Thinking with one’s own head … « Chapeau bas » to the young comrades of OSA-Opposizione Studentesca d’Alternativa. Vedi : « Questione ambientale e movimenti studenteschi », di OSA – Opposizione Studentesca d’Alternativa http://contropiano.org/documenti/2019/09/28/questione-ambientale-e-movimenti-studenteschi-0119109
Suggested readings:
1 ) « Global Warming Fraud Exposed In Pictures » , by Tyler Durden , Tue, 10/01/2019 – 12:25 Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk, https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/global-warming-fraud-exposed-pictures
2 ) « Sono uno scettico climatico, Si, ma perché? » di Franco Zavatti in http://www.zafzaf.it/clima/sono_scettico.pdf (Many graphs are in English. For the comments one can always use a online translator. For the IPCC inaccurate modeling take a look in particular at the Figure 6 « Global mid-tropospheric temperature variations models vs observations »)
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Introduction
Essential links briefly commented on the scientific aspect of climate change
The economic aspect of the Paris Agreement – 2015 – from the Stern Report, to Larrouturou, Gaël Giraud, Lagarde etc.
The discount rate vs. Ecomarxism.
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Introduction.
It is not the first time that the ruling classes are trying to indoctrinate children and young people, ruining their lives and education in the process. In the Middle Ages there were the Crusades of the Children and of the Little Shepherds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherds%27_Crusade_(1251)
At the time, demographic pressure was felt. To ease its impact on the countryside and on the cities various crusades were preached not so much to free the Holy Sepulchre but to dominate the Mediterranean outlet of the Silk Road. The debts of the participating noble families were forgiven, usually through the enrolment of the cadets. The most cynical of these crusades was certainly that of the Children. In short, if there really were a dramatic anthropogenic climate warming, public infrastructures should get public priority in order to preserve the health of citizens and safeguard the territory, without vain talk about CO2, which is beneficial to agriculture, vegetation and phytoplankton. But short-term speculative capital that currently amount to around 250 000 or 300 000 billion cannot afford it. And apparently neither can the States, now enslaved through the public debt created by this speculative monster … Hence the need to invent a narrative to put what remains of public finances at the service of green speculation with the excuse of decarbonisation.
Life on Earth is carbon based. One of the apostles of CO2 demonization, Jancovici, had the intellectual honesty to clarify that we must choose between CO2 and GDP (see « Jancovici: CO2 ou PIB, faut choisir – Sciences Po – 08/29/2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjkq8V5rVy0 “. The climatologists’ project has always been the imposition of negative growth on the masses. Forcing things a little an argument could be adduced in favor of a qualitative and socially oriented growth of GDP in the countries belonging to the Center, but what about those of the Periphery and the Semi-Periphery? Who would dare to defend zero or negative growth? Not surprisingly, one of the founders of IPCC/GIEC, Maurice Strong, also known as the creator of green certificates to pollute, was a declared neo Malthusian. The biography of this dubious character, very present in all globalist projects, in particular those carried out by the West in UN Agencies, illuminates the real reasons behind these obscurantist and imperialist Western narratives. Just read the Report from the Iron Mountain, the reports of the Club of Rome, those of the Trilateral Commission and those of the IPCC . (see Meet Maurice Strong: Globalist, Oiligarch, “Environmentalist” in https://www.corbettreport.com/meet-maurice-strong-globalist-oiligarch-environmentalist/ . See also: « Survival of Spaceship Earth 1972 », https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCHyP8sj92g )
From the very beginning of the capitalist mode of production, the owners of the means of production preached the control of the population. This was intended to restrict the level of social redistribution of the available resources necessary to legitimize their systemic domination. To achieve this result the usual exploitation of fear and of the sense of guilt of the masses remains the preferred method. It send us back to the old story of original sin. In a gattopardesco fashion, it doesn’t matter whether the capitalist system devastates the Planet, the guilt must be resented and internalized by every single citizen, even children and young students, in order to preserve the profits and the ecological footprint of the 10% and even more that of the 1% at the top of the socio-economic pyramid.
Yet since its origin the narration of the need to control climate change was linked to an alleged need to curb the overpopulation of the Planet to ensure its survival. The logical contradiction of this reasoning began with the social Darwinism of Malthus for whom resources increased according to an arithmetic progression while the population grew in a geometrical one. Marx had already dismantled this silly argument by focusing on the growth of productivity and of the socio-economic well-being of the masses of citizens.
But the inegalitarian narratives are not based on logical reasoning but rather on their calculated plausibility and on their emotional impact. The twentieth century showed that human density, for example in the Netherlands, posed no problem given the wealth of the country and its modest but real redistribution among its citizens. It should be noted that instead of mouth-washing oneself with the rising level of the sea, which is actually very modest today, the Netherlands has not waited to build new gigantic and often artistic dams.
The modernization of societies also went hand in hand with the natural stabilization of the synthetic fertility rate. Here is a summary of the world population growth in billions of inhabitants: 1 in 1800; 1.65 in 1900; 2.5 in 1950; 3.6 in 1970; 5.3 in 1990; 6 in 2000; 7.5 in 2017. We can conclude that “… the average fertility rate in the world has decreased from 5 children per woman in the early 1950s to less than 2.5 by the end of 2010.” (Ramses Report 2019, p 46) The Report adds that the demographic transition is now complete at the world level except in Africa and in some Latin American and Asian countries, with an average population growth rate of 1.5. Some countries even have a negative population growth rate. They are Spain, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Ukraine, Moldova, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, and Japan. Note that apart from Spain, Italy, Greece and Japan all other countries were victims of wars or brutal regime changes. In all these countries, a genuine sustainable development program would grant priority to a strong pro-natalist policy based on the general reduction of working time for the same initial salary but increased social benefits, the creation of public and universally accessible national daycare , the restoration of universally accessible public health-care and public education, and the rehabilitation of national pension and social assistance programs without neglecting public infrastructures.
Malthusianism was born in reaction to the rural exodus induced by the “enclosures” dear to Adam Smith and by the rapid industrialization of the English cities where the modern proletariat developed only to be immediately perceived as a “dangerous class” by the capitalist owners of the means of production. The end of the Second World War accelerated the decolonization movement in conjunction with world population growth. For the ex-colonialist and imperialist powers the problem of a more equal division of the Planet’s resources among sovereign nations was raised. The resurgence of imperialist Malthusianism was masked in various forms by the USAID-CIA type aid programs to end up with the never kept promise of the rich countries to consecrate 0.7% of their GDP in aid to the “developing countries” , a policy actually geared to keep them in their sphere of influence. The sermons in favor of the urgent control of overpopulation allowed the masking of the real causes of poverty and consequently of the strong birth rate worldwide.
Today, as we mentioned above, there is no longer any danger of overpopulation, on the contrary. If anything, the risk is the aging of populations with little renewal of the generations. Therefore the imperialist powers have invented a new narrative, namely the anthropogenic global warming centered on the fable of the harmfulness of CO2 and consequently of fossil energy sources. Energy is vital for the modernization of societies. The real purpose is to block the economic development of new rival powers and of the economic take-off of developing countries. In fact, they have an unbeatable cost of labor if used with identical machines and identical ways of organizing production processes.
The carbon tax reveals this imperialist logic. While the dismantling of tariff barriers with free trade deals was required of all sovereign nations, moreover with special international tribunals empowered to protect the privileges of multinational corporations mostly originating in rich countries, new less visible trade barriers like the carbon tax were devised to protect the privileges of the Western ruling classes. The latter would precisely hit the use of energy needed for all the classic – industrial – economic processes or modern ones – for example energy-intensive data farms. Add to this the Western monopoly on capital, technologies and patents, including GMOs for seeds – cereals, etc. -, pesticides and associated fertilizers and so on. The ineptitude of this decarbonisation policy or that of the non-defined « carbon neutrality » – for 2030 or 2050? Starting from which threshold criterion? – is becoming increasingly evident in recent years. This is not only because China already dominates the market for solar panels and rare earths needed for electric batteries or for the manufacture of wind-powered installations, but also because it already deposits more patents annually than the United States or the EU.
For imperialism, the enemy is not only the foreign proletariat but also the mass of domestic citizens qua workers. These too were promised to the Nietzschean “return” to a society of new domesticity and new slavery according to the Report from the Iron Mountain, the secret document of the US Establishment published after the war – in 1966/67 – with a preface by John Galbraith that sanctioned its authenticity. This Report was born from of the old logic of population control derived from socio-economic Malthusianism and from the exploitation of war as a way of organizing highly hierarchical societies. In the post-war period the theory of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt of the domination of the masses through the artificial creation of an “enemy” was added.
This regressive thought briefly interrupted by the New Deal was immediately dusted off after the Second World War. First there was the defeat of the New Dealer Wallace against the reactionary Truman, the Cold War apostle. McCarthyism translated Carl Schmitt into imperialistic Yankee English. The Korean war, a catastrophic test of the attempt to replace containment by the roll-back policy, was unleashed by Washington in part to revive the production of the American steel industry. Big Steel was then caught up with the first post-war overproduction crisis. During the Vietnam War, L. B. Johnson sought to maintain domestic consensus against the growing dissent of students, workers and of a large portion of black citizens with the Just Society project. This provoked a right-wing extremist reaction embodied in the reports of the Trilateral Commission founded in June 1973 with the help of Rockefeller. Samuel Huntington was part of it. He was the man behind the “strategic hamlets” in Guatemala and Vietnam, later to become the theorist of the conflicts or clashes of civilization, a line of thinking that naturally led to the modern pro-Zionist crusades, to the Doctrine of Preventive War and, at the domestic level, to the liberticidal Patriot Act.
The Trilateral was strongly represented in the administration of J. Carter. It theorized the end of the “rising expectations” of the citizens and the workers – concretely the end of the American inflation control policies or Cola Clause and the end of industrial democracy -, the control of the « authorized flows of communication» and the « return » to the “deference to Authority” – self-designed Authority, that is. Imagine! The American workers, at the time saw themselves as a “middle class” entitled to social rights, for example the ability to finance access to education, health-care, etc., in short entitled to perpetuate their expensive American Way of Life of the 50s and 60 !!! And this in a world freed from the war in Vietnam and therefore from fear as a means to organize society in a military-police fashion … What a danger for the epigones of exclusivism! One can easily see them in pray of the ghost of the strength of Number against the privileges of a few so feared by Nietzsche and by many other philo-Semite Nietzscheans. The Chicago Boys’ triumph followed with the nomination of Volcker as President of the Fed and of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States. Behind the latter was the whole the extreme right, including the Committee on the Present Danger. These did put an end to the modest American redistribution policies and to growing social rights, including the collective bargaining negotiated by strong unions. Behind the Chicago Boys and their mainstream university associates was the Austrian-Jewish fascist von Mises, the one who continued unabashedly preaching eugenics even with the pretension that the direct cause of diseases, or of the weakening of the Species, was the existence of a public health-care system, therefore to be dismantled. (See the “Note 11” of my essay on Health available here: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/la-sanita-tra-tagli-e-corruzione-una-vittima-eccellente-del-federalismo-fiscale/ )
To evaluate the monetarist neoliberal dehumanization project implemented in the name of a holy « Market » composed of simple and disembodied factors of production, increasingly liquefied in monetary and even speculative terms, it will suffice to consider the percentage of “gig” or “shitty jobs” in the United States where the active population – included in an ultra-precarious way according to official statistics – is around 63% of the total population. Contrary to the mainstream paradigm, the « market » does not automatically produce full-employment and even less full-employment with full-time jobs. Besides, statistics count jobs rather than workers … In Italy, we are around 59 % abstraction made of the over 5 million of our co-citizens forced to emigrate since 2007. In Calabria, the employment rate fluctuates around 40 % in a developed nation in which the ISE – means-tested threshold – for social assistance is set at € 3000.00 of annual family income with € 5000.00 of real estate plus the automobile, which amounts to an institutional invitation to resort to illegal work to survive! (see the Category “Comitato Cittadino per il Lavoro Dignitoso ” on this same site.)
