October 13, 2011 By
By RICHARD K MOORE—
In an era of economic growth, the dynamics of competition, innovation, and entrepreneurial investment were important elements of the game. In a non-growth era, the game will be based on entirely different dynamics. The mechanisms of production will become relatively static. Instead of corporations competing to innovate, we’ll have production bureaucracies. They’ll be semi-state, semi-private cartels, concerned about budgets and quotas rather than growth, somewhat along the lines of the Soviet model.
We can already see steps being taken to shift the corporate model towards the bureaucratic model, through increased government intervention in economic affairs. In the US for example, with the Wall Street bailouts, the forced restructuring of General Motors, the call for centralised regulation of banking and industry, and the mandating of health insurance coverage, the government is saying that the market is to be superseded by government directives. Not that we should bemoan the demise of exploitive capitalism, but before celebrating we need to understand what it is being replaced with.
In the era of capitalism and growth, the focus of the game was on the production side of the economy. The game was aimed at controlling the means of growth: access to capital. In an era of non-growth, the focus of the game will be on the consumption side of the economy. The game will be aimed at controlling the necessities of life: access to food and energy. Carbon limits and carbon trading provide the mechanisms that will enable the banksters to micromanage the necessities of life on a global scale.For more information on this see my full length article “The Elite Plan for a New World Social Order” in New Dawn 128.
As regards financial budgets, the IMF is doing the micromanaging, using the leverage of debt. For carbon budgets, it will be the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that will do the micromanaging, using the excuse of global warming. How this will work is explained by the Herald Sun, 10 July 2011, discussing Australia’s new carbon legislation:
“An emissions trading scheme is where the government sets a cap on the total amount of pollution [CO2] that can be released each year. Businesses compete for permits and can trade permits, within that cap. The price can vary but the amount of pollution is fixed. Each year the Government could lower the cap – meaning Australia’s emissions will fall.”
In terms of propaganda, this carbon-credit regime is being sold as a solution to global warming and peak oil. The propaganda campaign has been very successful, and the whole environmental movement has been captured by it. In Copenhagen, demonstrators confronted the police, carrying signs in support of carbon taxes and carbon credits. But in fact the carbon regime has nothing to do with climate or with sustainability. It is all about micromanaging every aspect of our lives, as well as every aspect of the economy.
If the folks who are running things actually cared about sustainability, they’d be investing in efficient mass transit, and they’d be shifting agriculture from petroleum-intensive, water-intensive methods to sustainable methods. Instead they are mandating biofuels and selling us electric cars, which are no more sustainable than standard cars.
As the new global regime is consolidated, the IPCC will dole out a mandatory annual carbon cap to each nation. Each government will then budget out its allocation in some way, as Australia is doing. With smart meters, energy use can be micromanaged all the way down to the number of minutes people spend in showers, or at what temperature people choose to do their laundry.
Whether these kinds of measures will significantly reduce CO2 levels is open to considerable doubt. Creating a tree plantation in the third world can be ‘traded’ for continued emissions, even if a rain forest is cut down to make room for the plantation – and this overall transaction actually increases global CO2 levels. And there will surely be special cases, such as favoured industries, or government and military applications, where exceptions to the cap will be permitted. And in general, enforcement of industrial regulations tends to be notoriously lax.
Although reduction of CO2 levels may be in doubt, there is one thing that is not in doubt: carbon caps will limit access to the necessities of life and will greatly increase the cost of those necessities. Every industry that burns fossil fuels will have an additional cost added: the cost of obtaining carbon permits – by being the highest bidder. Those costs, plus profit margins, will be passed on to the consumer. Fossil alternatives, such as wind power and biofuels, will be only marginally lower in price: it is IPCC-imposed fossil fuel scarcity that will set the price in each market segment, as we already see with world grain prices. All of this will encourage speculative investment in futures markets, which will increase prices still further – and this is already happening with global food prices.
With food prices linked to energy prices, and agriculture land being converted from food production to fuel production, the result can only be a massive increase in third world starvation. Depopulation has long been a stated goal in elite circles, and the Rockefeller dynasty has frequently been involved in eugenics projects of various kinds over the past century. Genocide through imposed poverty is already a model being pursued successfully in Africa, and biofuels are systematically expanding that program.
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