The Net-Zero Debate Turns Orwellian

Getting the facts straight on how to make the world a better place.

Our current climate conversation embodies two blatantly contradictory claims. On one side, experts warn that promised climate policies will be economically crippling. In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) states that achieving net-zero in 2050 will likely be “the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.” That is a high bar, surpassing World War II, the black plague and Covid.

On the other side, hand-waving politicians sell net-zero climate schemes as a near-utopia that every nation will rush to embrace. As John Kerry, US President Biden’s climate envoy, told world leaders gathered at his climate summit in April: “No one is being asked for a sacrifice.”

Both of these claims can’t be true. Yet, they are often espoused by the same climate campaigners in different parts of their publicity cycle. The tough talk strives to shake us into action, and the promise of rainbows hides the political peril when the bills come due.

George Orwell called this willingness to espouse contradictory claims double-think. It is politically expedient and gets climate-alarmed politicians reelected. But if we want to fix climate change, we need honesty. Currently-promised climate policies will be incredibly expensive. While they will deliver some benefits, their costs will be much higher.

Yes, climate change is real and man-made, and we should fix it smartly. But we don’t because climate impacts are often vastly exaggerated, leaving us panicked. The UN Climate Panel estimates that if we do nothing, climate damages in 2100 will be equivalent to 2.6 percent of global GDP. That is a problem, not the end of the world.

Most people think the damage will be much more significant because climate news only reports the worst outcomes. Remember how we were repeatedly told 2020’s Atlantic hurricane season was the worst ever? The reporting ignored that almost everywhere else, hurricane intensity was feeble, making 2020 one of the globally weakest in satellite history. And even within the Atlantic, 2020 ranked thirteenth.

When Kerry and many other politicians insist that climate policies mean no sacrifice, they are clearly dissembling. In the UN Climate Panel’s overview, all climate policies have real costs. Why else would we need recurrent climate summits to arm-twist unwilling politicians to ever-greater promises?

The IEA’s new net-zero report contains plenty of concrete examples of sacrifices. By 2050, we will have to live with much lower energy consumption than today. Despite being richer, the average global person will be allowed less energy than today’s average poor. We will all be allowed less than the average Albanian used in the 1980s. We will also have to accept to shiver in winter at 66°F and swelter in summer at 79°F, highway speeds curtailed and fewer people allowed to fly.

But climate policy sacrifices could still make sense if their costs were lower than the achieved climate benefits. If we could avoid all of the 2.6 percent climate damage for, say, 1 percent sacrifice, that would be a good outcome. This is common sense and the core logic of the world’s only climate economist to win the Nobel Prize in 2018. Smart climate policy costs little and reduces climate damages a lot.

Unfortunately, our current double-think delivers the reverse outcome. One new peer-reviewed study finds the cost of net-zero just after 2060 – much later than what most politicians promise – will cost us more than 4 percent of GDP already in 2040, or about $5 trillion annually.

And this assumes globally coordinated carbon taxes. Otherwise, costs will more than double. Paying 8 percent or more to avoid part of 2.6 percent damages half a century later is just bad economics.

It is also implausible politics. Just for China, the cost of going net-zero exceeds 7-14 percent of its GDP. Instead, China uses green rhetoric to placate westerners but aims for development with 247 new coal-fired power plants. For the first time, China now emits more greenhouse gasses than the entire rich world.

Most other poorer countries are hoping to follow China’s rapid ascendance. At a recent climate conference, where dozens of high-level delegates dutifully lauded net-zero, India went off-script. With other participants squirming, power minister Raj Kumar Singh inconveniently blurted out the truth: net-zero “is just pie-in-the-sky.” He added that developing countries will want to use more and more fossil fuels and “you can't stop them.”

If we push on with our climate double-think, rich people will likely continue to wring their hands and aim for net-zero, even at considerable costs to their own societies. But three-quarters of future emissions come from poorer countries with more important development priorities of avoiding poverty, hunger and disease.

Like most great challenges humanity has faced, we solve them not by pushing for endless sacrifices but through innovation. Covid is fixed with vaccines, not unending lockdowns. To tackle climate, we need to ramp up our investments in green energy innovation dramatically. Currently, increasing green energy requires massive subsidies, but if we could innovate its future price below fossil fuels, everyone would switch. Innovation is the most sustainable climate solution. It is dramatically cheaper than current policies and demands fewer sacrifices while delivering benefits for most of the world’s population.

 

 Bjorn Lomborg - July 2021

 

The messages in the article  below apply equally to Australia and the USA.

