we rarely use, right? Well rest assured because in the future we’ll simply rent everything. In 2030, if we need a ball gown, a grandparent to babysit our kids or a screwdriver to repair damage at home, we’ll simply go online, pay a small fee and borrow one.
So, what’s new? I’ve never owned my own ball gown, even in the days when I could have afforded to; I regularly call on a fellow senile citizen to replace me when the grandchildren need looking after (the kids can’t tell the difference – we all look the same behind the wrinkles.) And I also borrow screwdrivers. The garage is full of them. (And so is yours – admit it.) The bonkers thing about this article is the idea that I would go online and pay a small fee for such things.
There’s a conspiracy theory around that all this madness emanates from the World Economic Forum and its mastermind Klaus Schwab, in a fiendish attempt to seize control of the joysticks of power. I’ve spent several hours on the WEF site, and lunatic though it is, I can’t believe it means harm. It’s nothing but a kind of Rotary Club for the hyper rich and terminally bored. It means well; it’s looking for answers to the Big Questions, as we all are; but I can’t believe it capable of producing this level of lunacy – not without help.
Take this phrase in the Australian article above:
In 2030, if we need .. a screwdriver to repair damage at home, we’ll simply go online..
Forget the weirdness of the idea of going on-line to borrow a screwdriver and ask yourself: who, among members of the human race, could call a screwdriver something “to repair damage at home?” An Australian female journalist? Fie on you sir. Klaus Schwab himself? He has staff to turn his pontifications into normal English.
No. These two may never have handled a screwdriver or seen one up close in their lives, but they couldn’t commit such a solecism. Only someone, or something, observing us from afar could come up with such an expression. We are being watched by beings who, despite their superior intelligence, frequently have difficulty in interpreting our behaviour.
– Why’s he pushing that fine spatulate tool into the groove in that helical metallic cone?
– He’s repairing damage to his home, Observer %¥#5486. Now shut up and get on with your field work.
– Why’s he pushed that ballgown to the back of the wardrobe where no-one can see it? The number of times he wears it, it would be so much simpler to hire one.
and so on.
True, Klaus Schwab’s Weforum site is a prime source of such idiocies, but the sheer number of them defies the explanation of human agency. It’s not possible that so many mere humans could come up with such a volume of drooling nonsense. They are receiving Aid from Elsewhere.
Take this article from 2016by Ida Auken, Member of the Danish Parliament:
Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better
Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes. It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.
Here’s a photo of Ida.
https://www.billedbladet.dk/kendte/danmark/politik/ida-auken-kaempede-med-svaer-beslutning
As you can see, she owns no clothes or appliances. The underwear she’s wearing (sorry, you can’t see it, because WordPress insists we crop the photo) was last worn by Klaus Schwab himself.
First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?
What were we thinking? I can tell you what I was thinking. That this article was written four years ago, and we’re 2/7ths or nearly a fifth of the way to Ida’s Utopia, and I don’t see any signs of “transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives” becoming cheaper, let alone free. The only thing that’s become free is access to digitised madness of the kind to be found on the WEF website.
And I was thinking too that, though I don’t own a car, I’m a keen user of other people’s. Also taxis and Uber. And one of the problems I can see with not owning one’s own car is the tendency of one’s children to leave their favourite teddy down the back of the seat.
And the tendency of other people’s children to leave other stuff, like chewing gum and sick. And what applies to cars applies to all the other stuff that’s cluttering up your life, like screwdrivers, underwear and grandparents. You don’t know where they’ve been. And the advantage of having your own underwear, grandparents and screwdriver is precisely that you do know where they’ve been, and where they are now. Near to you, at least emotionally, if not physically.
Of course, in this digitalised world, you don’t know where anything’s been, whether it’s information on Wikipaedia or Danish MPs. Maybe that doesn’t bother them in the Danish parliament which, according to Wiki, is called the Folketing, which means the People’s Thing, and is pronounced (again, according to Wiki) [ˈfʌlkəˌtsʰe̝ŋˀð̩]
That’s extraterrestrial talk. I’m more and more persuaded that this stuff is coming from Out There Somewhere. They’re up there in their coal-fired Unidentified Flying Objects, trying to divest us of our fossil fuels, and sending messages via odd folketing like Ida Auken.