The project of forcefully « returning » the Western masses towards socio-economic and cultural conditions that have disappeared since the 19th Century, is almost completed, even in the United States. It just will take a little more effort with the appropriate narratives. In a globalized world the environment and the climate concern each of us. For the rest, as we know, the Nazi industrialist Schindler was declared a “Just Man among the Nations” – gentiles nations – and his Jewish accountant Stern belonged to the (self)-elected race by exclusive divine right.
Indeed, despite the innocent and less innocent proponents of the Green New Deal, Trump’s position is understandable. The gross economic ineptitude of the Green New Deal would have to be financed with other QEs in the form of Modern Monetary Theory – MMT. This will be fine for the proponents of speculative finance because it will serve their interests, but much less for society in general. Especially the disastrous and unrealistic project to achieve, in the United States of all places and in only 11 years – a year has already passed – 100% of energy from falsely termed « clean» sources “(see ” Understanding Why The Green New Deal Won’t Really Work “, by Tyler Durden, Thu, 03/10/2019 – 9:25 pm, Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog, https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/understanding-why-green-new-deal-wont-really-work .
This 100 % of energy and not just electricity to be provided with solar and wind power would be an economic, aesthetic and environmental horror. In simple arithmetic terms it would be unlikely that this 100 % objective could even be reached by 2050 as stated by certain proponents of the American Green New Deal. « Somehow, the world would have to replace the equivalent of the energy contained within 2.4 Ultra Massive crude ships. Every. Single. Day. For 11,000 days straight, without missing a single day. A 7,000 mile long cargo train of ultra massive ships retired at the rate of 2.4 per day for the next 30 years. » in: « Getting Real About Green Energy, by Tyler Durden, Fri, 11/10/2019 Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com, https://www.zerohedge.com/health/getting-real-about-green-energy. A bouquet of energy sources is desirable for many reasons – national vulnerability, health, location, business productivity, general competitiveness of the social formation etc. – but the a-social ideological narratives must always be discarded … applying instead the precautionary principle!
Perhaps due to provocation some have concluded that in order to respect this fast approaching deadline, only “eating the children” remained !!! « LaRouche PAC Exposed As Ocasio-Cortez Troller Behind “We Must Eat The Babies” Viral Video », by Tyler Durden Fri, 10/04/2019 – 20:58 https://www.zerohedge.com/political/woman-aoc-town-hall-insists-we-must-eat-babies-stop-climate-change )
Trump does not ignore the fact that it was the American imperialists and associates who invented the fairytale of climate change and then of climate warming. He also knows that this narrative is no longer useful to protect the imperialist United States against the emergence of the new rival powers – economic and military ones such as China, Germany, the Eurozone, Russia, etc. In other words, those same potential rivals that many secret documents from the States and the Pentagon, before the formulation of the Preventive War Doctrine, coldly destined for pre-emptive destruction. Starting, of course, with 66 culturally Muslim countries.
To tell the truth, today’s American strategy is confused. And not just because of the desire to influence the oil market with its domestic production based on the environmentally questionable «fracking» or hydraulic fracturing. It seems to want to substitute the defense of speculative finance, which has now reached the end of its destructive cycle, to the preservation of the superior interests of the United States as a great nation now in decline. This is easily evidenced by the destructive tariff war while the resolution of the underlying economic problems would simply require the adoption of a new definition of anti-dumping capable of protecting the three components of the “net global income” of the households – see my « Appeal » in http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/test/ – together with the return to public credit and, in one form or another, to the banking regulation of the Glass Steagall Act disastrously repealed in 1999. The new definition of anti-dumping would allow the interpretation of existing free-trade deals without having to go through the long WTO negotiation process that requires the unanimity of all members. Global fair trade would then become a fact, ushering the World into a era of unprecedented open exchanges and prosperity.
The COP strategy, in particular that defended by Macron – and worse still by people like Hulot – is only class demagogy aimed at preserving and aggravating current inequalities with a shameful recourse to a new “climate gospel”. (Vedi « Nicolas Hulot, un ministre de l’Ecologie qui possède six voitures (pas toutes propres) », Outre ses six voitures, le ministre possède un bateau, un scooter électrique et une moto. https://www.francetvinfo.fr/politique/moralisation-de-la-vie-politique/nicolas-hulot-un-ministre-de-l-ecologie-qui-possede-six-voitures_2517797.html . The problem is not so much the number of vehicles that Hulot possesses but rather his unabashed chutzpah in preaching zero or negative growth to the masses of citizens …See also: « L’empreinte écologique à l’épreuve des inégalités » , 23 février 2017 https://designer-s.org/revue-de-presse/lempreinte-ecologique-a-lepreuve-des-inegalites/ .
This strategy makes little sense. Abstraction made of speeches, the measures actually adopted are more pragmatic; they take more into consideration the defense of the national competitiveness and of the productivity of national enterprises, rather than the bogus and dramatized thresholds of the IPCC. For example, the latest plan announced by Germany involves some investments for the railroads and crumbling infrastructure, financial aid to accelerate the energy transition for cars, the country’s large industrial and export sector, and some gestures towards the working poor forced to Kürtzarbeit in order to prevent popular revolts of the type of the Gilets jaunes or of the farmers of the Netherlands. (see « Climat: les manifestations massives poussent l’Allemagne à débloquer plus de 100 milliards d’ici 2030 », Par Isabelle Lepage, AFP 20/09/2019, https://www.latribune.fr/economie/union-europeenne/climat-les-manifestations-massives-poussent-l-allemagne-a-debloquer-plus-de-100-milliards-d-ici-2030-828583.html . Vedi « Un piano detto “ambientalista” per favorire imprese e finanza tedesche » di Claudio Conti in http://contropiano.org/news/ambiente-news/2019/09/21/un-piano-detto-ambientalista-per-favorire-imprese-e-finanza-tedesche-0118912 . Vedi pure: « Rivolta nei Paesi Bassi : contadini contro il “ Fascismo verde “» in https://scenarieconomici.it/rivolta-nei-paesi-bassi-contadini-contro-il-fascismo-verde/ .
These social struggles point to the adoption of the necessary scientific-Marxist distinction between purchasing power – an index to evaluate inflation – and standard of living which refers to the three components of the “net global income” of the households, see: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/pouvoir-dachat-niveau-de-vie-temps-de-travail-socialement-necessaire-et-revenu-global-net-des-menages-2-31-dec-2018/ )
You can bet that the Green Neal Deal in Italian sauce will produce even more subsidies in favor of national parasites – and I’m not just talking about the wind-power mafia – and huge increases in energy costs. As we know, these are then recovered through the current wage deflation policy which is hardly compensated by promised tax cuts on gross salary for employees – less than 3 billion euros are promised in the new budget – employees that are, in any case, still deprived of their constitutionally guaranteed collective bargaining rights – Article 99 in particular. (See (Vedi « Fotovoltaico e dintorni. Perché conta anche come si fa la riconversione ecologica », di Niccolò Ricciotti http://contropiano.org/news/ambiente-news/2019/10/03/fotovoltaico-e-dintorni-perche-conta-anche-come-si-fa-la-riconversione-ecologica-0119230 . See also: https://www.ilmessaggero.it/italia/vito_nicastri_mafia_condanna_oggi_1_ottobre_2019-4769872.html )
The demonization of CO2 was chosen because it involves the central role of energy in the economy and in modern daily life. We know that the “creeds” of the Nietzschean “new alliance” also play on other keys. For example, the attempt to make the consumption of meat taboo for proletariats destined to be transformed into new docile Dalits. See http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/une-nouvelle-strategie-de-la-peur-les-viandes-et-le-cancer-au-nom-de-la-desincitation-ecologique/ .
It is the sign of the ethico-political regression induced by the monetarist neoliberalism that the leaders and the mass media are mobilized for a fictitious fight against CO2 instead of trying to ensure access of all the inhabitants of the Planet to drinking water – which instead is privatized – or to guarantee the right to food, health-care, public education, social housing, etc. (For the right to food, see the table “Countries that are committed to the right to food by ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (160). “In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_food . It is noted that the United States is not a signatory while the West invents other planetary emergencies.” In 2006, more than 36 million people have died of hunger or disease due to micronutrient deficiencies [5]. “at https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrizione . Almost 7 every second! See also Suplemento elaborado por FAO (Naciones Unidas) La influencia de los precios internacionales de los productos básicos en el hambre, FAO, 10-10-2019 https://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=261295 . In my Livre-Book III entitled Keynesianism, Marxism, Economic Stability and Growth, (2005), I proposed the twin concepts of « food sovereignty » and « Ecomarxism » as a critique of neoliberal « food security » to be achieved with derivative products … see section Livres-Books of www.la-commune-paraclet.com ) We know that in modern capitalist societies there is a shift from the rights of workers to the class-regulated rights of consumers. One method used by the powers-that-be and by their governments to reach this objective is to claim to play the role of “umpire” in the negotiation processes between business and trade unions or social forces and to finance pressure groups and various NGOs. Some of these organizations have now transformed into multinational corporations with purposes other than those derived from their grassroots origins. The cooptation of NGOs and interest groups, certainly not all, in the mainstream mind set is part of the construction of bourgeois consensus (for Greenpeace see for example « La vera storia di Greenpeace » in http://www.pieroiannelli.com/la-vera-storia-di-greenpeace oppure « Patrick Moore: Why I Left Greenpeace » in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRlYHF9Bqps See « Patrick Moore – The Sensible Environmentalist » in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFHX526NPbE )
The question I would like to address to environmentalists in my country is the following: What responsibilities do you accept for the disappearance of all the olive groves in Puglia, up to Brindisi despite various warnings, including from the EU? The criminal inaction prevails today. In fact, if nothing changes, in a year or so the Basilicata will suffer the same fate and shortly after Calabria to the South and Tuscany to the North. Clearly, it is easier to mouthwash about CO2, isn’t it?
These narratives have become so untrustworthy and obscene that the IPCC fraud in Macronist and European sauce is turning to farce thanks to the young, credulous but willing Greta. Unlike the petty squat that typically attacks her in the media without listening to what she has to say, Greta is very serious about CO2 calculations and about the reduction agenda put in place. Like her young companions, Greta rightly insists on the issue of social justice. It is a pity, however, that she does not yet know that life on Earth is carbon-based and that CO2 is beneficial.