We can only meet our green targets by doing the exact opposite of what's in XR's manifesto

The 'solutions' offered by hardcore environmentalists would not only destroy our economy, they would do very little to tackle climate change

Tom Harwood 4 December 2020 • 12:45pm 

It’s easy to baulk at the Government’s steep new emissions target – to cut CO2 emissions by as much as 69 per cent of what they were in 1990 by the end of 2030. Yet despite its ambition, this goal is not impossible. With the right technological progress, policy decisions, and economic growth it can (just about) be reached.

Frankly, there is one narrow path to achieving it. The Prime Minister must look closely at what Extinction Rebellion protesters are demanding and do exactly the opposite. From Maduro-style democracy-swerving alternative parliaments to the anti-nuclear, anti- shale gas, anti-capitalism agenda – it has long been clear that the so-called solutions being proffered by scruffy environmentalists would not only destroy what is left of our economy, they would be ineffective at tackling climate change too.

History tells us that listening to hardcore environmentalist attempts to solve the emission reduction puzzle is damaging and often counterproductive. The Green Party’s influence in Germany led to the shutting down of all that country’s nuclear power plants, and therefore a worse rate of CO2 reduction than even the United States last decade.

From nuclear power to the shale gas revolution and most importantly capitalism-led innovation, the very things Extinction Rebellion opposes provide the only route by which we can so drastically cut our emissions. The key reason why the United States of America was able to somewhat impressively reduce its CO2 emissions was the shale gas revolution under President Obama. Shale, a not-perfect but far cleaner fuel, allowed the US to transition away from dirtier fuels and grow the economy while doing it. And that is the key.

There is no way a nation can better insulate homes or move away from the internal combustion engine without having created the wealth to do so. Politicians charging after a green agenda without thinking it through has led to historic policy blunders that could have been avoided if Governments dropped their fixation for picking winners. Who can forget the diesel emissions scandal, where filthy diesel cars were massively incentivised within the EU as they produce 15 per cent less CO2 than petrol.

While impressive electric cars were being developed in the United States, EU bureaucrats fell for the car lobby’s overtures and mercilessly promoted a fuel that emits four times more nitrogen dioxide than petrol and 22 times more general pollutants. In bending to vested interests and steering investment towards this sector, the EU may well have hindered green advances on a global scale.

In 2009 the EU made the disastrous decision to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2011. At the time governments began promoting instead the uglier, slower, harsher and more expensive ‘compact fluorescent lamp’ bulbs – which are impossible to recycle due to the mercury they contain. The EU-promoted ‘CFL’ bulbs, which cost considerably more than incandescent ones, saved around 50 per cent on energy used. Yet little did regulators know that the world was just a couple of years away from mature LED bulbs. Unlike Government-promoted CFL options, LEDs did not take up to a minute to fully turn on, used 90% less energy, were brighter, longer lasting, and crucially far cheaper than even traditional bulbs.

Time and time again when Governments have sought to direct investment at the behest of lobby groups, the results have stunted technological progress. Banning, subsidising, taxing, and directing from the centre are just about the very worst ways to bring about a better society.

In the early 1900s, the US military ploughed millions of dollars into the work of Samuel Langley, who was attempting to build the world’s first aircraft. Little were they to know that despite their enormous investment and massive teams – or perhaps because of that – their aircraft would never fly. In fact it was two unknown non-Government funded bicycle engineers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who were able to produce a lighter, nimbler aircraft – one that could actually fly – on a shoestring budget.

The Tories mustn’t throw away the lessons of the last century. We know the only way to fight climate change (without descending to the poor, nasty, brutish, and short pre- industrial revolution world) is technological progress. And we know that heavy handed Government interference of the kind demanded by environmentalists only serves to undermine that. One does sometimes wonder if the shrewdest environmental campaigners know all this – and have simply latched onto the cause of climate change as the latest vehicle for their regressive, luddite, anti-growth, protectionist, Malthusian worldview.

The ‘living off your own allotment’ worldview needs little thinking about to realise the desperate poverty and illness such a society would inflict on its people through lack of technology, medicine, and enterprise. The happy reality is the world is not far from cheap, reliable and abundant cleaner energy. And capitalism is already delivering. We’re on the verge of an electric vehicle revolution. Every year technology enables us to do more with less. Efficiency is growth. And despite protestation from green campaigners, nuclear power is safe, cheap, and abundant. No government could possibly imagine the miraculous innovations that history tells us will appear in the next decade.

The message to Boris has to be simple: keep calm, ignore the regressive hippies, and let the market do its job.

 

The myth of the ‘stolen country’

The myth of the ‘stolen country’

What should the Europeans have done with the New World?

The Spectator - 26 September 2020

 

Last month, in the middle of the Covid panic, a group of first-year university students at the University of Connecticut were welcomed to their campus via a series of online ‘events’. At one event, students were directed to download an app for their phones. The app allowed students to input their home address, and it would piously inform them from which group of Native Americans their home had been ‘stolen’.

