The Left Is Wrong: CO2 Has Dropped 68% Per Dollar of GDP, Thanks to Capitalism
The state of the human spirit is directly related to the economy. The human spirit thrives in free-market societies, whereas progressive, socialist-style economies stifle it. Innovation and excellence flourish when the human spirit is unleashed, but the squelching of creativity leads to mediocrity and stagnation. When human innovation is nurtured, problems are solved; when it is held in check, they fester.
When it comes to today’s environmental challenges, progressives run around like Chicken Little screaming, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” For them, climate change is the number one existential threat — not just to humans, but to the entire planet.
They’re wrong. The proof? In just one example, CO2 emissions per dollar of gross domestic product in the European Union fell by 68 percent from 1960 to 2014, according to the Cato Institute‘s 2020 publication “Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know.”
In June of this year, Joe Biden, speaking at the annual Capital Dinner of the League of Conservation Voters, said climate change “is the only truly existential threat.”
“Climate change is an existential threat,” or some version of that alarmist phrase, is the rallying call of Marxist progressives in the United States and around the world. In 2022, a United Nations “expert” claimed, “Climate change is the greatest threat the world has ever faced.” According to the World Economic Forum, the number one global threat of the next 10 years is “Failure to mitigate climate change.”
What do the Biden administration, the U.N. and the WEF have in common? They’re Marxist totalitarian globalist ideologues — experts at manipulating language to bend truth into lies and cherry-pick facts to promote their utopian delusions.
I’m not an expert on climate change. I’m not a scientist. But I am literate and capable of evaluating arguments based on fact and reason. Evaluating the specious claims of politicians and global elites is a waste of life. I prefer to stick to the facts.
I have no reason to believe the Cato Institute is inventing or manipulating the facts in, “Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know.” I am aware Cato looks at issues from a libertarian perspective, but this does make for confirmation bias on my part. Facts are facts, and Cato is a respected think tank. I trust that they aren’t making up facts as they go along.
Here are the facts: It’s not just the EU that has witnessed a decline in CO2 emission rates — the archvillain in the “existential threat of climate change.” In the United States, CO2 emissions per dollar of gross domestic product fell 66 percent between 1960 and 2014, according to Cato.
The report continued, “After China abandoned its inefficient communist system of production,” CO2 emissions per dollar of output fell 75 percent from 1978 to 2014. The report concluded that “This downward trend in emissions per dollar is largely the result of businesses’ constant efforts to reduce their energy costs.”
The progressive climate-change narrative relies on projecting one side of the story. This completely undermines the credibility of their so-called argument. Nevertheless — due to the relentless spread of the narrative via mainstream media, NGOs and the government — people believe it. This one-sided political approach to environmental issues engenders unease and depression, especially in younger people.
The Lancet‘s 2022 survey of 10,000 individuals ages 16 to 25 found that over 50 percent of respondents were “very or extremely worried” about climate change, and more than 45 percent said their feelings about climate change impacted their day-to-day lives, according to CBS News.
Sarah Schwartz, a psychology professor at Boston’s Suffolk University, told CBS, “Higher climate change anxiety is correlated with higher clinical symptoms of depression and anxiety. So, they know that the world is going to get to be a harder, darker, scarier place. And imagining themselves in that world feels really scary for them.”
Leave it to a university psychology professor to twist words to fit the survey findings into the progressive scheme. The youth in the survey don’t know the world is going to be a “harder, darker, scarier place.” People like Schwartz are leading them to believe it will because they are telling them one side of the story.
Maybe people wouldn’t be so ill at ease if they were afforded the opportunity to weigh both sides of the argument. For example, David Simon of the Washington Examiner found that “studies published in May 2015, July 2021, and August 2021 analyzed millions of deaths in numerous countries over recent decades and found that cooler temperatures kill several times more people than warmer temperatures.”
Environmental statistician Bjørn Lomborg wrote in September 2021, “Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually,” according to Simon’s article.
Matt Ridley’s February 2022 essay in Spiked claimed that global warming is a positive phenomenon because “NASA data [shows] that global greening has added 618,000 square kilometers of extra green leaves each year, equivalent to three Great Britains.” Maybe dour young activists like Greta Thunberg wouldn’t feel so glum if they considered that.
Progressives would have you believe that natural disasters support their assertions that climate change is an existential threat. The facts don’t support it. The number of hurricanes per year, according to a 2021 EPA report, has not increased since the late 19th century. “The total acreage burnt by forest fires annually has decreased, and most rivers flood less today than they used to,” according to the Examiner.
The human population has quadrupled from less than two billion in 1920 to almost eight billion, but the number of people killed by natural disasters each year has shrunk by about 90 percent.
In one more example, the global air pollution death rate has declined by about 45 percent over the last three decades. Does this sound like climate change is an existential threat to you?
The point is, there are two or more sides to the story. The climate is a complex topic. There are good things and bad things that happen as the climate changes. There have been ice ages and droughts in the past. They’re nothing new. The climate changes. It will continue to do so.
With this in mind, the question becomes, “Can humans adapt to climate change in ways that are good for them and the planet?” It depends.
Do you believe the freedom inherent in a free-market economy is essential to human flourishing? Or do you believe humans are intrinsically evil and, left to their own devices, will destroy themselves and the planet? It’s another complex question. There are many examples of great and small horrors committed by humans in the past, but there are also countless everyday examples of humans doing the right thing by promoting the common good.
The answer for Christians is that — because God created us with free will in order to freely choose to accept or reject Him — humans are capable of tremendous good or unspeakable evil. It’s the price of freedom.
People of true faith — because they believe there will be consequences for our actions in this life and the next — try to do what is right for creation. When they fail, as they inevitably will, they apologize, get up and try again.
Marxist progressives, on the other hand, latch onto issues like climate change and reduce it to their religion — politics. They promote policies like the Green New Deal. Why? Because they want to play God by enslaving human potential.
Why? For progressives, humans are a vile species and human freedom — and here we’re talking about the freedom necessary for laissez faire capitalism to function — must be curtailed to save the planet. Only elites like Klaus Schwab, they believe, will be allowed to make your economic decisions.
You will assimilate. So hurry up and buy an electric vehicle, whether you can afford it or not. Get rid of that gas stove. Quit flying around in jet airplanes — they, too, are reserved only for the elite, so they can fly around the planet. Plebes like you and I just need to do what we’re told.
The progressive politicization of climate change is the real existential threat. It threatens to thwart the human spirit. It strives to squelch human creativity by reducing it purely to political economics. Marxist ideology promotes mediocrity over excellence, blind obedience to progressive elites rather than freely given obedience to God.
One thing is for certain: Free market capitalism progressed exponentially in the 20th and 21st centuries as businesses developed incentives to create newer, cheaper energies. As a result, our negative impact on the planet has decreased.
The answer to our environmental concerns is competition and more free enterprise, not government control and coercion, forcing everyone, including the poor, to immediately abandon fossil fuels.
There are problems with the current woke corporate capitalism model and its increasing identification with progressive ideals. Maybe Biden and company should be working to promote the competition real capitalism thrives on, instead of telling you the world is going to hell and it’s your fault. It’s not.
The world is going to hell because the progressives in power do not hold as self-evident “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
To hell with them. Don’t tread on me.
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