Watch the full speech: “WATCH: Greta Thunberg’s full speech to world leaders at a Climate Action Summit” in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAJsdgTPJpU . Miss Greta points out that – according to the same numbers provided by the IPCC, reducing CO2 emission by half in the next 10 years give a 50 % chance of remaining under a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Again according to IPCC’s latest narrative, this would imply disastrous irreversible changes. To have 67% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees, the remaining CO2 budget calculated by the IPCC itself will be exhausted in 8 ½ years !!! Hence the restrained and educated anger of the courageous teenager, who nevertheless states – we have seen above wrongly – that she does not believe that the World and IPCC leaders are « evil ». She does not yet know that she is being manipulated, she has not noticed that the deadlines change according to the centers of power and according to circumstances. When she will understand the forgery, perhaps she will be politely angrier than before … In the EU the 2030 deadline is used for the mobilization of students and of the most gullible masses but the fluctuating one of 2050 is used to orient the real transition on a voluntary basis.
( See for instance : « La Pologne attise la querelle sur le coût et la signification de la neutralité carbone » Par Sam Morgan, Euractiv , 06/10/2019, https://www.latribune.fr/economie/union-europeenne/la-pologne-attise-la-querelle-sur-le-cout-et-la-signification-de-la-neutralite-carbone-829898.html )
Meanwhile, taking them literally, Miss Greta is right to take them to Court. Poor Macron, is like a « devil in holy water » to use the proverbial French saying. It is bizarre since France ranks as the second most virtuous country for CO2 emissions thanks, in part, to its nuclear park, which Macron and his philo-Semite Nietzschean entourage now want to dismantle even so a great French Physics Nobel Prize (2018), Gérard Mourou, has developed a laser that is capable to eliminate nuclear radioactivity from nuclear wastes. The whole thing is turning into a farce !!! See «MACRON SLAMS GRETA THUNBERG AFTER TEENAGE ACTIVIST SUES 15 COUNTRIES OVER CLIMATE» https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/macron-slams-greta-thunberg-after-teenage-activist-sues-15-countries-over-climate.
In conclusion, we cannot help but underline the cruel cynicism of globalist climatologists and mainstream media as well as that of so many others who do not shy away from the indoctrination of children and adolescents to push for the adoption of their most regressive agendas. This is perhaps their worst crime, a crime against scientific ethics and against Humanity.
Now let’s take look at some scientific issues before analyzing the socio-economic aspects.
Essential links briefly commented on the scientific aspect of climate change
1) « « Questione ambientale e movimenti studenteschi » OSA – Opposizione Studentesca d’Alternativa , http://contropiano.org/documenti/2019/09/28/questione-ambientale-e-movimenti-studenteschi-0119109 (American and English-speaking fellow students should read it, if necessary using an online translator, and emulate the critical approach … On the bogus Modern Monetary Theory see: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/critica-marxista-rapida-de-la-teoria-monetaria-moderna-aviso-argentina-y-otros-paises-26-09-2019-en-espagnol-y-frances/ )
2) “Climate and indoctrination” http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/climate-and-indoctrination-march-2019/ . This article refers to a nice scientific summary in Italian entitled « Sono uno scettico climatico, Si, ma perché? » di Franco Zavatti in http://www.zafzaf.it/clima/sono_scettico.pdf . It is shown, in particular, that all the IPCC climate simulation models, apart from the Russian one, are far from the facts actually observed. I pointed out that they do not take permafrost into account, so it is not surprising that the oscillations of CO2 do not precede, and therefore do not cause, but instead follow the observed climatic fluctuations. With the IPCC the Model shamelessly substitutes for Realty.
3 ) « Global Warming Fraud Exposed In Pictures » , by Tyler Durden , Tue, 10/01/2019 – 12:25 Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk, https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/global-warming-fraud-exposed-pictures .This beautiful article in English with easy-to-read graphics highlights the fraudulent use of data by the IPCC and non-realist climatologists.
4 ) « Riscaldamento globale | innalzamento-record del livello degli oceani » in https://www.zazoom.it/2019-09-26/riscaldamento-globale-innalzamento-record-del-livello-degli-oceani-la-minaccia-per-venezia/5830311/. Or: « Océans : pour le IPCC, “l’avenir est encore entre nos mains” » Par Giulietta Gamberini 25/09/2019, https://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/industrie/energie-environnement/oceans-pour-le-IPCC-l-avenir-est-encore-entre-nos-mains-828849.html.The knowledge about Oceans is still fragmentary as well as the data of low and high atmosphere chemistry. We can already underline the ineptitude of the IPCC when it states that the acidification of the oceans is due to CO2 increases. The first page of the chemistry book tells us instead that warming will cause the ocean to release CO2, not to store it. The causes of acidification are to be found elsewhere. See http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/acidification-des-oceans-et-changement-climatique-9-nov-2017/ . See also: https://www.climato-realistes.fr/retractation-dun-article-de-nature-sur-le-rechauffement-des-oceans/ . Meteorologists are not new with these sophisms. My favorite is the Lorenz Butterfly Effect applied on the Planet scale. Of course this flies in the face of the first page of vectorial calculus. But being the first with nuclear scientists to get Crays and such, can cause some hubris … We can see also why global and local climate can vary. Mind you Lorenz is still very useful for washing machines.
The sea level has been rising for more than 20 000 years, but since the beginning of the last 8 000 years the increase has stabilized, the average increase being only a few millimeters per year (see table « Sea level rising for 20 000 years » in https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/global-warming-fraud-exposed-pictures .) Nevertheless, today some experts, including inside the United Nations, push islanders like the inhabitants of Tuvalu to take to Court those countries that do not respect the – vague – objectives of the 2015 Paris Agreement, in order to dramatize the climatological fairytale !!! However, in this case, nobody asks the essential question of knowing if we are dealing with atolls, which have a natural evolution of birth and submersion in the Ocean according to a cycle of some centuries which is still little known. (See the tables in the « Formation» section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoll ) However, in Tuvalu the construction of airports and hotels etc. is experiencing a boom given the – understandable – need to draw on tourism resources beyond than provided by financial ones. The small Pacific nation is not spared the problems of modernity such as access to drinking water or waste recycling. Those are problems far more serious and urgent than the alleged global warming. (See https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/42659/solid-waste-management-tuvalu.pdf )
5) CO2 and the mechanics of the greenhouse effect. For example, in Jancovici’s works. The fact that CO2 is a stable molecule does not imply that it would contribute more to the greenhouse effect, as someone like Jancovici wrongly claims. (I also believe that Jancovici has never understood that what matters in the production of energy is the magnitude of the positive balance … obviously respecting human health. The current civil nuclear technology was chosen for military reasons, i.e. the reactor had to produce plutonium for the A Bomb and it had to be compatible with the propulsion of American Navy submarines. Already at that time molten salt alternative technologies – ex. rhodium – were conceived that did not produce radioactive wastes with a half-life longer than 30 days and which were not prone to explosions. Today their feasibility is being demonstrated, for example in China: the availability of rhodium is almost unlimited at a low price and the energy balance is among the best possible today – given that nuclear fusion is not yet in the cards.
Apart from the « radiative forcing» (discussed for example by Zavatti v. Note 2 above) the molecular stability of CO2 does not prevent various combinations, including chemicals. (See for example « Creato il sistema low cost per trasformare la CO2 in carburante » in http://www.rinnovabili.it/innovazione/trasformare-co2-in-carburante/ ) The most important greenhouse gas remains vapor – ex clouds – which has a cooling effect. In reality, Jancovici works with various a-scientific assumptions – the stability of a molecule says nothing about its possible combinations and its participation in the dialectic of Nature. He also works with a childish – “simpliste” – mechanics of the greenhouse effect. Hence, if I understood him correctly, 60% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere disappears, but 40% remains trapped in the reflective or yo-yo mechanics of the greenhouse effect according to Jancovici … All the while cheerfully ignoring permafrost, peat logs in Ireland and elsewhere as well as the phytoplankton etc. We know instead that CO2 contributes to the growth of vegetation etc, etc. Jancovici is unfortunately the most “serious” of these climatologists !!!
It is perhaps important to briefly explain what is meant here with the dialectic of Nature. In his book Gaïa Lovelock emphasized the fact that the Earth was a living being with various cybernetic self-regulation mechanisms. It is also inscribed in an astronomical mechanics – years ago I had underlined the essential importance for the climatic variations of the precession of the equinoxes, of the Coriolis force etc. There are various interwoven cycles of various lengths. But as Joachim of Fiore or Giambattista Vico would say, they are non-circular dynamic cycles. The law of energy dispersion – entropy – is not a universal law. It is overturned by biological life. And this is crucial for the evolution of our planet. The natural cycles on Earth are over-determined so that cybernetic mechanisms also change and adapt in the long term. For instance, biological life sustained by the strong concentration of CO2 gradually changed its absorption and restitution cycle into the atmosphere. This example, by definition, is the most significant of all, it allows us to assert that the terrestrial cycles, as well as their mechanisms, are dynamic. In addition, the development of human consciousness changes the simplistic naturalistic logic, for example that of Rodinescu-Roegen, on adaptation to the environment and on the disappearance of species. Natural adaptation is slow and sometimes leads to extinction. Often, when long time permits, it involves the transmission of favorable mutations via gametes. Human consciousness gives a more rapid and more reasoned power of adaptation. As Karl Marx pointed out, Man, a natural and historical being, reproduces himself in the bosom of Nature and History. These elements should alert climate change scholars, if not those of the IPCC, calling all to more modesty at least in the statements offered to the public. The Ancients, for example Heraclitus, knew that Man cannot swim twice in the same river.
6) CO2 is beneficial for vegetation and agriculture, in particular the cultivation of cereals; it is similarly beneficial for phytoplankton and therefore for the entire oceanic food chain up to the whales and to … Man. In fact, today the Planet is greener than before in recent years, even in the Sahel, while the fires in the Amazon rain forest have nothing to do with the alleged global warming. This is more a matter of agricultural capitalist aggression to the territory to expand intensive crops, often GMOs, as well as cattle breeding. And marginally it is a matter of traditional “slash and burn” agriculture. See « La Terra è più verde di 20 anni fa, secondo la NASA », https://www.pianetablunews.it/2019/03/18/la-terra-e-piu-verde-di-20-anni-fa-secondo-la-nasa/. Rispetto ai fuochi nell’Amazonia . « What Satellite Imagery Tells Us About the Amazon Rain Forest Fires » in https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/24/world/americas/amazon-rain-forest-fire-maps.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur . Vedi pure: https://www.climato-realistes.fr/amazonie-fake-news-desinformation-et-manipulation/ . For analysis of the big corporations present in the Amazon see: « La posta in gioco /4 » , di Alexik * http://contropiano.org/interventi/2019/10/09/la-posta-in-gioco-4-0119428 In English « The Companies behind the burning Amazon » in https://stories.mightyearth.org/amazonfires/index.html
Science must not to be confused with often obscurantist narratives. If, as science says, the anthropogenic CO2 does not have a measurable impact, then the whole narrative of the IPCC is a criminal fraud – if only because the permafrost is not included in the models of the IPCC while the CO2 level given at 410 ppm results from a single measure taken on Mauna Loa, one of the 16 most active volcanoes on the Planet located in Hawaii – see http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/question-urgente-au-IPCC-sur-la-mesure-du-co2-6-dec-2018/ . This is true as well as for the carbon tax, or for the objective of a badly defined “carbon neutrality”. In addition this threshold would not even be enough to reach the – foolish – goal of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius in the next 11 years – or more – according to the manufactured data of the same IPCC! The carbon tax had an initial purpose, that is to act as an invisible technological / commercial barrier against the emerging countries to which free trade was imposed. Today, however, some of these countries dominate technologies and patents for renewable energy sources – solar and wind power in particular! The already debatable strategy does no longer make sense from an economic perspective.