 

​We all know the interpretation of history on which this app is based. The United States was founded by a monumental act of genocide, accompanied by larceny on the grandest scale. Animated by racism and a sense of civilisational superiority, Columbus and his ilk sailed to the New World. They exterminated whomever they could, enslaved the rest, and intentionally spread smallpox in hopes of solving the ‘native question’. Soon afterwards, they began importing slave labour from Africa. They then built the world’s richest country out of a combination of stolen land, wanton environmental destruction and African slave labour. To crown it all, they have the audacity to call themselves a great country and pretend to moral superiority.

 

​This ‘stolen country’ paradigm has spread like wildfire throughout the British diaspora in recent years. The BBC recently ran a piece on the 400th anniversary of the Plymouth landings, whose author took obvious delight in portraying the Pilgrim Fathers as native-mutilating slave drivers. In Canada, in the greater Toronto school district, students are read a statement of apology, acknowledging European guilt for the appropriation of First Nations lands, before the national anthem is played over the PA system every morning.

 

​As a professional historian, I am keenly aware of the need to challenge smug, feelgood interpretations of history. I understand that nationalism and civilisational pride carry obvious dangers which were made manifest by the world wars of the 20th century. And I understand that these things can serve as subtle tools not only of racism but of exploitation of many stripes, and as justification for a status quo which gets in the way of meritocracy and fairness.

 

​But I also know that if the pendulum of interpretation swings too far in any one direction, things can go from bad to worse with lightning speed. It is times like these that we realise the stories we tell ourselves — about our history in particular — are of fundamental importance to the direction our societies take. The shift from Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany was accomplished, first and foremost, by a shift in who controlled the national narrative. Ditto with the shift to Communism in eastern Europe, as so movingly chronicled by the late Tony Judt in his book Postwar.

 

​So what can be the harm in acknowledging every morning that Canadians live on stolen First Nations land? The problem is this: if you begin the day by acknowledging that your country, your society, and people of your ancestry are particularly egregious, this is a sure route to self-doubt, impotence and societal failure.

 

​What’s true at the personal level is true at the national. What well-meaning liberals do not seem to realise these days is that democracies thrive or fail on the basis of national stories. This is doubly so in republics like the US, where there is no apolitical figurehead to unite people in place of a monarch. In the end, stories are all we’ve got as a glue to cement us together as a society. If that story says that our democracy is rotten to the core, then how do we expect anyone to retain enthusiasm for democracy itself? As history shows time and again, as soon as a republic does not believe in itself and its ideals — that it is better than the tyrannies and autocracies surrounding it — that republic succumbs very quickly to autocracy itself. The riots that have recently erupted across the United States, the new and unaccustomed boldness that characterises dictators around the globe, attest to the breakdown of the Western democratic order which is being accelerated by these self-inflicted wounds.

 

​This is not an abstract fear. By many measures, support for democracy among younger people is plummeting around the globe. Many in the US seem to have no clue just how much of a ‘city on a hill’ the US is still perceived to be, and how important that American beacon is to millions of people living under autocratic regimes. The mere thought of Obama’s motorcade passing through my European province electrified schoolchildren across the region. For them, he was as close as you get to a real-life superhero. Such universal support for a politician is virtually unheard of. Even though republican regimes are historically less popular internationally, for billions of people around the globe the US still equates with democracy — it is ‘the good place’. If the image of US is fundamentally delegitimised, if it’s entire raison d’être is tainted, then increasing numbers of people wonder whether democracy itself is worth the trouble. So we have to be very careful what we wish for.

 

​Again, my criticism of the current excesses of the left is absolutely not a call to embrace the worst aspects of the right. This is no code or excuse for jingoism, racism or any other ism. I fully support the lessons of the world wars that excessive nationalism, that unilateralism, are ugly and a bad idea. It is rather a caution: a sense that we have to be careful how far we go, and how quickly, in our rush to signal our support for the historically downtrodden. On a personal note, I add that it gives me zero pleasure to have to write this piece. Fifteen years ago, I would have been the one at the barricades helping Native Americans rally against an oil company or some such. Writing this, I incur considerable personal and professional cost in order to come out of the closet as a (shock, horror) centrist, who believes that the left is currently rampaging out of control and must be stopped before it’s too late. One arena in which I can best help is the interpretation of history, upon which much of the current leftist hysteria is based.