Ida Auken’s 2016 article continues: “Shopping: I can’t really remember what that is.” How very prophetic of her. But don’t listen. Like another famous Dane, she’s not wearing any clothes.
Climate Scepticism 
WEF – World Econonomic Fantasia… les perspectives fantastique!
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The coyotes were hunting this evening which sent our boarder collie into protection mode.
The boob tube indicated I could catch the end of-
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. (1982).
I had never watched the credits before and I am glad I did as I have a feeling that the bit below about a better future seems appropriate given our building back better and all.
“The producers would like to thank all the fish who have taken part in this film. We hope that other fish will follow the example of those who have participated, so that, in the future, fish all over the world will live together in harmony and understanding, and put aside their petty differences, cease pursuing and eating each other and life for a brighter, better future for all fish, and those who love them.”
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I’m glad someone is giving this an appropriate context 🙂
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I am currently preparing to move home and in so doing squeeze the contents of a large four bedroom house into a two point something bedroom bungalow. We are having to get rid of stuff beyond comprehension, and life will change in ways we haven’t yet fathomed. Things thought indispensable aren’t. Yet in the process of packing we’ve come across objects not seen in a decade but which we instantly identify as indispensable. I have moved house nine times and across the Atlantic twice. Each move involved a cull, but each stay entailed collecting treasures and useful objects. Today we have a life’s jigsaw.
With this background I examine the concept of owning nothing, hiring or borrowing everything. It’s rubbish. Nothing would have any value and would be treated as such. Last week I put together a garden truck to help us with our upcoming move, but couldn’t find my adjustable spanners. So I borrowed my neighbour’s. When using them, I treated them better than my own. If no one owned anything of value (including my neighbour) why would I have bothered? These suggestions of non-ownership strike at the root of our existence in a complex society. Nothing would have any value. Why bother making anything yourself if the added value couldn’t be yours?
We will value what is ours until it is super ceded or can no longer be kept. Isn’t this the Western way?
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In the complex, multi-faceted, technocratic global society envisioned in Schwab’s Great Reset/Fourth Reich (er, sorry, Industrial Revolution), if you own nothing then, necessarily, you are owned, completely.
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I’d like to think the “appropriate context” mentioned by Andy is Monty Python or Fantasia. But look at this from her WEF page:
I love ridiculing this stuff, but seriously, what are we going to do?
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‘Young’? She doesn’t look that young to me.
Looks like a typical 40s something middle class lefty climate activist.
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“I love ridiculing this stuff, but seriously, what are we going to do?”
There’s no evidence as yet that they will ever have any operational power. Nor is there really a ‘they’, as membership is loose and amorphous, initiatives are interpreted any which way. The illusion of a hard agreed agenda is just that. And, considering they’re mostly capitalists, it’s highly unlikely they would ever shoot their own support base out from under them. But vote for someone else. This kind of thing is why the Finn party is now the 2nd biggest in Finland, why the FvD won big in Holland last year, ultimately the same kind of elitist nonsense that precipitated Brexit, plus strong anti-establishment / EU feeling in Italy and some of Eastern Europe, and so on. Unfortunately, it can be playing with fire in some cases, because some leaders of the reaction may come with big issues of their own, albeit in different dimensions. But in a polarised and polarising world, one has to risk enabling enough of the reaction for a stiff lesson. And one day, the climate culture bubble will burst; it hooked its wagon to science and that’s a very major strategic error (fortunately, cultures are blind), so this will help enormously. Now forced to make new friends via CANZUK or whatever, the UK will auto-distance from the biggest influence (which is Western European elite, it was originally called the European Management Forum). And the WEF have problems of their own; the fall from grace of China via covid, HK and the Uighers has spiked their convenient hand-holding with China.