Even more serious, the demonization of CO2 makes us forget the real problems of atmospheric pollution, such as particles emission, sulfur, etc. But it justifies subsidies for more polluting alternatives. For example some studies tell us that gas-running trucks are 5 times more polluting, see: « Des essais sur route démontrent que les camions au gaz sont jusqu’à 5 fois plus nocifs pour la pollution de l’air » Les camions circulant au gaz naturel liquéfié (GNL) polluent l’air jusqu’à 5 fois plus que les camions diesel, conformément aux essais sur route sollicités par le gouvernement des Pays-Bas. Les résultats vont à l’encontre des déclarations des fabricants de camions, indiquant que les camions à gaz diminuent les émissions de NOx (Oxyde d’azote) de plus de 30 % [1] [2]. Transport & Environnement (T&E), qui publie aujourd’hui les résultats de l’essai, demande aux gouvernements de l’UE d’arrêter d’encourager l’acquisition de camions GNL en mettant fin aux taux d’imposition extrêmement bas dont bénéficie le secteur du gaz fossile dans la plupart des pays. Eoin BannonSeptember 18, 2019 – 18:09 https://www.transportenvironment.org/press/des-essais-sur-route-d%C3%A9montrent-que-les-camions-au-gaz-sont-jusqu%E2%80%99%C3%A0-5-fois-plus-nocifs-pour-la (quoted by https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/09/19/les-camions-roulant-au-gaz-polluent-jusqu-a-cinq-fois-plus-que-les-diesels_5512124_3244.html )
7) The transition to the electric or hydrogen car has probably become desirable not so much to lower the CO2 level as to lower the fine particles and other pollutants that contribute to the formation of smog in increasingly numerous populated urban areas everywhere on the Planet. (Personally I preferred the compressed air plus adjuvant technology developed by Guy Nègre if only because it allowed to guarantee a portion of small farmers’ income with the production of the necessary biofuel, in the framework of a rigorous protection of the lands destined to traditional agriculture and animal breeding. Such a policy would also beautify the otherwise abandoned territory. Furthermore compressed air is perfect to store intermittent or non-peak energy production and embarked tanks do not raise any traffic accident issues contrary to electric batteries or hydrogen tanks )
That being said, the batteries will need to be recharged. Fortunately, if CO2 is beneficial, fossil fuels can be rehabilitated with a strict insistence on the latest generation of filters, etc. Here is an episode that deserves reflection: « Watch: Porsche Taycan Laps Broken Down Tesla Model S At Nurburgring » by Tyler Durden Sat, 09/21/2019 – 08:45 https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/watch-porsche-taycan-laps-broken-down-tesla-model-s-nurburgring . Quote : « First, the company installed a Supercharger at the Nurburgring that appeared to be hooked up to a diesel generator ». This does not mean that one must drill for oil in Italy since the small fossil reserves available should rather be protected as strategic reserves.
We note that the environmental balance sheet of electric batteries is not convincing. Not so much for the balance sheet calculated in CO2 terms, but with reference to the other pollutants and the quantities of water mobilized in the production of the Rare Earths, etc. Not to mention the dangers of explosion, combustion etc multiplied by the number of batteries put into circulation. And this at a time where the behavior of electric batteries has yet to be studied. See « 11 Tons Of Water And “Special Container” Used To Extinguish Burning Tesla In Austria », by Tyler Durden Sat, 10/05/2019 – 13:40 https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/11-tons-water-and-special-container-used-extinguish-burning-tesla-austria . We note, in addition, that the question of the recycling of these new products, said to be less polluting, is not discussed much. For example, today, nobody knows how to recycle wind turbine blades and as a matter of fact, the old parks, for example in California or Hawaii, are left to rust on the site! We already imagine what is likely to happen in Italy … See ‘Green’ Energy’s Toxic Legacy: Millions of Wind Turbine Blades Destined for Landfills, September 27, 2019 by stopthesethings https://stopthesethings.com/2019/09/27/green-energys-toxic-legacy-millions-of-wind-turbine-blades-destined-for-landfills/.
8) So far, solar and wind power were used to privatize production and distribution networks and to create a class of green parasitic and poudjadist entrepreneurs who live off huge subsidies. The cost of intermittent solar and wind energy is paid by the networks, that is by citizens when they pay their bills. Without these direct and indirect subsidies their cost would be prohibitive. And let’s not even talk about the cost of recycling the installations. Lately the French government has imposed on EDF not only the privatization wanted by the EU but also an artificial rise of the volume of electricity to be made available to alternative energy companies at a normatively lower price than before. Without this governmental gift these private alternative sources and distribution companies would have gone bankrupt. We have now reached the absurdity that some of us have been denouncing for years, see http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/diffuser-amplement-s-v-p-energies-renouvelables-le-casse-du-siecle-gilles-balbastre-12-27-nov-2018/ . See also: « L’incroyable arnaque de la hausse du prix de l’électricité » in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiRLz4MQk7Y&list=PLXJa1eyN_t2nT3kXaxms-JgwX9dpwFl2F&index=6&t=0s
All this happens in the context of a regressive tax system favoring private beneficiaries, in particular through income tax credits for those who are still paying enough income taxes to make the installation of solar panels or wind turbines profitable. See: « Fotovoltaico e dintorni. Perché conta anche come si fa la riconversione ecologica », di Niccolò Ricciotti http://contropiano.org/news/ambiente-news/2019/10/03/fotovoltaico-e-dintorni-perche-conta-anche-come-si-fa-la-riconversione-ecologica-0119230. This choice means that the electricity bills – in addition to the mockery of the 28 days billing period – have more than doubled in the last 6 years for Italian households while our country cannot even guarantee a stable 10-year contract for the highly recyclable aluminum industry in Sardinia and elsewhere! The KWh costs almost a third more in our country than in neighboring nations. Italy spends tens of billions each year to buy electricity from our neighbors in the European market with its so-called “smart grids” that do not guarantee protection against blackouts – given the privatization and intermittency of certain sources. It goes without saying that these are certainly « smart » in guaranteeing huge profits to private companies.
Climatologists are commonly sold to decarbonisation at all costs for instance Legambiente – which would be hard pressed to explain the unprecedented disaster that befell the centuries-old olive groves in Puglia. These groups have invented subsidies to be taken away from fossil energy industries to be transferred to solar and wind power sources. The fight against the more than 300 billion euros annual tax evasion interests them much less. There is talk of subsidies amounting to 12.1 billion euros in 2013, and today to 17 billion. But one arrives at this figure in a very strange way by counting the use of fossil energies. For example: «Yet we are talking about 4.4 billion direct subsidies distributed to truck drivers, fossil fuel power plants and energy-intensive businesses, and 7.7 billion in indirect subsidies between new roads and highways, discounts and gifts for drilling, for a total of 12.1 billion euros in oil, coal and other sources that pollute the air, damage health, and are the main cause of climate change. https://www.legambiente.it/sites/default/files/docs/dossier_stop_sussidi_fonti_2013_legambiente.pdf
Apart from the inept demonization of CO2, it is only a matter of insuring the profitability of the alternatives that otherwise would be too costly. They already cost us almost 7 billion euros a year just for electricity, a sum transferred to the electricity bill. In reality, the cost of oil production is around 6 to 12 euros depending on whether it is light oil or not. The annual weight of excise duties on petrol and derivatives is over 35 billion euros in Italy. In fact, given that CO2 is beneficial, we should stop subsidizing alternative energies at least when they are not profitable without subsidies, Otherwise they will only contribute to making the cost of production in Italy higher, a hike that is usually and foolishly recovered with wage deflation which in turn destroys domestic demand. It would be wiser to cut 30 billion in excise duties to rehabilitate our industrial and economic competitiveness, at the same time providing a budget margin the households. I have already explained that this operation would be zero-cost as long as the same sum would cut off from the huge and ineffective tax expenditures granted to capital. As evidenced by the poor results of the Jobs Act and paradoxically by the small surplus in current accounts. This latter is derived from a greater decline in imports on exports and moreover it is arrived at in total abstraction of the net international position of our country. This is apparently positive only when the almost 500 billion euros of the intra-EU Italian debt under Target 2 is not taken into account. Contrary to what some would pretend the Target 2 debt is not a simple “jeu d’écriture” but a heavy sign of the poor competitiveness of our country.
These tax expenditures do not have the efficacy ideologically attributed to them within the framework of the neoliberal and monetarist public policy. According to the Court of Auditors, the tax expenditures amounted to 250 billion in 2011 for 720 incentives – Report 2017, p 106 – and over 300 billion in 2015 – 2016 Report, p 98. Then the Court came into phase with the Senate’s assessments . So that other more recent sources indicate only 75 entries for around 80 billion euros … http://francofichera.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Agevolazioni_fiscali_4_2012.pdf . As everyone knows, the definition of what is accounted for often influences the results obtained. It would take more in-depth studies. Also because the tax expenditures, the flagship of the monetarist neoliberal public policy, have the merit – for the capitalists and their governments – of disappearing from the budget radar once they are awarded. So that governments can always present a budget on the edge of the precipice in order to legitimize the perpetuation of austerity.
9) For the direct cost of this privatisation choice in Italy, which as we saw amounts to around 7 billion a year, see « Fotovoltaico e dintorni. Perché conta anche come si fa la riconversione ecologica », di Niccolò Ricciotti http://contropiano.org/news/ambiente-news/2019/10/03/fotovoltaico-e-dintorni-perche-conta-anche-come-si-fa-la-riconversione-ecologica-0119230 . See also: https://www.ilmessaggero.it/italia/vito_nicastri_mafia_condanna_oggi_1_ottobre_2019-4769872.html ).We have seen that the demonization of CO2 serves to subsidize green parasitic entrepreneurs living on State subsidies without which solar and wind power would not be profitable; as we know they transfer the high cost of their intermittency to the production / distribution networks, consequently to the citizen now transformed from a public beneficiary into a customer. Paraphrasing Hobbes « What is the worth of a customer ? » , only his ability to pay: so much for social rights. Apart from their not really convincing carbon balance sheet, we have also seen above the difficulty, now silenced in a typical venal fashion, of the recycling of solar panels, wind power and electric batteries.
10) We must add a key element, namely the transformation of a large part of the inter-sectoral flows of raw materials, not only the large amount of rare earths needed with the enormous volumes of water associated, but also the intensity of steel, copper, etc. , and therefore also the volumes of energy needed to extract and transform them, without obviously forgetting the impact on the environment … See this beautiful and important study: « Énergie versus matières premières : La transition est-elle réellement possible ? » — Olivier Vidal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxT7HD4rzP4 ). It is not a question here of the simplistic argument of the “finite resources” put forth by the Club of Rome which, as already demonstrated at the time by the University of Cambridge USA, abused the function of geometric growth by abstracting many intervening variables of weight. For example, the nodules of minerals in sea bottoms, which are much larger than the earth’s surface and even less known; the use of substitutes, or the necessary but still neglected recycling.