 

The narrative of the ‘stolen country’ or ‘Native American genocide’ does not stand up to scrutiny by any honest and clear-sighted historian. It is a dangerously myopic and one-sided interpretation of history. It has only gained currency because most practising historians and history teachers are either susceptible to groupthink, or else have been cowed into silence by fear of losing their jobs. Reduced to its puerile form of ‘statement of guilt’, this myth puts 100 per cent of the burden on Europeans who are held responsible for all historical evil, while the First Nations people are mere victims; martyrs even, whose saintlike innocence presumes that their civilisation and society were practically perfect in every way. This is no way to honour or respect the realities of First Nation lives and their agency. And it helps perpetuate the idea that the US and Canada are fundamentally illegitimate societies, and that by implication, every other country on Earth is legitimate. If we were to be honest, there is not a single country on Earth which did not displace natives, or which did not engage in nasty wars or ethnic cleansings at many points during its history. The current fad for holding up the US and Canada to special scrutiny and particular opprobrium is therefore distorting at best.

 

Was the land stolen?

 

As an economic historian, allow me to point out some of the most obvious structural problems with the ‘stolen country’ paradigm.

 

​First, no matter who ‘discovered’ the New World, it is inevitable that a large proportion of New World inhabitants would have died within the first few decades after first contact. This is universally acknowledged by specialists in the field. The New World population was smaller and more homogenous than the Old World population. Thus, its people had less immunity to disease than the people of the Old World, where disease communities from Africa, Asia and Europe had been intermingling for millennia. Even though some European captains did try and spread smallpox around a few forts and villages from time to time, the effect of their efforts was almost negligible compared with the natural spread of disease. So the claims of genocide by disease have almost nothing to do with European actions, apart from their simply reaching the New World. And of course, Europeans of the time had no way of envisioning the continent-wide epidemic repercussions of their actions. Verdict: not guilty.

 

​Let us also acknowledge that Native American society was just as warlike as any other in human history. The anthropologists’ vision of Native Americans as peace-pipe-smoking environmentalists which gained purchase in the 1970s has long since given way to a more Hobbesian portrait of pre-Columbian reality. In North America, most Natives were primitive farmers. This means that (with some exceptions) they had no permanent settlements: they farmed in an area for a few decades until the soil got tired, before moving on to greener pastures where the hunting was better and the lands more fertile. This meant that tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes. It also meant that chiefs were continually vying for power, creating confederations under themselves, and that the question of who owned the land was in a more or less constant state of flux. In most of North America, the idea that any one piece of land belonged to any one tribe, for more than 50 or 100 years, is therefore highly questionable. In short, if you looked at a map of Native Canada 200 years before Europeans arrived, it would have been entirely different. In the meantime, some groups of natives would have slaughtered, bullied or enslaved others. Should we not be grieving for those Native Canadians whose land was stolen by other Native Canadians? Or is that somehow OK? I don’t suppose there is an app for that.

​The idea that the Europeans stole some land which had belonged in perpetuity to any one tribe is therefore ludicrous. The situation in most of North America was similar to northern Europe on the eve of the Germanic migrations, or western Europe as the Celts were moving across the landscape. Precisely to whom the land belonged in any given century at these periods in history was anyone’s guess. The very notion of property is a Graeco-Roman invention which most cultures found foreign until quite recently. But Europeans of the time had little chance of grasping this difference. What the Europeans did in the New World was insert themselves into a fluid power struggle which had been ongoing for millennia. Many Native American chiefs were ready to pledge allegiance to the Great ‘Chief of the English’, as a political expedient, just as various English colonies sided with this or that Native American ‘Great Chief’. Despite a few sensational cases of duplicity, most of the time, Europeans tried to buy land from Indians, just like they would buy an acre of land in England. If the local chief assented to this and liked the price, where then was the crime? Many individual Europeans believed that according to the norms of both parties, they had legal usufruct to the land they were working. To judge this as theft is therefore anachronistic. As Europeans set up farming communities, and introduced guns to North America, Native American communities were forced to move further away from European lands as game retreated. The areas around white settlements were often empty for this reason, making the land seem all the more abandoned. Musket use by natives probably depleted animal stocks at a higher rate than previously, meaning that the very introduction of firearms might have spelled the doom of hunting and gathering in North America in the long run, even if the Europeans had otherwise left the country alone.

 

​Another major structural issue is this: what precisely would our pious anthropology professors have had Europeans do with the New World once they found it?

 

​This is not a joke. Political reality has a way of crashing in on the pipe dreams of liberal academics. The reality is, if the English had not colonised, then the French or the Dutch would have. If the Spanish had not colonised, the Portuguese would have. This would have shifted the balance of power at home, and any European country which had not colonised, would have been relegated to secondary status. And it is easy to overestimate the amount of control that European governments actually had. As soon as the New World was discovered, many fisherman and traders sailed across the Atlantic on their own, in hopes of circumventing tax authorities and scoring a fortune. Long before colonies were established in most regions, the New World was crawling with Europeans whose superior technology gave them an edge in combat. Nonetheless, it was extremely dangerous for Europeans to provoke fights with Native Americans, and most of them tried to avoid this when possible. In retrospect, one could in theory be impressed that so many European governments showed a genuine concern to rein in the worst excesses of their subjects, with an express eye to protecting the Indians from depredation. The logic was simple: they attempted to protect their subjects at home, in order to secure good order and a better tax base. So they would do the same to their subjects in the New World. For a long time, few Europeans harboured any master plan of pushing the Native Americans out of their own lands. In more densely populated regions such as Mexico, such an idea must have seemed an absurdity. Reality tends to occur ad hoc. Boundaries often took generations to move, and would have seemed fixed at the time. For several centuries, many Europeans assumed that they would long be a minority on the North American continent. In Mexico and Peru, they always have been.