Their increased PR lately may be more desperation than confidence. Schwab is 82, he and others are likely feeling that their visions are slipping away from them. Populism and resistance are everywhere, globalism under major attack, Gilet Jeunes, Brexit and Trump – no matter that he lost (I presume), way more people voted for him than 2016, more ethnic / PoC voted for him than for any other Republican since PoC got the vote, and seats were gained in the House in his name, the Senate was not lost. Which all means his agenda and US nationalism, is far from dead. Covid is likely the WEF’s last big opportunity before the old guard die off or are voted / kicked out, and I don’t think they’re in any kind of position to truly capitalise on it for any kind of real vision realisation. No way no how. Timescale way too short. This time next year, if attempts are made to maintain the strict approaches, populations will be way more afraid of the cure than the disease. And so they will act accordingly, and just like with the original fear, governments will respond. Plus the WEF big business buddies will in the end go where business takes them, they’re only ideological until the share price drops like a stone. The old fogeys rotary club will go back to imagining SF over their brandies and cocoa.
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The proof that WEF types have influence is the observation that we PAY :
more for energy
and lack of freedoms,
in countries where they have influence
And in countries where they don’t have much influence you pay less for energy and can buy a car which doesn’t conform to Euro6 standard etc.
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Stew, with respect this is not ‘proof’ that the WEF is causal. The energy thing, for instance, is largely linked to climate-change policies, and for these an emergent culture of catastrophe is causal. Which doesn’t mean the WEF along with countless other orgs aren’t implicated, but they are as much symptom as cause because it is not a top-down command, it is emotive belief at all levels at once. The climate agendas could not progress without widespread and indeed passionate belief, albeit elite expression is one of the tools of culture. Actually, it’s not even proof that the WEF contribution matters more than the huge raft of presidents, prime ministers, high ministers, other NGOs, churchmen, economists, businesses, influencers and so on, in their own right. Some of whom drink in the WEF clubhouse and many who don’t, yet even for the former this is just circumstancial. All these are not co-ordinated via the control of a Schwabish Blowfeld type command-structure, but (along with countless lesser authority sources plus literally hundreds of million of passionate supporters) are singing off the same hymn-sheet (indeed a saying derived about cultural co-ordination), via cultural belief and associated narratives. That someone is standing around who dislikes a murder victim, is not proof this person dun it, especially when a 1000 more people are standing just around the corner who also dislike the victim too. And neither are any of these people proof he was pushed not fell in the first place (i.e. an emergent cause does not point to a deliberately nefarious act, only to very misguided and mass belief, which nevertheless should not be an excuse for any relinquishment of responsibility).
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Andy I deliberately wrote “WEF types ”
to distance myself from saying the WEF are directly pulling the levers.
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BTW a common topic on Twitter is how the media cherrypick the extreme angle
“that WEF actually deliberately created COVID”
as a strawman to use against anyone that criticises WEF BuildBackBetter
and portray them as “Mad Conspiracy Theorists”
with TalkRadio’s @TVKev particularly
shouting “This WEF issue is just some mad Conspiracy Theory”
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Stew, “Andy I deliberately wrote “WEF types ””
Oaky, point taken (albeit this still doesn’t falls short of ‘proof’ 0: )
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Stew, a lot of supposed anti-conspiracy theory, appears to be conspiracy theory. Maybe the same theory as ‘antifa’.
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What Stew said.
Ida Auken was a socialist and minister of the environment from 2011 to 2014. She’s now a member of the Social Liberal Party. She’s a priest by profession and a member of the advisory board of Vigga.us, a Danish company that produces organic children’s clothing after the circular idea, so that the clothes can be rented and reused. Auken is also a member of Old Brick ‘s advisory board, which is a Danish company that cleans and recycles used bricks. Auken is also member of the advisory board of EMG, an international Corporate Social Responsibility and sustainability consultancy which advises in sustainable development.
The point of my “Notes from Under..” title was that it’s not enough to look at this “from above” as a global cultural phenomenon. You have to go into details sometimes to get a feel for what’s going on. Auken is mad – out there with David Icke. But you’d never know because no-one in the media will ever say so. Until a couple of months ago I saw the WEF the way the media presented it – with gentle irony as a rich men’s hobby where CEOs could gawp at celebrity film stars and schoolgirls and we could all have a little sneer at their sustainability programmes and private jets.