We are probably dealing here with the heart of this climatological narrative. Normally, within the framework of an indicative and incitative socio-economic planning system similar to that practiced in France, Italy and elsewhere, particularly in the EU, during the first three decades of the post-war period, the reorganization of sectoral and industrial flows, including the mobility of labor, was conceptualized as a strategic necessity. Its aim is to preserve and improve the qualitative level of the Insertion of the Social Formation within the World Economy. With the triumph of neoliberalism and monetarism, complete with the predominance given to private transnational corporations over national sovereignty, this is no longer the case. Climatologists contribute to the strengthening of the privileges of private property in international law right at a time when free-trade treaties harmonize the health-care protocols downwards – including the EU vs. the US – and give legal predominance to private corporations in special international tribunals. The growth in the number of lawsuits brought before these tribunals in the name of climate change is certainly not a necessarily positive development for the advancement of « natural law » and for democracy! (See http://www.rinnovabili.it/ambiente/cambiamento-climatico-tribunale/ )
National planning cannot be abandoned to the mysterious work of the “invisible hand” moved by the individual acquisitive spirit. The optimizing of private accumulation on a global scale cannot coincide with the preservation of the superior interests of sovereign countries, even with the golden share to regulate foreign control levels. Worse still when private accumulation is in the hands of speculative finance, in reality of very few hedge funds. (See «Piketty fait the impasse sur le trou noir du vrai pouvoir financier», Par Olivier Passet, Xerfi 08/10/2019, Quote « Behind this, there is the accelerated development of fund managers whose size and degree of concentration is amazing, with some surprising results: with the leadership of BlackRock 5251 billion of resources managed in 2018, Vanguard 4257, State Street 2200 etc. On their own, the top 10 managers represent over a third of the total capitalization of the managed funds. For instance BlackRock holds a share of around 5% in the capital of the main CAC 40 or DAX flagships. Together, BlackRock + Vanguard + State Street are the majority shareholder of 90% of the companies listed in the S & P 500. » in https://www.latribune.fr/opinions/tribunes/piketty-fait-l-impasse-sur-le-trou-noir-du-vrai-pouvoir-financier-830060.html )
If the energy and industrial transition desired by the climatologic narrators takes place following their guidelines and time-limits, then it will be worse than what happened with the 1987 Montreal Protocol for CFCs. You will remember that in the « mature » economy of that time the sales of household appliances served only for the renewal of existing parks. Dupont de Nemours had new patents for cooling – refrigerators, air conditioners etc. The fear induced by the hole in the ozone layer was invented in order to obtain a suitable legal framework to induce the renewal of all the existing parks of these products. Nobody speaks of the famous Ozone Hole anymore even if we still do not know what causes its fluctuations. Some studies point towards greater pollution produced by CFC substitutes even though, today, most studies do not make the distinction. (See https://www.notre-planete.info/environnement/trou-couche-ozone.php . Typically this type of article is apologetic. To read it well you must take into account two elements: a) According to the article itself, 1995 was the date of observation of the maximum concentration of harmful substances such as CFCs and HCFCs. However the evolution noted since does not confirm the optimism of the article; b) The article rightly points to possible natural causes. It is then worth taking a look – ignoring the unsurprising comments – to the curve that begins in 1979 available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVrQ601nPXo . The level was much higher in 1979 than in 1995. At the minimum we can conclude that the current scientists in the majority are not too convincing …)
The 5G will cause a renewal of the existing parks for many products, so that there is no need to add false climate reasons that are as useless as they are potentially more polluting. They certainly provide little benefits in terms of increasing the standard of living of the citizens. From this point of view it is true that capitalism is not compatible with the preservation of the environment, and even less with the preservation of the quality of life of the citizens …
The worst is yet to come in the near future. In addition to doubtful narratives, current climatologists have become accustomed to shooting extravagant amounts as if they were central bankers serving the dozen major private primary banks, including Goldman Sachs. There is talk of 1% of world GDP immediately, of 1000 billion euros a year immediately and so on and so forth. Lagarde, the new ECB executive, already seems convinced of the need for green QE. Her only problem will be to find a trick to get around the ECB statute that prevents programs that discriminate between fractions of capital. But it does not seem an impossible obstacle to negotiate among capitalists. However, we can already foresee a disaster worse than that caused by the recurrent QE and other Tltro of Mario Draghi.
Before analyzing this speculative inflation of the dominant discourses and of the derivative products involved, we take the time to reiterate the criminal hypocrisy of this speculative climatologic strategy with respect to emerging countries. In fact, at the COP in Copenhagen 2009 – during which certain falsifying e-mails from the IPCC were also leaked with respect to Himalayan ice – these countries were promised 100 billion dollars in exchange for the adhesion of their comprador leaders. To date, of these 100 billion only 10.3 billion were actually offered and actually only 5.3 billion effectively received, see https://www.greenclimate.fund/what-we-do/portfolio-dashboard
. Nothing surprising in this behavior of the rich capitalist countries. President Rafael Correa had already tested the seriousness of their promises with his generous proposal concerning the renouncement of the exploitation of the oil reserves in the Yasuni Park against a fair compensation. The Funds promised by the West never materialized. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasun%C3%AD-ITT_Initiative . Of the 3.6 billion dollars mentioned, only 200 million were actually promised in 2012, forcing Ecuador to change its policy while taking the necessary steps to protect the general environment of the park.
Luckily for the countries of the so-called Periphery and Semi-Periphery – Galtung’s terminology – the alternative of the Silk Road has emerged, possibly with a national rehabilitation of public credit and with the negotiation of joint-ventures between State-owned enterprises in order to accelerate socio-economic development, obviously while respecting the health of citizens and the environment.
The economic aspect of the Paris Agreement – 2015 – from the Stern Report, to Larrouturou, Gaël Giraud, Lagarde etc.
It is therefore not just a question of asserting the scientific basis of data on the alleged climate changes and their supposed harmful consequences. At the limit, said without irony, a little more heat in Patagonia, in the Prairies or in the black lands of Ukraine or Siberia, with a little more CO2, a beneficial factor for crops, would not be so catastrophic. The bubbles of champagne and sparkling wine are produced by CO2. Unfortunately, if global warming is not scientifically well established, local changes are even less so. Paradoxically, the alleged heating does not occur uniformly.
We know that the cost of solar and wind power energy stop being competitive at the moment the subsidies they benefit from would cease together with the transfer of the cost of their intermittency to the production-distribution networks and therefore to the monthly billing of the citizens. We know that their carbon balance sheet – the CO2 nonsense – is not conclusive once their relatively shorter life cycle is taken into consideration. It is now assessed to about 10 years instead of the prior 20 or 25 years, particularly for wind turbines. Nor is the cost of their recycling or that of their installed overproduction capacity which is needed to guarantee minimum reliability due to their intermittency. These problems are bound to be multiplied when one considers the 100% solar-wind transition. Some hard thinking is now devoted to assess the devastating intersectoral transformations required as well as the use of raw materials, for instance the intensity in terms of steel, rare earths which in turn require lots of water for their production, composite materials etc. – see « Énergie versus matières premières: The transition est-elle réellement possible? »– Olivier Vidal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxT7HD4rzP4
We also know that the ruling classes want to create coercive legal parameters to enforce the energy transition complete with the crazy interdiction of fossil energies. While talking about greenhouse gases, the IPCC models that inform the various COPs are obsessed with CO2. This is precisely to create a rational widely internalised by the people against fossil fuels, notwithstanding the fact that, in the end, it would have been enough to strengthen the environmental criteria for their extraction and to develop new generation of filters, something the EU already knows how to do with some success. For example, the rules applied to automobiles.
This narrative, normative and legalistic obsession is equally found in the Montreal Protocol – 1987 – and in the 2015 Paris Agreement and its sequels. The revolt of the Gilets jaunes and that of the Dutch peasants represent the first concrete and unavoidable refutation of these obscurantist climate narratives, because they are enemies of any socio-economic qualitative progress. Even before we take into account the fact that, because of neoliberalism and monetarism, we live in an age in which the future of the young generations is likely to be worse than that of their parents.
The resignation of the pitre Nicholas Hulot is good news. When minister Mr. Hulot wanted to unilaterally accelerate the prohibition of fossil fuels in France and the transition away from civilian electricity producing nuclear plants while a whole battery of measures, not really compensated for less wealthy homes, hit the budget of families just to create the disincentive to consume dear to the epigones of class-oriented zero or negative growth. We have already pointed out the obscene “ecological footprint” of people like Hulot and Al Gore and other climatologic moralizers of the same ilk. (See (Vedi PLAN CLIMAT https://www.gouvernement.fr/argumentaire/paquet-solidarite-climatique-quatre-mesures-concretes-pour-les-foyers-modestes ; TRANSITION ENERGETIQUE https://www.ecologique-solidaire.gouv.fr/loi-transition-energetique-croissance-verte )
Even if a part of the Left has not yet understood it, when all is told, the neoliberal capitalist leaders, like one of their great masters Jean Cocteau, know « how far they can push it » (“jusqu’où ne pas aller trop loin ») But they do it only to preserve their class interests while still pushing their regressive climate strategy forward with all means available to them. It is enough here to underline the recent demagogic dramatization by the IPCC in its attempt to forcefully impose two well-known deadlines, those of 2030 and 2050. We already know that these deadlines will not be met, but this is not the most important thing for capitalist leaders. Who knows what they will invent after these deadlines will have past …
The parameters of the current governmental and media discussion were formalized in the UK at the request of the government of Gordon Brown. It was the Stern’s Report that first dramatized the fake problem of the energy transition in the name of the absolute necessity – invented for this purpose – to slow down or reverse the trend – an invented and dramatized trend – of global climate warming. It was already said elsewhere that this Report was always based on the worst scenarios of the presumed warming due to CO2 and that it counted things twice. An American professor even said that he gave him “a D for diligence” and an “F for fail” (see STERN REVIEW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review ) However, it is not said that the leaders of the UK are always convinced to live at the time of Kipling and therefore, with the exhaustion of North Sea oil, they had to invent a global emergency to restore the competitiveness of their country. As for us we rather hope for an early “return” of the spirit of Gerard Winstanley, of the Levellers and of the Diggers …
The 2006 Stern Report was one of the first studies that sought to assess the cost of the ecological transition. It estimated the cost of inaction between 5% and 20% of the World GDP. This loose margin is not surprising with scholars like Stern and many other climatologists. It is enough to look at the always false predictions made by the various and numerous IPCC models on which the conformist works of these scholars are based. In this perspective, the Stern Report assessed the annual cost of the energy transition at 1% of the World’s GDP in order to remain below 500 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. For the UK this meant an investment of £ 14 billion each year. Given the propensity to dramatize by relying on IPCC data, Stern stated in 2008 that this 1% was becoming a 2% and maybe even 10%. With the same precision … See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/jun/26/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange .
This being said, we note that the logic of the Stern Report is based on the demonization of CO2, therefore of fossil resources in order to justify billions and billions of euros of investments for the energy transition. If, on the other hand, CO2 were beneficial and if the late-generation filters were efficient, all that would remains of this shibboleth is the cynical imperialist and speculative mockery. One which, to speak clearly, is deeply neo-Burkean and philo-Semite Nietzschean in nature.