 

​​Population density mattered, a lot, when it came to pre-modern global migrations. China and India were ‘safe’ from excessive European colonisation because they had the densest populations in the world, and they were likewise largely immune to any diseases brought by Europeans. Sub-Saharan Africa had a lower population density depleted by slave raiding, but they still outnumbered European colonists by a large margin throughout the colonial era — again because European contact did not decimate their numbers through disease the way it did in the Americas. It is worth noting that no one claims that Europeans committed genocide in India, Asia or even Africa, although their technological advantages gave them every opportunity had they actually been of a genocidal mindset (as were for example the Mongols). In fact, the European track record shows them to be almost shockingly un-genocidal, given their clear technological advantages over the rest of the world for a period of several centuries. Few other civilisations, given similar power over so much of the world’s people, would have behaved in a less reprehensible manner. This is not to give Europeans a pat on the back. Rather it is to point out that Europeans are regularly painted as the very worst society on Earth, when in fact they had the power to do far, far more evil than they actually did. Let us at least acknowledge this fact.

 

​The mixed farming/gathering economy of most Native Americans, coupled with their vulnerability to Old World diseases, therefore meant that North America was sparsely populated by the time Jamestown was founded in 1607, and unable to replace missing population at a very high rate. At this time, the New World was more sparsely populated than anywhere in the Old World apart from its subarctic regions and the Sahara. Furthermore, a great deal of North American land was located in the temperate zones — traditionally the ones most suited to agriculture, and therefore to growing large civilisations. Primitive farming and hunter-gathering can only support a tiny population at the best of times. But Old World rice and wheat agriculture — the farming regimes which supported the great civilisations of the Old World — can support a far greater population density per hectare. The huge disparity in population density between the Old World and the New — especially after the first contact epidemics had wiped out so many New World peoples — therefore made it likely that excess population was going to flow from the Old World to the New. Furthermore, as soon as Old World colonists began to set up the farming and city-dwelling regimes which they imported from home, population growth in the colonies was going to outstrip Native American groups in terms of population growth, even without further in-migration.

 

​This brings us to the question of how cultural adaptation works. Many people have been told by their friends on social media that Europeans destroyed Native Culture. The problem is this: whenever a good idea comes along, which clearly increases one’s living standards, one tends to adopt it. And who is to say that this adaptation is bad, especially if it results in higher living standards? Even as they discovered America, the Europeans were in the process of adopting dozens of superior Chinese inventions and ideas: paper money, gunpowder, pasta and fine porcelain are only the most famous. Should we accuse China of ‘cultural imperialism’ when they ruined ‘native’ Italian cuisine by introducing Marco Polo to spaghetti? Similarly, Native Americans were quick to adapt the many useful Old World ideas which Europeans happened to carry with them. To reiterate, most of these had not even been invented by Europeans, but had been adopted by Europeans from other Old World cultures. Why grind corn laboriously by hand for several hours a day, when one can use millstones instead? Why hunt with bow and arrow, when one can use a rifle? Why refuse to domesticate cattle, when they provide huge boosts in caloric intake for your family? Why refuse to adopt the wheel, for goodness sake?

​By the time Columbus set sail, then, the Old World had dozens of clear technological and institutional advantages, which for the most part, New World populations were eager to adopt as soon as they saw them. Rather than jealously guard their technological superiority, many Europeans were ready to trade anything that Native Americans might want, including firearms. This made it inevitable that New World society would be changed beyond recognition, once sustained contact was initiated.

​What about Columbus himself? Try as they might (and they have tried mightily), historians have been unable to find any evidence that Columbus was genocidal, or had any particular ill-will towards the Native Americans that he encountered. The guy lived in 1492. We could have forgiven him for literally ‘going medieval’ on any natives that he encountered. This was the same century in which the Mongols were exterminating every Russian, Muslim and Chinese person that they could get their hands on, sometimes slaughtering over 100,000 men, women and children at a go in some of history’s worst blood orgies. Instead, we find in Columbus’s journals a general sense of curiosity, of wonder even, and a genuine desire at many points to communicate and trade with natives, whose help Columbus realised he would need if his little expeditions were going to be successful. Let’s remember that Columbus was first and foremost a merchant. His main purpose was to open a trade route to China. Europeans realised that China had better stuff. Like expert businessmen everywhere, Genoese merchants had long since realised that attacking the people you want to trade with is counterproductive.