One of the questions we should be asking ourselves is why no-one is attacking this stuff with all the weapons to hand. Propose a penny on petrol or a change to the Sunday shopping laws and a vast political debate will ensue. Propose radical limitations on the way we live (no petrol cars or gas boilers) and there’s hardly a murmur, because those who have the rational arguments on their side are banned from the media. ANDY WEST argues that this will sort itself out because the science is on our side and reality will win out. But what exactly will happen when the first windless blackouts hit, or electric cars start exploding in large numbers? Does anyone think the media are going to say: “Oh, Homewood and Montford were right after all. Let’s invite them on to the Today programme”?
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“ANDY WEST argues that this will sort itself out because the science is on our side and reality will win out.”
Not really. In the sense that I say the climate bubble *must* burst one day, because it hooked its wagon to science. Unless all of the enterprise of science itself founders permanently first, which I doubt. BUT…. I have no clue when this will happen. And so in the past plus now too I also say I don’t know whether huge damage from climate policy will occur before it bursts (and hence indeed part of why). Or not. I say that when it does, this will help tremendously, though I guess this rather a Captain Obvious statement.
“Propose radical limitations on the way we live (no petrol cars or gas boilers) and there’s hardly a murmur…”
Because there’s still a (small minority – not more than 10% in any nation) that passionately / culturally and extremely vocally want this kind of thing, and a far bigger (around half or more) swathe of the populace who see this culture, aren’t passionate about it but think it may be right, yet have no clue about the downsides. When some real knowledge of the heavy downsides starts to break through big time (already started trickling through with EVs), I think the resistance will be gigantic. If it finds no political expression (no party to express it through), things will get hairy.
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@ Andy yesterday
There is an interesting counterpoint to this on today’s UnHerd. It may be confirmation bias, but the concept of a neo-feudalist society does seem to ring true to me. There does not need to be nefarious motives – we are though seemingly drifting towards a state where the “middle class” are effectively eroded down to a rump sandwiched between our new overlords and overladies and the proles beneath. A lot of indicators you can examine all point to the same place: wealth concentrated with a few hyper-rich and young folk with good jobs but owing to capital hyperinflation can’t afford to buy a house to name but two.
One thing that is slightly discordant is that young folk are on board with this. They are in effect turkeys voting for their own Christmas. Society could be far more equal if they desired it. But they prefer to follow the new green agenda which will lead inexorably to their own impoverishment. Many sceptics are of a certain age. We will be spared some of these humilations. It’s up to the young to recognise where they’re being taken and do something about it.
@ Geoff there is a difference between a slap now and an eternity in hell later. Which is a better deterrent? Something far away just can’t get the pulses racing; I think a good tactic is to write the future in tablets of stone from decades away and then it’s just a fact of life. Propose a hike in a certain tax, and there will be more howls than if you propose the end of civilisation in twenty years.
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JIT: “but the concept of a neo-feudalist society does seem to ring true to me.”
I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but one of the big reasons the original feudal societies were out-evolved, is that they aren’t very creative, or indeed that productive. Modern (and technical) societies need both functions to keep ahead of the pack. If all the world regressed in sync to neo-feudalism, there’d be no more competitive societies around to out-evolve them. But how / why could that really happen? And soon, they would physically regress too. And it’s highly unstable; the moment one country or region ditched their feudal leaders there’d be an explosion of creativity and free expression, which no force could keep out of the other places, and even for the intervening time while they did, they’d be falling further and further behind. Of course this is the big view (as ever!) It doesn’t mean we couldn’t lose a generation or two while this experiment is given time to fail 0:
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Geoff
May I suggest that you have a typo in the heading to these piece – shouldn’t it be the Greta re-set?
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ANDY WEST
There are signs that it might. The censorship of Covid contrarians is a very sombre indication of the way things are going. Thatcher’s utilitarian edicts on university finance pushed scientists into becoming marketing men (I think Alan Kendall has commented on that.) Certainly the treatment of science in the media is mediaeval. Meanwhile, the Chinese are on their way to Mars and we’re trying to figure out ways of blowing a fizzy trace gas into holes in the ground.