As we have seen, the sophisms (Socrates-Plato) or the paralogisms (Kant) of the Stern Report has foreshadowed the Paris Agreement 2015. However, we note the increasingly affirmed tendency to involve speculative finance. Especially now that it is endangered by the most serious economic-financial crisis since the Great Depression and by the recent failed attempt at re-normalization. This « reset » was thought to be necessary to restore the degraded balance sheets of the central banks, in particular those of the FED and of the ECB, after their gigantic injections of liquidity in the banking-financial system since 2007-2008.
The two most telling examples are those of the Jesuit Gaël Giraud and of Larrouturou. The economist Gaël Giraud was able to observe things from the inside; up until July 31, 2019 he was the chief economist of the Agence française de développement. (See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga%C3%ABl_Giraud ) « Gaël Giraud was very active during the preparation of the Moscovici law on the separation of the banks, denouncing with Alain Grandjean and Olivier Berruyer (among others) the predictable inefficiency of the new regulatory provisions. » (Idem. My translation) In a very interesting video at 55:00 mn he tells of his meeting with various representatives of the City at the Royal Academy of Science. He presents them as blasés and not too ready to take the necessary measures to ensure the energy transition despite their consensus on the gravity of the situation. The reason adduced was the will to defend the status quo and the privileges acquired by the world of finance in the current monetarist neoliberal framework. At 1:04:00 mn, G. Giraud assesses the cost of the transition needed to stay around a 2 degree Celcius increase – i.e., the target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement – at between 50,000 and 90,000 billion euros for the next 15 to 20 years, that is the equivalent of world GDP. According to him, this sum can be created or withheld from existing amounts of money. He notes that the liquidity injected into the financial system is around € 240,000 billion, 90 % of which is the subject of financial transactions without any connection to the real economy. Taxing speculation would, according to him, redirect this money towards the energy transition. (The 17,000 billion dollars of negative-rate capital in the world do not seem to confirm this optimism … the short term horizon and the structure of hegemonic speculation have not even allowed the Fed to carry out its “reset” …) A 1 : 06: 00 he approves Jouzel-Larrouturou’s proposal – see below – recalling that, 7 or 8 years ago, he and his friend Alain Grandjean had already proposed something similar.
In my opinion, the most important information provided by this video concerns the November 2008 rescue of the French financial system – the 4 largest banks of the Hexagon – by the Société de financement de l’économie française (SFEF), a private company but one benefiting from the guaranty of the French State. It was created in one night just to raise funds on the market without them being counted in the public debt according to the definition of the Maastricht Treaty. The SFEF made 70 billion euros available to the French banking system before the St Sylvester, a sum without which these 4 systemic banking giants would not have survived. With all the systemic consequences one can imagine …
It is possible that Gaël Giraud is well-intentioned when he talks about redirecting speculative capital to the real economy. But this remains deeply inscribed in the logic of private property and capitalism, at best regulated by the State. But, through other actors, and shortly with Ms Lagarde at the helm of the ECB, this kind of logic increasingly conceives green finance as the only available alternative to save the hegemonic speculative finance which, today, is victim of its own a-economic and a-human mechanisms.
This is obviously the case for the duo Jouzel-Larrouturou. Jean Jouzel is perhaps the best known of the French climatologists. He was part of the Group 1 that is to say the scientific group of the IPCC, but he does not appear to follow or even comprehend the predictive prudence of this group, one that is understandably induced by the uncertainties that emerge from the largely fake and divergent IPCC models themselves. His interest in climate change immediately took a decidedly political turn. His characteristic is that of the man who “has the blind faith of the self-appointed Righteous ” (“la foi du charbonnier”) even if he proves able to change his mind. Thus in 1970, like most scientists at that time, he was convinced that, due to a 10,000-year cycle, the Earth was about to enter a new ice age. Jouzel is a glaciologist. Then he changed his mind following the work of Russian scientists from 1983-1984: “According to Jouzel, the analysis of ice samples shows that during cold periods there is less CO2 and that during hot periods there is more. We therefore confirm that what governs the main phases is astronomy, the position of the Earth with respect to the Sun, but that during heating the CO2 amplifies the phenomenon “. » https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Jouzel . However, perhaps because the IPCC models do not take into account the permafrost among many other crucial factors, the astronomical aspect is no longer discussed at all and for the rest Jouzel has not yet understood that the increase in CO2, which is beneficial for crops and for vegetation, follows and does not precede the heating phases.
Larrouturou once concerned himself with the reduction of working time but he did this according to the – legitimization – formulas devised by de Robien in opposition to the concrete and highly successful implementation of the RTT by the « gauche plurielle ». It is fascinating to note the 1000 billion initial amount of money that is always tossed by these new Millenarians… It applies as much to Larrouturou as to Stern and to Gaël Giraud. But, where to get this money? What is proposed is the creation of a European climate bank, i.e. continuing QEs but in green sauce (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtMQeCdwZiQ ) Larrouturou pretends to be an economist but he does not seem aware of the current economic-financial crisis that was created by the hegemony of speculative finance; he does not seems to understand the seriousness of the failed attempt by both the FED and the ECB to carry out a “reset”. At best, such a climate bank seems like an inconsiderate “fuite en avant”. (See my « The FED dilemma » in https://www.la-commune-paraclet.com/EPI%20TWOFrame1Source1.htm )
In summary: “According to Pierre Larrouturou, the European Court of Auditors has estimated that it would take around 1 trillion (thousand billion) euros per year, divided between public and private financing, to save the climate “[83]. It therefore proposes turning the European Investment Bank (EIB) into a bank for sustainable development, which could provide EU Member States with zero-interest loans entirely used for the energy transition; this would amount to more than 2% of their annual GDP, for 30 years. For example, this bank would allow France to benefit from 45 billion euros of zero-interest loans every year. Other sources of financing of the energy transition come from a 5% tax on the non-reinvested benefits of companies, and from a financial transaction tax and a CO2 tax [84], [85]. “» (My translation) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Larrouturou
It is not surprising then that this duo conceived itself as a spearhead to act on the political front, always with their usual and blind « foi du charbonnier ». Their aim is to create a coercive public regulatory framework capable of imposing the energy transition and decarbonisation to societies, an objective to be reached by dramatizing the unfounded hypotheses of IPCC models. The division of labor between the two is not surprising, Jouzel justifies the climatic parameters and the economist Larrouturou formulates his Millenarian proposals within this framework. Of course, they always allude to the necessity to fight against growing inequalities, but they fail to propose concrete programs – for instance to guarantee access to water, to the right to food, to universally accessible public health and education etc. The fight against global warming, and in particular against CO2 is more important for their narration. See: “Pour éviter le chaos climatique et financier” – Jean Jouzel et Pierre Larrouturou https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl9iKlcwokQ
Meanwhile, climatologists are rushing to give a new life to the certificates for polluting, that is to say the green certificates, which allow the exemption of very polluting activities. For instance cement plants which can use them to compensate for their significant pollution, which however is valued in terms of CO2 emissions !!! The neoliberal-monetarist equality among market agents implied that the right price of the green certificate was to be established by the « market », hence a special exchange platform was created. As we know, this Green Stock-exchange got priority with each COP despite many and dramatic falls so far. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificat_vert
One of the new words of the climatologic gospel is the Green Bond. This is happening with the regulatory and soon the financial support of the EU. « The green bond market has experienced very strong growth worldwide since 2013: since then, almost 275 billion dollars have been issued in green bonds, of which over 100 billion this year. Total green bonds in circulation reach almost 900 billion if we include non-labeled climate bonds, according to the British NGO Climate Bonds Initiative. However, this represents only a percentage of the bond markets (90,000 billion dollars). (…) France is the second largest issuer of “green bonds”, behind China, ahead of the United States. » See :« Qu’est-ce qu’un green bond? » Par Delphine Cuny 08/12/2017, https://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/banques-finance/qu-est-ce-qu-un-green-bond-760714.html .
The EU has integrated the climate into its policies.
« Key EU objectives for 2030
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% compared to 1990 levels Bring at least 27% of the share of renewable energy in total energy consumption Increase energy efficiency by at least 27%
Long-term goal
By 2050, the EU intends to reduce its emissions substantially – by 80-95% compared to 1990 levels as part of the overall efforts required by developed countries. Transforming Europe into an energy-efficient and low-carbon economy will also stimulate the economy, create jobs and strengthen Europe’s competitiveness.
Financial support
At least 20% of the EU budget for the 2014-2020 period (180 billion euros) should be spent on protecting the climate. This sum would be added to funding from individual EU countries. The EU funds low-carbon energy technology demonstration projects through the sale of emission certificates. Technologies are included to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and other industrial plants or to store it underground (the so-called CO2 capture and storage technique.) » in https://ec.europa.eu/clima/citizens/EU_ENG
For a summary and a pessimistic evaluation of the results achieved so far, see « Climate: EU and Italy, close to Greta, far from the targets » 1 Apr 2019 – Luca Bergamaschi on https://www.affarinternazionali.it/2019/04/clima-italia-ue-greta/ (The article mentions 80,000 premature deaths related to pollution but without mentioning that CO2 has nothing to do with it … Carbon dioxide (CO2) is not to be confused with the poisonous monoxide of carbon.)
It is symptomatic of our modern age that Ms. von der Leyen was elected President of the European Commission largely thanks to her promises on the strengthening of climate policies for the next programming period 2021-2027. However, it will be more a question of objectives and guidelines to be interpreted by member countries given that the European budget remains limited and subject to strong constraints such as agricultural policy.
We already know that the Kyoto objectives were not respected and that those of the Paris Agreement have already lost so much credibility that it pushed the IPCC to forge a dramatic 12-year horizon – today 11 – before its predicted catastrophe, that is, before getting over the somehow fatidic 2 degrees Celsius rise in global warming. For now the IPCC is fortunate in that it can rely on the looseness of its statistical projections compared to the observed data. But what will they invent next ? (See « Fig.6: Global Mid-Tropospheric Temperature Variations Models vs Observations » « Average global of variations (average over 5 years) of the temperature of the mid-troposphere (about 6 km in height) for 32 models (lines) representing 102 individual simulations. Circles (stratospheric balloons) and squares (satellites) represent the observations: the Russian model (INM-CM4) is the only one that comes close to the observed data. » in http://www.zafzaf.it/clima/sono_scettico.pdf , p 41)
It is now important to move on to the essential aspect, namely to understand the economic neoliberal and monetarist climatologic logic with respect to the socio-economic and environmental logic provided by the theory of Ecomarxism.
Discount rate or Ecomarxism?
We should now analyze the proposed financial logic. This will enable us to underline the fraudulent neoliberal and monetarist Marginalist aspect to be compared with the scientific logic of Ecomarxism. The Stern Report that we discussed above is summarized here: The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AII69k0mhQY . In addition to counting twice and choosing the worst scenarios, this Report uses the concept of discount rate to base its predictions and arrive at a cost assessment.
