The Solution to Climate Change

Poverty

Much ink has been spilled in a desperate attempt to keep the public from viewing oil as anything besides a destructive poison. Many will claim that continued fossil fuel use will lead to an inevitable warming event which threatens human life on Earth as we know it. I don’t know whether that event would truly come to pass but one thing I’ve observed is that the best solution any nations have come up with so far is widespread poverty.

Take carbon taxes for instance, the economists’ favourite tool. They purport to disincentivise fuel consumption by increasing the cost of gasoline at the pump. Fair enough, the less money you have the less you will be able to drive, thereby forcing consumer behaviour to shift. Many have pointed out that this punishes those with little spare income the most as gas is a highly inelastic good. Knock-on effects are inevitable in other goods such as food since our entire infrastructure relies on oil, still.

It gets better though. Proponents of climate economics will say, “Good! With the price of fossil fuels rising it will make adopting green tech a no-brainer.” The obvious and unheeded flip-side is that with the rising cost of oil and coal, the cost of producing “green tech” skyrockets too. Solar panels and windmills require tremendous amounts of oil and coal to produce for many years to come, and they will not come cheap.

Next up, ESG investing: It’s complete bullshit. I looked up the first ESG fund I could find and it was a bunch of companies you’d recognize. Here are some of the top 10 holdings: Paypal, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, Facebook…. Easy to be green when you run your business on the internet I guess. There can be no denying that these are massive companies with tremendous carbon footprints. ESG is a mirage designed to trick people into thinking a company gives a shit about anything besides profit. They don’t. They simply understand that there is a lot of activist-influenced money they can take advantage of through corporate gobbletygook.

As governments and activists pressure pension funds and emerging economies into going into ESG, a favoured tactic is to go after the financing. This will again punish poor countries and people, forcing them to buy in to “green” tech that is more expensive and less reliable than conventional tech.

Final nail in the coffin? The world’s richest countries (and people) have the greatest carbon footprints. Since we currently lack the infrastructure for a green future today, reversal of our carbon output can only be achieved through a deliberate dismantling of society’s carbon-based backbone which provides for our modern lifestyle facilitating cheap travel, food, and energy. Replacing that system will be costly.

Bottom line: Poverty IS the point.