Actually, my guess is nearer 2%. That’s a third of the 3% who will always vote Green (two thirds of whom hate windfarms and solar panels and biomass) plus another 1% of the canny élite who’ve jumped on the WEF bandwagon. It’s only a guess of course, but, as your articles at Climate Etc. demonstrate, the number of people who worry about the climate depends entirely how you ask the question.
It already is, in that the politicians who dare to express doubts (Trump, Farage, le Pen, the AfD) are hated by the establishment and by most of the educated public. Any success they have had or might have only drives the majority of the public towards eco-lunacy.
So I repeat my question: What is to be done? Much as I love WUWT, the GWPF and Paul Homewood, simply repeating day after day the same old reasonable arguments is getting us nowhere.
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JIT
The neo-feudal society, with a middle class squeezed into (relative) poverty is a direct result of globalisation – and deliberate. First you outsource heavy industry to Asia, then all the technically skilled jobs that can be done remotely. And you fly to Budapest to get your teeth fixed. Soon you’ll be getting heart surgery in a Chinese cruise ship anchored off Land’s End.
ANDY WEST
No danger of that. The Chinese are evolving and taking Asia and Africa with them. That’s the hard reality which will hit us before the plebs realise that renewable energy is a con. The political élite knows this – hence the Hong Kong nonsense. I’m personally happy with the idea of Europe as a cultural amusement park for a more successful civilisation – like Greece when it became a minor colony of the Roman Empire. But I don’t expect to have many supporters there. Hence the difficulty of your otherwise interesting idea, expressed elsewhere a few months ago, of a political party.
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Afternoon Geoff,
Joel Kotkin talked a bit about the squeeze on the middle class in the US (especially in CA) recently-
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2020/11/18/the_end_game_650132.html
How to address fixed costs is something CA is trying to come to terms with as we are having issues with to much RE at certain times and not enough electrical energy at others times.
A reminder to complete our monthly generator maintenance showed up in my inbox this morning. The previous two months we didn’t need to run a monthly maintenance as we ran the generator 3 times during planned black outs (lasting up to 50 hours) and 1 time for an unplanned black out.
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for some light entertainment – h/t Paul Homewood & h/t Jo Nova – Yes Minister Does Global Warming
JUNE 23, 2017
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Geoff: “There are signs that it might.”
In some senses, science and people’s acceptance of it have never been stronger (commands huge trust in the public), and despite more junk science than ever before, no doubt, that’s partly because there’s massively more science in total than ever before, so more of the real stuff and its benefits too. Actually part of the problem is too much trust, which has allowed junk science to play God while the real stuff just gets on and makes real improvements in the background. This may foster less trust in coming years, which is *good*, because science benefits without blind trust. Meanwhile, if the Chinese or anyone else is going to get to Mars, they’ll need monster amounts of real science, and it doesn’t matter too much who gets there first for this science to eventually benefit everyone. The modern electronics industry owes a great deal to the US space program.
“Actually, my guess is nearer 2%”
Those who put climate-change policies above all other competing concerns or policy choices no matter what (hence, avid belief) are about 9% in highly irreligious countries such as Sweden or Denmark, falling with increasing religiosity to about 3% in places like India or the Philippines. See the thickest orange trend in Chart 1 at the link below. https://judithcurry.com/2020/11/19/cultural-motivations-for-wind-and-solar-renewables-deployment/
“…as your articles at Climate Etc. demonstrate, the number of people who worry about the climate depends entirely how you ask the question”
Which is exactly why over a range of questions asked systemically at different ‘how’, which is ‘strengths’ plus both reality-constrained or not, we can detect people’s affinities to emotive narrative, both in the virtue signalling fashion and the real-word fashion, i.e. use these surveys in a way none of the survey folks intended (as most excellently divined by John here a while back). And reliably get what we want across many nations, which trends are extremely robust. Bias in this instance *helps* us to get what we want.