We have all learned with Marx and Karl Polanyi that the Marginalist market capable to give the right price for goods and services simply does not exist. There are various topological markets and therefore of limited radius – emporiums, fairs, fish markets such as Léon Walras criée, ecc. And there are various institutional markets, for example the stock exchanges, today partly transformed into high-frequency trading platforms. The capitalist market, like the Green Bond market, is a regulatory and legal coercive creation. You can invent the market you want, for example to make the so-called clean energies profitable by privatizing EDF and forcing it to transfer a certain volume of electricity at a low fixed price to private companies in the sector specialised in alternative sources. I have shown that the just price of the market is only worth what the intersection of the demand and offer curves is worth. To draw the demand curve you need to provide a table of offers given in prices (!). And vice-versa to draw the offer curve. Hi-Han! (see « The pseudo-economic science of the bourgeoisie: this is why we should quickly change economic paradigm » in http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/the-pseudo-economic-science-of-the-bourgeoisie-here-is-why-we-should-quickly-change-economic-paradigm/
The capitalist mode of production is based on profit, more precisely on private accumulation. How to harmonize private profit with the generate interest given that, as Adam Smith said, the capitalists “love to reap where they never sowed? “(Wealth of nations, Ed Sutherland, 1993, p 47) Since, according to him, profit derives from human labor, Smith admitted that he no longer understood its genesis. In fact, the work of a manager or owner could not be hugely larger than that of the worker. Nor the reward for that job. Explaining profit with the recourse to risk seemed to him similar to prostitution (idem, p 103) In the end, he proposed the magic of the “invisible hand” to harmonize the individual interest and the general interest of the Nation but as a good Physiocrat, this had to be done respecting the natural law of philosophers (p. 392), that is to say respecting the most perfect justice, the most perfect freedom and the most perfect equality (p 286); this respect alone would be able to guarantee the maximum prosperity of the three classes in presence – and by extension of their three forms of income: salary, profit and land rent.
In addition, as far as scientific, that is to say Marxist, economic theory is concerned, there exists an essential distinction between profit and interest. The second is necessarily deduced from the first. In fact, before the current phase of the hegemony of speculative capital, this distinction was empirically obvious: commercial banks were lending money to entrepreneurs that were active in the real economy to allow them to make investments beyond the limit allowed by reinvested profits only. It is true that no bourgeois economic theory, least of all the varied Marginalist versions, is able to distinguish profit and interest. Thus, based on their paradigm, bourgeois economists are ontologically incapable of accounting for speculation. In fact, with the affirmation of the theory of capital efficiency, speculation should accelerate the return to equilibrium … They relegate the study of Trade cycles to the historical or better narrative part of their “dismal science”. (For the most useful bourgeois contribution in this field see, for instance, J. K. Galbraith’s A short history of financial euphoria (1994) or Hyman Minsky)
In reality, where bourgeois theories speak of stationary or dynamic equilibrium, scientific-Marxist theory analyzes the intersectoral flows of the entire system. Karl Marx was the first to present the Equations of Simple Reproduction – stationary equilibrium – and of Enlarged Reproduction or dynamic equilibrium. See my Synopsis of Marxist Political Economy in the Livres-Books section of my old site www.la-commune-paraclet.com )
We know that the capitalist mode of production – MPC – passed through various historical phases characterised by the dominance of a fraction of capital, either merchant, banking, financial capital, internationalization of productive capital – multinationals – and today global hegemonic speculative capital embodied by transnational financial firms and non-financial companies in which the CFOs have priority over the CEOs. The relationship between the real economy and banking and speculative capital were never harmonious since interest is always deducted from profits. See, for example, the hatred of the industrialist H. Ford against the Morgan House at https://archive.org/details/TheInternationalJew_655 .
With the emergence of banking and financial capital, the power to invest was increased, However, this favored a type of allocation dictated by the search for maximum private accumulation, relying on the magic of the “invisible hand” to reconcile the micro-economy – private interest – and the macro-economy – general interest . This sectoral imbalance of investments – sectoral expansion / contraction – results in speculative bubbles which are then purged with recurring crises or Trade cycles. The crisis is organic to the MPC, it constitutes its natural cybernetic mechanism of self-regulation. That is why Keynes was for State regulation « to save the capitalism of his own animal spirits ».
With the hegemony of speculative finance, things are quite worse, there is no longer any distinction between profit, classical interest and speculative interest. Worse still, thanks to financial deregulation, this last legally imposed itself as a sectoral profit corresponding to the gains of the speculative sector of the so-called « universal banks ». It naturally cannibalizes the profit extracted in the real economy. For example, with the ROE or with the loans obtained without collateral to proceed with various LBO and other public purchase offers more or less friendly. As an autonomous “sector” the bank and speculative finance can extract ultra-competitive profit volumes because its investments in fixed capital is much lower than those needed in the real economy. It suffices to add that the neoliberal norms and laws have removed all the barriers between deposit banks and commercial banks etc. and therefore also between the real economy and the speculative economy, a phenomenon that we all know under the name of financialization of the economy.
Moreover, since the 2007-2008 crisis, the MPC, under the hegemony of speculative capital, has invented a mode of operating against nature, denying capitalist competition and the cyclical purge of speculation as a necessary consequence of crises. The big banks – called universal banks – with all their shadow banking – money funds, etc. – were considered « too big too fail ». At this point, the only regulatory mechanism between the banking-financial sector and the real economy, i.e., the prudential banking ratio disappeared and was de facto replaced with the central bank’s injections of liquidity in various forms, Facility 1 and 2, FSEF, MES, OMT, QE, Tltro 1,2, 3, repurchase agreements etc. At this point the speculative bubbles can only grow accumulating one on top of the other. And by the strangulation of labor income in the name of lowering the cost of production – confusing it with the cost of labor – and the sell-out of the State fiscal policy with the recourse to ineffective but gigantic tax expenditures.
Today financial speculation is around 250,000 or 300,000 billion dollars. The attempt by the FED and the ECB to normalize the situation with the “reset” has failed. The fragility of the banking-financial world is highlighted by the “credit crunch” paradoxically induced by the liquidity injections and QE: Banks, particularly the large systemic banks, are so vulnerable that they no longer lend themselves to each other on the interbank markets. To protect themselves they have adopted two great strategies. First they hoard their liquidity in a defensive manner often choosing to deposit them at a negative rate at the central bank, thus cancelling the illusory belief entertained by central bankers in the transmission of their liquidity policy to the real economy, at least in part. Second, they buy safe government bonds – German Bunds, etc. – even at a negative rate. Today, there are over 17,000 billion dollars of these negative-rate bonds. With the tariffs war and the global economic slowdown, the banks are forced to maintain their loans to many zombie companies just to avoid having to register the losses on their balance sheets. The general vulnerability of the system was revealed recently by the inter-banking market crisis that was exposed by the dramatic intervention of the FED on the overnight market – repurchase agreements. In a few days, the banks were given $ 278 billion “The Repo Market Incident May Be The Tip Of The Iceberg”, by Tyler Durden Mon, 07/10/2019 – 05:00 am, Authored by Daniel Lacalle via dlacalle.com, https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/repo-market-incident-may-be-tip-iceberg
The prudential ratio of banks determines the credit volumes that can be granted to companies with respect to their own funds. This ratio therefore links them theoretically to the performance of the economy. If the economy is doing well, the loans earn interest increasing the capital of the banks and the banks can then lend more. If the economy goes badly, with bad loans, banks must register the losses and reorganize their activities to respect the ratio. In short, today, the only prudential ratio of the current speculative world is the creation ex nihilo of credit from central banks, and behind these liquidities and other QE, the recurring bailout operated at the expense of States and tax payers. Therefore in 2007 I proposed the analytical category of « credit without collateral » – see https://www.la-commune-paraclet.com/MandelbrotFrame1Source1.htm . Bernanke, whose PhD was on inflation (!) in the singular, had invented the QE with the hope of creating hyperinflation in order to transfer the burden of the US public debt financing to the creditors of the United States, above all China and Japan. Instead, he created a tremendous « credit crunch ».
Today, the difficulties quickly presented above are made worse in the context of the worsening public debt financing. This had explodes in absolute terms as well as in terms of percentage of GDP. In this nefarious context, the so-called Zero-bound strategy was imagined – see in particular Blanchard-Smmuers, 2019. This strategy hopes to unleash a virtuous trend capable to reduce the weight of the financing of public debts with low or negative real interest rates on government bonds, in any case lower than real GDP growth. Let us leave aside the accounting falsification of GDP accomplished in 2013 in the USA and in October 2014 in the EU with which was artificially added 3% or 3.5% to GDP, accounting for prostitution, drugs, evasion, certain armaments and certain intellectual property rights – See http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/debito-pubblico-sciocchezze-marginaliste-caso-italiano-3-marzo-2017/. It is clear that with already vulnerable systemic banks and over 17,000 billion government bonds with, perhaps safe, but nonetheless negative rates, this strategy can only compress the « profits » of the sector and lead to an increase in bank brokerage and intermediation costs and to a worsening of the burden placed on the real economy by the « credit crunch » revealed by the recent repos crisis.
Speculative finance has thus arrived at the end of its devastating cycle. But the capitalist leaders are looking for other mediations to save their skins. So, Green QEs will be unleashed soon. This will add speculation to speculation; however, through the energy transition foolishly based on decarbonisation, it will ruin the costs of production and therefore the competitiveness of the foolish Nations that will travel along this path.
Given that speculative capital works in the short term, the biggest problem with this transition is its financing. As with motorways, airports, water plans, the Coliseum, etc., capital knows how to manage public infrastructures for the benefit of its shareholders but does not know how to respect their maintenance schedules and even less how to build them from scratch.
The discount rate is only the subjective narrative invented to legitimise the capitalist interest rate. Being subjective it cannot be more precise and founded than the criée in the Walrasian fish market. The inevitable fluctuations do not lead to any possible real economic anchorage even after a series of « tâtonnements », given the ontological problem summarized as the problem of ex ante-post hoc coherence, whose most rapid demonstration was given above by referring to the intersection of supply and demand curves. A practical anchorage of sort is provided by the interest rate guaranteed on government bonds, which is also determined by the capitalist « market »! The current short-term speculative market does not allow the financing of long-term infrastructural projects. It is precisely for this reason that the followers of the ecological transition discussed above want a coercive legal framework to redirect investments or a return to public credit to be placed at the service of speculative capital !!!
The credit needed for investments is always an anticipation of growth. This poses no problem for public credit when growth is objectively assessed by central planning or by indicative and incitative planning. Private credit uses individual and subjective assessments that always converge ex post to the formation of the effective interest rate.
Worse still, the discount rate is based on the economic falsification operated by Irving Fisher. A disciple of the forger of Marxism Böhm-Bawerk, Fisher had made up his mind to contribute to the Marginalist narrative by falsifying the logic of Book 3 of Capital, which distinguished between rent, profit and wages, the three main sources of income underlying the three main social classes and therefore the class struggle. Fisher canceled these essential distinctions by inventing a uniform « income stream » (see my Methodological Introduction in the livres-books section of www.la-commune-paraclet.com ). In this way the distinction between profit and interest was equally erased. On this falsified basis, all economic actors, workers, housewives, employees or managers and capitalists owners were presented as following the same acquisitive logic bent on the optimizing of their earnings. They were all turned into investors perpetually worried by two strategies. That is the time preference for investments – either short, medium or long term – and the risk preference for their more or less risky investments.