 

​From the get-go, Isabella of Spain expressly forbade the enslavement of her New World subjects. Instead, she showed a genuine desire to bring them into what for her constituted the folds of civilisation, as Christian equals. So historians must grudgingly concede that the Spanish Crown, for its part, was likewise not nearly as bloodthirsty, genocidal or racist as they clearly hope to find.

​The priest Bartholomé de las Casas wrote an eloquent plea to the monarchs of Spain as early as the 1540s, chronicling in detail how wonton adventurers had taken advantage of the lawless situation in New Spain to exploit and slaughter natives against the express will of the Spanish Crown. A few things are worth noting about this: A) at least some Spanish people already had a genuine sense of compassion for, and desire to save, the Indians. B) Las Casas assumed that there was enough sympathy for his story at the Spanish court that he presented his book to the crown. Las Casas believed, therefore, that compassion for the Native Americans was, or at least could become, the dominant mood at court.

​Likewise, the relationship between English colonists in North America and Native Americans was never one-sided. To borrow a phrase from Facebook, the real historical relationship between these peoples is best described as ‘complicated’. The very first Native American chief who encountered the English, Powhatan, almost immediately expressed an interest to live in an English-style house. He considered it to be superior to the types of houses that his own people built, and he was ready to adopt whatever European ways made his life more comfortable. John Smith is supposed to have built him such a house in his capital of Werowocomoco, and to this day a monument called ‘Powhatan’s Chimney’ purports to be the remains of this house. Whether this is actually true or not, the fact is that many such acts of cultural borrowing were at work in English North America. We will say nothing of the many Native American habits that English settlers gratefully adopted, since this would be angrily dismissed as ‘cultural appropriation’ or some other such bad-faith nonsense.

 

​The story of Powhatan is outshined by the biography of his daughter Pocahontas. Of course there is much legend attached to this and there will be a ‘whitewashing’ of the legend. However, we have eye-witness accounts attesting that Pocahontas and other native children were in the habit of turning cartwheels around the Jamestown fort and playing with the boys there. Pocahontas and her friends are credited at one point with bringing provisions into the fort when the colonists were starving. Like any other neighbours, the settlers of Jamestown and the natives of the region had individual personal relationships that lasted for many years. But frontier relations were often capricious, and friendly games could turn to war, and back again, in a matter of months. At one point, John Smith was captured and brought to Powhatan; it is believed that Powhatan thereby hoped to bring Jamestown into his own dominions as Great Chief. He also sent an agent to England with a mission to spy out the population of that country — thus quite resourcefully attempting to size up the competition. He might even have imagined conquering England itself. Should we call Powhatan a ‘cultural imperialist’? At a later date, Pocahontas was captured in war, kept under house arrest, and eventually freed. In 1613, she converted to Christianity and took the rather less interesting name of ‘Rebecca’. She was given away by her father Powhatan to the successful Jamestown planter John Rolfe, and the two of them were given an estate totalling thousands of acres by Powhatan himself. Was this land ‘stolen’ from the Native Americans? Sources relate that the marriage helped foster several years of peace between the Native Americans and the Jamestown colony. In 1616 Pocahontas accompanied her husband to England, where she was treated as a celebrity, and an example of how the natives could be ‘civilised’. One can read this suspiciously, as any good Liberal critic is now taught to do, as an act of ‘white superiority.’ Or one could accept it at face value, as proof that many English people believed Native Americans to have the same innate human abilities as Europeans. Arguably, this is the exact opposite of racism. (Notice we don’t even have a word for this.)

 

​There is therefore little real mystery of what happened to the Native Americans as a culture. They were certainly not exterminated at the behest of any concerted ideology of hatred or European superiority. After the initial disease-caused die-offs, and in spite of a few sensational wars and small-scale massacres, remaining Native Americans adopted so many Old World ‘life hacks’ that most of them were gradually assimilated into European culture. Only a minority stayed ‘wild’ enough to be placed on reservations. Even after that, many enterprising people left the reservation for a better life elsewhere. This was done on an individual basis, for the most part peacefully and willingly, leaving no fuss or much trace in the historical record. The stories of Powhatan and Pocahontas attest to the presence of this pattern at the dawn of English-Native American relations, and it continues to the present day. Now, such a statement would cause an uproar in almost any academic conference room these days. But the majority of the evidence and experience all points in this direction.