So responses to climate questions that are unconstrained by the reality of competing choices (blue trends) look completely different, which is why folks often get very confused about what the level of support in any country actually is, or alternatively, they can pick the result that best suits their purpose. The ‘strength’ of the Blue trends, effectively represents how biased they are to the emotive narratives of climate catastrophe. The reality-constraint of the orange series wipes out such emotive beliefs, here ‘strength’ relates to the tightness of constraint. See especially the dramatic different between the orange and blue at the RHS. While looking at Green parties is another way to go about this, undemocratic or religious nations may not have Green parties (despite having some Green sentiment), plus even within Western democracies there are essentially thresholds (probably a good thing) that contribute to folks not placing votes where they think these can’t really count. [And these differ per country, PR systems usually garner more Green]. The Liberals have long countered this with regional concentrations, but this strategy has thus far seemed harder for Greens to manage. https://judithcurry.com/2020/11/19/cultural-motivations-for-wind-and-solar-renewables-deployment/
Why would you expect anything less than hate from culturally established elites (especially re climate) when political parties of popular individuals get major successes? This itself is a sign of success! And the restless populace and rising support are enough to show that these can be mass movements, even majority mass movements, even where so far they are not yet huge. Their success is not driving the populace to more eco-lunacy; it is causing elites and passionate believers to double down on more eco lunacy, while big swathes of the population oppositely open their eyes to the lunacy and signal high skepicism, so far, which will be much stronger later. Hence this is pushing up overall polarization, as mentioned before. While the polarization itself can ramp to ugly consequences, there likely is little choice, currently, but to do still more. Hence more of those resistance votes, and in the UK, an actual realistic party that opposes climate lunacy. Reform now does, I have no idea whether they’ll be realistic. And I have no idea how to politically organise and probably wouldn’t be very good at it. Neither would I necessarily be happy with other Reform policies. But of you want your lance to have more effect, this is where it should be tilted. You might have to kiss some frogs too. An issue is that climate is still not seen as the biggest thing despite growing skepticism, and the more ‘anti-establishment’ skepticism it is enveloped in will come with some difficult bedfellows and uncomfortable policies, most likely.
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Geoff: I agree that China’s aggressive competitiveness will indeed help prevent a regression to any neo-feudal system. And elites have been floored because they appeased China for far too long, including our new favourite baddy the WEF, and it is hitting them at last, albeit still slowly, in fact like a slow-motion car crash. Hence at last, some stiffening of the backbone, albeit still marginally, on Hong Kong, so indeed I do not think this is nonsense at all. As to ‘a more successful civilisation’, over millennia the West, China, and indeed Islam have all swapped this mantle, and the former two are likely to swap it again maybe more than once or twice, before we’re all living on Mars with a culture than benefitted from both (and other input too). But as of this moment, and using measures like health, wealth and happiness along with military power plus level of global control too, I wouldn’t give it the ribbon even while I think no-one is actually very deserving of a ribbon currently. And the nature of the regime in China makes it potentially still subject to a fatal cracking down the middle; due in part to China’s hugely intensified Hanization in recent years, a lot of resistance to the centre is growing, which due to the nature of (even this form of) Communism, has no real means of expression. As China exerts muscle across the world, this is likely to expose the internal tensions still more.
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ANDY WEST
I don’t in any way deny the reality of the findings of your analysis (which is brilliant by the way, and which I recommend everyone to read, starting here:)
https://judithcurry.com/2020/04/17/can-religiosity-predict-cultural-climate-beliefs/
My remarks relate to your “constrained choice” figures
Another way of looking at your findings (which doesn’t invalidate your conclusions) is by class, geography and climate. Countries with high constrained belief are advanced with large educated middle classes, in temperate climate zones, completely unthreatened by drought, hurricanes or hellfire. (And being advanced and educated explains why they’re irreligious – at least sometimes.)
None of this argues against my hunch that the number of people who will go to the barricades to defend net zero and similar lunacies is tiny, consisting of a core of XR-style fanatics and a cloud of employees of the blob on the green gravy train.
I’ll come back to China another time. What you call “aggressive competitiveness” I’d call “flourishing civilisation.”
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Geoff:
Many thanks, Geoff, much appreciated.
“Countries with high constrained belief are advanced with large educated middle classes, in temperate climate zones, completely unthreatened by drought, hurricanes or hellfire. (And being advanced and educated explains why they’re irreligious – at least sometimes.)”