The discount rate is used according to this logic. Thus a long-term investment is considered more risky and will involve a higher interest rate. Obviously, this is nonsense since investing a few euros a month – for example in a pension fund – is not the same thing as investing a couple of millions in a hedge or equity fund. Above all, the economic and financial structure is not taken into account. In reality then, the discount rate fluctuates prosaically around the so-called « natural interest rate » given by medium and long term government bonds, that is say, prosaically, by the rates guaranteed by the government – even if today the vulnerability of the system favors terms lower than 10 years …
Above all, this reasoning presupposes the hegemony of private credit over central banks and private banks, the latter equally dominating the primary market for government bonds. If we were to return to the situation prevailing in Europe before the mid-1970s – and in Italy before the privatization of Central Bank of Italy in 1981-1983 – things would look quite different.
In effect, if the central bank is public, if the banks are largely public and/or differentiated between them – deposits, commercial, insurance, savings banks or credit unions -; if, in addition, the central bank finances public debt directly and public banks finance public and para-public companies, then this logic of the speculative Marginalist discount rate no longer holds. Public banks – central or not – do not need to make profit from their lending activities apart from what is needed to finance administrative costs and the establishment of a security fund through bank provisioning. Thus short, medium or long term public investments can be financed at very low cost. This also applies to the financing of the public debt directly on the primary market. At most, as I have shown, such a system could eliminate recurrent cyclical crises by allocating investments according to the logic of proportional sectoral symmetry given by the Equations of Simple and Enlarged Reproduction, that is, at least by recourse to indicative and inciting planning.
With the Marginalist allocation of capital effected according to the logic of the « invisible hand » and of individual profit, it is clear that these economic investments will create an expansion in certain sectors to the detriment of other sectors that will suffer a contraction, i.e., a crisis situation that can only be resolved with the purge effected by the breaking of the sectoral speculative bubbles. Today, recurring bailouts – indirect bailouts with 100% tax-deductible provisioning, direct bailouts with liquidity, QE, Tltro etc. – do replace the banking duty to respect the prudential ratio given by the fractional system, and consequently bailouts are now established as de facto prudential ratios. The capitalist law of competition is denied thus destroying the possibility for the system to readjust itself through the purge of speculative bubbles.
We will return to this topic in more details in the future. For now it is enough to point out that the logic of the Stern Report – which chose the most pessimistic scenarios and used the subjective discount rate to evaluate the costs of the transition – informs, in one way or another, all the financing proposals for the energy transition put forward by political leaders and by their advisors and allied climatologists, all philo-Semite Nietzschean narrators. They are all children of the Report from the Iron Mountain or of the Club of Rome and today of the IPCC (see: DÉFI AUX ÉCOLOGISTES, AU GIEC ET A TOUS LES APÔTRES DU RÉCHAUFFEMENT CLIMATIQUE (14 june 2007): in the Commentaires d’actualité section of the my old site https://www.la-commune-paraclet.com/ )
The logic of Ecomarxism implies taking scientific data and solid economic criteria into consideration. Although as noted by Simon et Cyert of the MIT years ago, in human affairs a problem is not necessarily solvable with a single solution but often requires « tradeoffs ». Before them, Vico and Marx had explained the problematic of societal choices by resorting to class struggle.
Acceptable scientific criteria would consider the study of climate change as a process yet to be understood. They would tear apart the exploitation of fear and of the sense of guilt directed to the masses of citizens who, in reality, are not involved in the processes of the capitalist degradation of the Planet. They would shift their view away from the profitability of speculative capital in order to concentrate more modestly on the concrete programs necessary to preserve the territories from hydrological devastation and from industrial and urban pollution – e.g., Seveso areas, landfills, water treatment, filters, plastics etc. They would give priority to these national programs instead of shifting the weight of the necessary changes on the individuals, above all with the coercive technique of the disincentive forced on the consumer in a society already ravaged by wage deflation and by pervasive job precariousness. They would shift their gaze to the infrastructures necessary for a civilized life worthy of the name. See, for example, the scandal of water treatment plants in our country with the costly consequences in term of health and of tourism. According to Luca Pagni (in https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2017/02/01/news/acquedotti_la_ue_ci_multa_in_arrivo_stangata_sulle_bollette-157317592/ : « Italy has already suffered two infringement procedures by the European Union that in December announced that it had denounced Italy, asking for a fine of € 62.7 million, to which would be added € 346 thousand for each day until the irregularities are remedied. The Extraordinary Commissioner has € 1.6 billion euro to face the situation. According to his estimates it will take around 5 years to redress the situation bringing the fines to a total of over 500 million euros. »» (see http://cotroneinforma.org/credito-debito-pubblico-e-tagli/ . This paragraph was cut from the article due to lack of space).
The preparation and the respect of the regional and national territorial planning are required in compliance with the precautionary principle. The latter is already implemented in a pragmatic and successful manner, for example in the public hygiene protocols, in the production and marketing protocols of products and drugs – now under attack in free trade treaties – and in the designation of risk areas , for example the Seveso areas. The rest is a « simple » question of resorting to public credit to finance the necessary public infrastructures. Forest fires reflect the abandonment of the territory, in particular in the peripheral areas. In Italy, a mountainous country, the Forest Guard was recently abolished! Floods reflect abusive cementation – Calabria wastes 4 times more land to construction than in the regions of Northern Italy !!! -, they reflect the tragic legacy of deforestation and of the abandonment of dams, canals and aqueducts and often of the old mule tracks and trekking paths. And soon and so forth.
In short, to protect the environment, the health and the standard of living of citizens, demonizing CO2 is counterproductive. Worse it is a hoax.
The reality is that short-term speculative capital can afford to ruin Nation-Sates via the privatization of the public debt but it cannot afford to finance long-term infrastructural projects. Gigantic monthly buybacks are more profitable to this speculative world. The liquidity issued by the central banks – QE, Tltro etc. – to save the speculative private banks did not produce the least transmission effect to the real economy, instead it worsened the « credit crunch». This harmful tendency will still worsen with Green QEs and green investments abandoned into the hands of private individuals.
One can already see the gigantic credit crunch that will result from the logic of the discount rate oscillating around the alleged « natural interest rate » in the context of low or even negative interest rates. See, for instance, the last crisis in repurchase agreements in the United States. It demonstrates the fragility of the American and World banking system, the private banks being so vulnerable that they can no longer lend to each other, even overnight, see We Finally Understand How Destructive Negative Interest Rates Actually Are », by Tyler Durden , Thu, 10/03/2019 – 05:00 Submitted by Tuomas Malinen is a Chief Economist of GnS Economics and an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Helsinki. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/we-finally-understand-how-destructive-negative-interest-rates-actually-are
It is an absurdity to expect that the right market price can be respected by letting the State finance the infrastructures and then transfer them to the management of private individuals who would ensure the right « market » price !!! (See the discussion of the Californian model versus the British-Colombian model in the chapter dedicated to public services in my Tous ensemble section Livres-Books of www.la-commune-paraclet.com ) The case of Autostrade in Italy demonstrates what happens: Private management favors the maximum payment of dividends to shareholders even at the expense of necessary maintenance and public safety.
Apart from the fact that there is no need for an energy transition based on the demonization of CO2, it remains that the public infrastructures really necessary to serve the higher interests of States and citizens – certainly not of speculative finance – require planning the rehabilitation of at least minimum strategic planning, including territorial planning, the return to public credit and a new definition of the anti-dumping, one that would be capable of protecting the three components of the « net global income » of the households, i.e., the individual net salary, the deferred salary and the tax area needed to finance social services and public infrastructures. (See the « Appeal » in http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/test/)
In a footnote that later disappeared from the other editions of his book Eléments the Marginalist Léon Walras recognized that scarcity is socially produced. But neither he nor Schumpeter nor any Marginalist or any bourgeois economist is able to prove it. Simply because no bourgeois economic theory is capable of combining microeconomics and macroeconomics. (see my Livre-Book III entitled Keynesianism, Marxism, Economic Stability and Growth, 2005,, in the Livres-Books section of www.la-commune-paraclet.com ; the shorter text also in English is available here: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/the-pseudo-economic-science-of-the-bourgeoisie-here-is-why-we-should-quickly-change-economic-paradigm/ )
Joseph Schumpeter was aware of the impossibility for Marginalism to resolve this lethal ex ante-ex post contradiction which implies the logical coherence between microeconomics and macroeconomics both in terms of quantity –products – and exchange value –or price and of labor time. (I am the only one capable to do this on the basis of Marx’s work, see my Synopsis of Marxist Political Economy in the Livres-Books section of my old site www.la-commune-paraclet.com ). Schumpeter tried to abuse his academic prestige to claim that it was an ontological and methodological dichotomy specific to the discipline. If that were the case, there would be no more acceptable criticism against Marginalism. I dismantled all these falsifying mechanisms already in my Tous ensemble 1998 – section Livres-Books of my old site. I also demonstrated that the Marxism once re-established by me thanks to the demonstration of the scientific law of productivity reinserted coherently in the SR-ER Equations, was the unique scientific paradigm capable of solving this false contradiction. At the same time providing the economic terms simultaneously in quantity and quality – value, working time, etc.
The theory of Ecomarxism elaborated in the Introduction and in the Appendix of my Livre-Book III mentioned above, supposes the resolution of the problem of absolute and differential rent, that is to say the demonstration of the scientific law of productivity coherently reinserted in the Equations of Simple and Enlarged Reproduction. It also implies the distinction between money and credit and between private credit and public credit. On this basis we can then conceive the economic calculation of the full cost of production according to the Ecomarxist theory. In short, planning would include the issue of natural or artificial reconstitution of the necessary raw materials, in compliance with environmental criteria, as well as the development of « massifiable » substitutes, i.e., susceptible to be produce on a wide industrial scale. To this would be added the maximum recycling of products according to the upstream and downstream planning of the product life cycle. These calculations would enter the new definition of anti-dumping taking into account the necessary international division of labor and production.
This is the exact opposite of the proposed imperialist carbon tax, whose sole objective is to create an artificial barrier to imports from emerging countries. Claiming to produce at zero kilometer is often an archaic absurdity for all products that are not quickly perishable. It would not even protect the incomes of small producers. Instead a new definition of anti-dumping capable of preserving the “net global income” of the households – that is, the Advanced Welfare State in transition towards Socialism – would quickly lead to a much more rational and beneficial international division of labor for all, rich or poor countries. It would unleash an era of unprecedented prosperity and World peace.
In addition, it would save us the shameful hypocrisy of the various COPs with their maintenance of asymmetric economic and technological interdependence between the countries of the Center, the Semi-Periphery and the Periphery, and with the obscene promise of a 100 billion dollars Fund for emerging countries, a promise that resembles that made to President R. Correa for the Yasuni Park. In fact, of these 100 billion dollars proposed at the Copenhagen 2009 Summit only 10.3 were actually promised and only 5.3 billion received so far, see:. https://www.greenclimate.fund/what-we-do/portfolio-dashboard .
Even with the full payment of the money promised, this fund would only result in keeping these countries into economic poverty and technological under-development. This global sum for all developing countries is to be compared with those Millenarians “1000 billion annually” proposed by many Western climatologists, from Stern to G. Giraud to Larrouturou-Jouzel et al.
For developing countries the most reasonable alternative would be to turn their backs on these obscene narrators in order to be free to implement the theory of Ecomarxism, including food sovereignty, by integrating into the new Silk Road intercontinental project.
Paolo De Marco Copyright © La Commune Inc, 3-11 October 2019