By Paul Homewood
The National Review exposes how environmentalists are pushing global wealth redistribution:
The environmental movement wants to make the rich West much poorer so that the destitute can become richer. Rather than improve the plight of the developing world through such crucial projects as constructing an Africa-wide electrical grid, environmentalists say significant progress will have to wait until the improvements can be sustainable–meaning that billions will have to remain mired in poverty to “save the earth.”
Having ruled out substantial growth for our destitute brothers and sisters, we are told that we will have to substantially redistribute the wealth of the West to the poor, so that the entire globe can live in a substantially lower (for us) but relatively equal standard of living.
In other words, forget creating a world with freedom of opportunity, but tilt at Utopian windmills to force equal outcomes: To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability. That’s certainly the message of a new paper published in Nature.
After identifying the criteria for a “good life,” the authors push redistributionism on a global scale. From, “A Good Life for All Within Planetary Boundaries:” (my emphasis):
We apply a top-down approach that distributes shares of each planetary boundary among nations based on current population (a per capita biophysical boundary approach). While the environmental justice literature emphasizes the need for differentiated responsibilities in practice, a per capita approach allows us to explore what quality of life could be universally achieved if resources were distributed equally. It is an important question to address given that it is often claimed that all people could live well if only the rich consumed less, so that the poor could consume more.
This means limits, limits, limits!
Read the full story here.
This is the Nature paper’s Abstract:
Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’ development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4
Forget about “high life satisfaction” then!
There are four authors. Three work at the Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds.
The fourth, William Lamb is at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), Berlin.
I wonder how much money UK taxpayers are forking out to the University of Leeds, to fund this marxist research?
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
February 8, 2018 at 05:42AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 