I actually tried running some of these things. Climate of nations (well, temperature), and an attempt at climate exposures (this is hard but there is some data), yield only a little better than mush, and nothing in the same league as Religiosity. The problem with education is that it’s well known to anti-correlate with religiosity, so should yield something better. But given that sociology generally ascribes this effect to the cultural limitations imposed by religiosity, it’s just a rather worse way of seeing the same causal variable.
“None of this argues against my hunch that the number of people who will go to the barricades to defend net zero and similar lunacies is tiny, consisting of a core of XR-style fanatics and a cloud of employees of the blob on the green gravy train.”
I agree. It hardly matters whether for the UK this is 3% or 7.5%, say, and in practice at the low end of these charts the error margin is much bigger relative to the signal. What we really need to know is the general picture, and they provide this. As I said in an earlier post on the concept at Climate Etc. the UK government is getting further and further away from mainstream opinion on this, by mistakenly pandering to what they think is a mass movement (XR et al). Whereas the real reason that Climate Activism is far more prevalent within irreligious countries, is because the very small minority who believe, are massively frustrated and shouty because the huge majority of the population around them certainly *don’t* believe. And indeed unlike in religious countries, this majority don’t even supply the ‘virtue signalling’ version of belief (via the blue trends, which decline to very small within irreligious nations).
“I’ll come back to China another time. What you call “aggressive competitiveness” I’d call “flourishing civilisation.””
I don’t really disagree with this, and the same two words can be used synonymously about the West also. Whether it is one or the other depends only on whether one is looking from the inside or the outside. But for the purpose of whether it would prevent the West falling into neo-feudalism, the outside view is the relevant one 🙂
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P.S. Another thing I mention (can’t recall whether it’s in the Renewables post, or previous ones), is that any further reality-constraints drop the thick orange line still further. So all the figures there are pre-covid. And the global effect of covid should pressure this line downwards within all nations (while retaining its gradient), which is actually a flaw in the plans of the build back greener crew, though they won’t discover this until the rubber meets the road on actually trying to implement policy.
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P.P.S. nothing physical, such as climate exposure, can cause what are sometimes huge flips between orange and blue modes, depending only upon whether the survey question is reality-constrained or unconstrained. If one’s attitudes are fundamentally caused by worry about drought or hurricane, for instance, then while orange and blue may part company a little due to knowledge that there are other budget priorities, they would largely follow *the same trends*, because one’s worry should be largely invariant of how the question is asked. But a cultural cause can break this expectation no problem, and indeed orange and blue are on completely opposed trends!
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P.P.P.S. A more distilled summary of the multi-post analysis that Geoff links to, all in a single file, can be found here: https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/summary-religiosity-predicts-cc-beliefs-2.docx
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We can see what number of people in the world truly believe in dangerous climate change by their actions, not their votes or expressed preferences.
How many people in the West refuse to use petrol driven vehicles or fly? Well less than 2%. Not even 0.2%. People buy organic because if you are rich that is a minor inconvenience. But not going anywhere is a massive limit to your lifestyle, so no-one does it.
How many people are prepared to take electricity blackouts as we get rid of all carbon supported electrical generation? Not close to 2%. Living without electricity for long periods is a major drag, whereas using recyclable shopping bags is easy.
Lorde was recently reported as saying she believed in dangerous climate change because she saw it with her own eyes in Antarctica. How did she get there? She flew of course. Apparently she didn’t see the disconnect.
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Chester: “How many people are prepared to take electricity blackouts as we get rid of all carbon supported electrical generation? Not close to 2%.”
But you are presupposing that the public *know* about the downsides, such as potential blackouts and all the rest. But largely, they *do not*. So the question is never realistically posed. The public are neither climate or engineering literate, and on the whole, they do not know. And even where some knowledge is starting to seep through, publics are largely blindsided by their bias from belief in the cultural story that it’s all necessary to ‘save the planet’, so do not see it. Plus of course, most media / authority, because they also do not know and also believe, support orthodoxy in such matters, all helping each other to hide any downsides, which strongly encourages the continued public belief even as more Renewables get deployed.