 

​A visit to my hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania a few years ago provided some striking evidence for just how much long-term peaceful cohabitation was occurring between Natives and Europeans on the Pennsylvania frontier around the time of the American Revolution. (This is even after relations took a turn for the worse in the 1750s.) Plaques attest to schoolrooms full of Native American children who were being taught to read and write German by the Moravian settlers. While modern-day anthropologists might recoil in horror at this act of ‘cultural imperialism’, it is likely that the parents of these children were grateful for the opportunities afforded to them (and the calories given to them) by the Moravian schoolteachers. It is also very likely that these children would grow up to marry and live on a farm, in European style. Who in their right mind would live in the woods, if they could live a far more secure life on a farm? This was the 18th century we are talking about, when life was hard enough for the great majority of Europeans. The Native Americans therefore showed common sense by gravitating towards habits which enabled them individually to survive and thrive. Accordingly, the colonial-era graveyard in Bethlehem contains a significant percentage of native people who, like Pocahontas 150 years before, had converted to Christianity and adopted a new name. There is no evidence that the egalitarian-minded settlers thought any less of these new converts to the faith. I was lucky enough to be a part of this history, first-hand. One of my two best friends growing up had a mother who went to the Moravian church; he was very charismatic and everyone who knew him thought it was cool that he had Indian ancestors. As we ran around in the woods looking for arrowheads, I was sometimes a little jealous that I had none.

 

​Let’s take a moment to look at the Moravians, whom our Liberal friends will glibly dump into the bucket of ‘European cultural imperialists’. First, the Moravians were, quite literally, communists; I will let that settle without further comment on the irony that entails in this context. In the lands bordering Moravia, ‘white privilege’ meant the privilege of sending an annual tribute of children to be slaves of the Ottoman Sultan: a practice which went on for 500 years, and was not discontinued until 1918. For centuries, Moravians therefore lived under threat of their homeland being invaded, and their people slaughtered or carried into Islamic slavery. (And though it is meant tongue-in-cheek, even pretending to use the lens of ‘race’ here is wholly distorting: in the Mediterranean context, religion and ethnicity mattered far more than ‘race’.) My point is that the Moravians and many neighbouring peoples hardly came from a position of cultural dominance.

 

​But it gets much worse. Moravia itself was originally Slavic-speaking, but it was also in the process of being taken over by culturally dominant Germans. So the very people teaching Native Americans to learn German in Pennsylvania were themselves victims of ongoing cultural imperialism which threatened the extermination of their ancestral language. And within a few generations, German itself would be all but eradicated from Pennsylvania by the majority English-speaking population. To this day, a few Amish still speak Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a version of German. They still refer to non-Amish as ‘the English’ and think of them as foreigners. To pretend therefore that Native Americans were the only ones in 17th- and 18th-century America whose culture was being ‘erased’ is highly naive. It is pernicious even — and racist in itself. This is to say nothing about religion. The Moravians were only in Pennsylvania in the first place because they faced a threat of extermination for their religious beliefs at home. They were, quite literally, refugees seeking asylum from the most horrific conditions. They found refuge in the tolerant state of Pennsylvania, set up by the religious refugee William Penn.

Conclusions

 

​As this piece was going to press, an article was published by the BBC on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower. After pretending neutrality at the beginning of the piece, the author launched with relish into all the worst possible assertions that can be levied against the Plymouth colonists. He implied that they were slave owners, when in fact, only a single Plymouth colonist is documented as having owned a slave. He implied that Plymouth ran on dirty money from the African slave trade, which is likewise almost entirely false. He mentioned every instance that can be found of colonists murdering Indians, and the image accompanying the article showed a representation of a native who was mutilated by colonists.

 

​The article steadfastly refuses to mention any mitigating factors. It says nothing about massacres perpetrated by Native Americans on colonists, or on each other. It says nothing about generations of realpolitik which saw alliances between any and all groups at various times. It says nothing about opportunism on both sides, let alone friendship, or love. It perniciously implies that any such friendships and/or sexual relationships must have been tainted by violence or some sort of racist original sin, in which Native Americans were always victims or dupes. It does not mention that the colonists usually attempted to purchase land from local chiefs. Nor does our BBC article mention the disease which had wiped out over 90 per cent of the Native Americans who lived on the site of the Plymouth colony in the year before the Mayflower landed (the disease had been brought by fishermen, who had been sailing off Massachusetts for generations). Or the fact that the Plymouth colonists’ main economic plan was to trade peacefully with the Native Americans for furs, until this was disrupted by the bad behaviour of English colonists at a neighbouring site. It does not mention that the Plymouth colonists had indentured themselves to the Merchant Adventurers, merely to pay for their own passage. They were, quite literally, economic slaves themselves, and desperately in debt. The article in question says nothing about how Plymouth authorities sometimes hanged Englishmen, or hunted down English fugitives, in order to demonstrate to their Native American allies that they took crimes against them seriously. Nor would the author dare to address the fact that the protestant dissenters of Massachusetts were intellectual ancestors of the global abolitionist movement which he and most of his fellows now take for granted, and give European culture zero credit for.

