It is hard to distinguish whether an action is driven by malice or incompetence when the results are the same. Even if there is no full-blown World Economic Forum (WEF) conspiracy led by the Bond villain lookalike Klaus Schwab, one has to wonder what those elites would do differently if there was such a conspiracy. Not much, I am afraid. In fact, their designs are not only out in the open, we have reached the point where taxpayers are funding the ideologies promoting global impoverishment or – as they call it – “degrowth.”
It should worry everyone that the old and new President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, spoke at a degrowth conference in the European Parliament last year. That Europe is falling behind economically is not the consequence of mysterious forces, but due to an elite that has signed up to economically suicidal policies.
On its webpage, the European Commission proudly presents its current funding of research into a future “post-growth deal” with almost €9m, which tells you that promoting degrowth needs a lot of growth in funding. It is not clear, however, how much actual research is going to take place.
Giorgos Kallis, one of the main grant recipients, gives a glimpse in the work-attitude that comes when someone else’s money is at stake: “I want to keep loyally to my rule of no work in weekends and in July and August […]. To paraphrase Emma Goldman, if I have to work August for the revolution, then that’s not my revolution.”
Another beneficiary of EU largesse is Jason Hickel, author of “Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World,” a book that promises “an economy that’s more just, more caring, and more fun.” All we have to do is, well, become poorer: the “planned downscaling of energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way.”
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? In case you think that maybe this will not be as much fun as Hickel claims, this just proves that you have been brainwashed into thinking access to modern medicine, lower child mortality, and women no longer dying from giving birth is somehow an improvement. “There is nothing natural or innate about the productivist behaviours we associate with homo economicus. That creature is the product of five centuries of cultural re-programming.” All that needs to be done is to reprogramme you to the point where you follow the WEF mantra (seriously) “You’ll own nothing and be happy” voluntarily.
The authoritarian impulse is what really drives him, which is why he rejects the idea of clean energy solutions: “A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.” Therefore, no matter what happens, the dictatorship of the eco-elites must be ushered into reality. Given the fact that Hickel’s book sounds like an updated version of every Rousseau-Marxist cliché one can imagine, it is also easy to figure out where the story will end for those who do not volunteer. Hickel is not clear about how much fun the re-education camps will be, but maybe he covers it in the next volume. As a working title I would suggest “Less for you is more for me,” since this is pretty much his business model.
Another luminary invited by the European Commission was the Indian activist Vandana Shiva, whose main claim to fame is promoting the end of artificial fertilizers in Sri Lanka (which lead to the collapse of the country) and campaigning against genetically enhanced crops that could save millions of lives. To a certain extent I am relieved that the degrowth movement only wants to work 10 months per year, since the less active they are, the better it is for humanity.
Unfortunately, they plough on with their insanity on both sides of the Atlantic. When not flying around in a private jet at US taxpayer expense, John Kerry is now promoting a crusade against agriculture, seconded by the once serious Economist that wants to treat “beef like coal” due to its environmental impact, and suggests tofu instead of steak.
Simultaneously, the former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte continues his war against his country’s agricultural sector. To put this into perspective, in the last decade one of the world leaders in nuclear technology – Germany – shut down its nuclear power plants, while the Dutch, probably the most advanced farmers in the world, are trying to destroy their highly advanced agricultural sector.
This is tantamount to the US shutting down Silicon Valley and is nothing but the beginning of economic and societal suicide on behalf of a bored elite who not only disdain those who have to suffer from their inflationary policies, but expects them to pay for the ordeal they want to put them through.
The renowned Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich has calculated that currently planned energy laws in Germany would require the economy to shrink by 14 per cent until 2030 in order to achieve their goals. It is unknown if the salaries of EU bureaucrats and degrowth-promoting academics will be indexed accordingly, but it seems most likely that they will find numerous ways to escape the consequences of a shrinking economy.
What makes all of this particularly frustrating is that none of it would be necessary. Even if we account for the offshoring of production, a growing number of countries has decoupled economic growth from CO2 emissions, a trend that could be accelerated through the expansion of hydropower, nuclear, gas, plus wind and solar where it makes sense. An energy-abundant world with growing living standards for the entire global population of eight billion would absolutely be possible.
The excellent substack writers at Doomberg (whom we also had on our Brussels Signal Podcast) have pointed out repeatedly that we have the technological capacity to create abundant energy and food at very limited emissions, but there is no one in the halls of power willing to execute these ideas.
There is a prevailing anti-humanist Malthusianism that simultaneously warns of a hypothetical apocalypse while doing everything to create a real one. Paul Ehrlich, who is still treated like a serious person despite being wrong on everything, sounds just like Hickel: “In fact, giving society cheap abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
This is the active prevention of an actual solution, because they know that a population that is wealthy tends to be less susceptible to their totalitarian designs. And this is what they are proposing. In an interesting debate the economist Steve Keen calls for the introduction of a “war economy” to deal with climate change, which translates into the abolishment of civil liberties and freedoms so that people like him can do “what is necessary” to degrow in order to save the planet. Those necessary acts will include not just the banning of your car, but also making “eating meat and milk and eggs [is] an indulgence we cannot afford.”
Europe is closing in on its 1789 moment where is neither can nor should accept the predations of an elite that want to find their own redemption from being rich while making the poor even poorer. Fighting against this might well be worth a revolution, even if it takes place in August.
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