As long as we map the attitudes systemically and properly (which is to say, not using the surveys as they were intended, but to probe what they *really* tell us about attitudes), they predict exactly what happens in practice with real actions / behaviours, at the ‘whole public’ level and at the current time. So for instance see at the link below; national (cultural) climate-change attitudes from survey, predicts the actual GDP-normalised Renewables Deployment per capita across 35 nations (r=0.73, a value most social studies would die for). So this deployment happens because publics allow it to happen within each nation, to the level of their own cultural belief. https://judithcurry.com/2020/11/19/cultural-motivations-for-wind-and-solar-renewables-deployment/ …and indeed the Deployment also very strongly anti-correlates with national religiosities, an entirely cultural phenomena!
As I note at this link, if publics were free of bias plus actually aware of the downsides, their behaviours would be very different indeed, and such levels of deployment wouldn’t be tolerated. Yet as things stand right now, what you are really proposing, to paraphrase, is that: “publics wouldn’t tolerate this if what was in my head, was in theirs.” Well no, they wouldn’t. But that isn’t where we stand. If it was where we stood, there wouldn’t be an issue and we could all go home and close this site!
Nor can you simply upgrade public knowledge on the issue, as is obvious from decades of effort even by those who still believe in climate catastrophe but understand the engineering downsides of renewables. Lomberg and Schellenberger and Planet-of-the-Humans are all still very minority views. Let alone actual skeptics. The cultural inertia against doing so is vast, and incorporates at the unpalatable end the whole denial / smear engine etc, but is mostly about honest belief. The best one can say is that, as the rubber starts to meet the road in terms of physical not projected / intellectual downsides, the penny may drop for the public (and will likely start with electric cars). But how much damage by then? As noted with Geoff above, the percentage of those who believe the narrative enough to vote for it against any other policy, is indeed very small; but bear in mind that even most of these *do not know* much about the downsides. Because they are *even more* blinded by belief. They’d only find out when it’s too late. However, a far larger portion of the public, are sufficiently uninformed/ biased as to ‘allow it to happen’, for now at least.
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https://delingpole.podbean.com/e/patrick-m-wood/
I found this podcast interesting. I’m not sure that I’m convinced, but there was some historical context I had no idea about.
Living on a farm, 20 kilometres to nearest town, how quickly will someone get the screwdriver to me?
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The Great Reset, according to cardiologist and humanist, Dr Thomas Binder, MD. We’ve been arguing about whether ‘fascism’ is a wise or appropriate description of what is occurring at the moment. Dr Binder argues that what is happening now is the expression of fascism in its truest form.
https://twitter.com/Thomas_Binder/status/1316143983526121472
https://twitter.com/Thomas_Binder/status/1316151928343101443
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Pointing out that the climate movement has latched on to science as a sort auto-immune infection of the public square comes to mind.
Climatology is a science in the same way as a lamprey eel is a fish.
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Here’s an op-ed on the Great Reset published in the Jewish Voice:
“Practical capitalism is to be supplanted by what Schwab calls “stakeholder capitalism” in which the private sector is tightly controlled by government (otherwise known as “fascism”). The free market is considered unfair and skewed to the advantage of a piratical business class exploiting the world’s poor and hungry. Democracy is regarded as an inefficient political arrangement relying on the incapacity of the demos to understand its own best interests or to command the intricacy of integrated governing structures and processes.
Everyone will be equal, everyone will be secure from the ravages of competition, risk and chance, and everyone will be happy — as they are today in the political template for the Great Reset, Communist China and its fascist business model.”
In the Times today, brown-nosing Pants Down Ferguson, he talks about the ‘opportunity’ presented to Commie Sage scientists to impose harsh, liberty-destroying lockdowns after Italy suddenly decided to follow the Communists China model. Ferguson and pals suddenly realised they had their golden opportunity for the Great Reset. So too did the climate change fanatics.
“As Prince Philip, a WEF member, mused, “We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from the crisis,” which may “make people more receptive to big visions of change” and reset the global economy toward “sustainability” — the buzzword du jour.
Indeed, COVID is a more powerful persuader even than “climate change,” since virus panic works immediately but climate panic “can only follow with a time lag.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a committed Marxist and an admirer of Schwab, is also on board. Addressing the United Nations, Trudeau asserted that “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.””
https://thejewishvoice.com/2020/12/the-great-reset-and-klaus-schwab/
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