 

​The question becomes, what good purpose does this calumny against the Pilgrims and other European colonists really serve? I ask this question in good faith. What myth about the Pilgrims needs tearing down with such one-sided ferocity? During the Cold War and the Gulf Wars, liberal historians called out excessive nationalism and jingoism, based on the legitimate fear that military types might start a war for no good reason. (In the case of Gulf War II, they apparently did.) So there is always a place for liberal critique within history. But on this issue, it’s more difficult to see the value of Pilgrim-bashing to today’s Native Americans, apart from making them bitter and resentful, and everyone else feel guilty and ashamed. There are after all very few Native Americans who identify as such; they are generally not subject to racism in the way that, say, African-Americans are, most are mixed race anyway, and most of them do not live on reservations. Many who do, are better off than many other Americans. So what grievances are pieces like the BBC story really addressing? In Canada, I am aware that there are serious social grievances on some reservations, particularly in the far north, but it seems as though the Canadian government has gone a long way in recent decades to address these in a reasonable manner, by allowing Native American representatives to guide and execute policy as much as possible. Should this not be applauded and supported?

 

​And whenever there are real grievances such as these, do we need to rewrite the entire history of European-Native relations in the most negative possible light in order to address them? Peel back the veneer, and we often find well-meaning white middle-class writers, whose cries of victimisation bespeak an essentialising racialism that they don’t even recognise themselves. Would it not be more productive to be more nuanced, to acknowledge that there have been points of goodwill, friendship, positive communication and — shudder the thought — even mutual benefit, since the very beginning?

 

​The real reason to perpetuate such a disastrously one-sided view, it seems, is if one is in a tiny minority of activists who has ‘drunk the kool-aid’ of Cultural Marxism — an ideology bent on bringing maximum embarrassment to Capitalism, Democracy, Western Civilisation and Europeans in general, in the vain hope that this will somehow bring about a sort of… what? Revolution? Really? Let’s not be naive. The only reason to be this consistently, this unreasonably angry about things which happened centuries ago, is if one sees the entirety of experience through the lens of perpetual racism and victimisation, and crucially, if one does not believe in the power of democracy to correct these wrongs.

​At base, such people do not believe in the democratic process. Marxists have always believed that a handful of self-appointed intellectuals are better suited to creating a ‘good society’ than the rough-and-tumble of real-world parliamentary debate. Has history taught them nothing? The ones who will really lose out if Anglophone democracy is further discredited are surely those people in the world who are most vulnerable and in need of protection. Do you wish to provoke an even wilder right-wing reaction to your irrational hate-mongering than we have already seen? Do you think that the autocrats you are emboldening will treat minorities and homosexuals better than the United States, Canada, and Britain? The Cultural Marxist’s finger, once again, is pointed in precisely the wrong direction.

 

​It is high time that historians spoke out against the dangerous misuse of history which supports the zealotry and iconoclasm currently emanating from our educational systems. This has become far too culturally dominant, far too damaging to global society, for us to ignore it any further. In the name of science, fairness, level-headedness, humanity, and democracy itself.

 

Jeff Fynn-Paul is associate professor in history at Leiden University

 

Evidence from 113 Studies: one aspirin per week can slash cancer risk by 40%

One aspirin per week could slash cancer risk by 40 per cent, study finds

Everyday painkiller reduces the risk of developing digestive tract cancers, researchers find

Lizzie Roberts 16 April 2020

Taking aspirin once a week could cut the risk of developing some cancers by nearly 40 per cent, a new study has found.

Aspirin has previously been linked to a reduction in the risk of bowel cancer, but new research shows the power of the everyday painkiller may stretch to other digestive tract cancers - including throat, esophageal, stomach and intestinal.

Scientists looked at evidence from 113 studies investigating various digestive cancers. The results showed regular use of aspirin - defined as taking one or two tablets a week - was linked to a significant reduction in the risk of developing all but one cancer.

The drug reduced the risk of developing cancer of the gastric cardia (the part of the stomach that connects to the oesophagus) and hepato-biliary (liver, gallbladder and bile ducts) by 39 per cent.
Bowel cancer was lowered by more than a quarter, oesophageal cancer by more than a third, stomach cancer by 36 per cent and pancreatic cancer by 22 per cent. Studies of head and neck cancer did not show a significant reduction in risk.

The team also analysed the effect of aspirin dose and duration on bowel cancer. A high daily dose (500 milligrams) could halve the risk of developing bowel cancer with the effects lasting a decade, the researchers found.

The study - the largest and most comprehensive analysis of the link between aspirin and digestive cancers to date - was published in the journal Annals of Oncology.

Dr Carlo La Vecchia, senior author from the University of Milan, said: "The findings for pancreatic and other digestive tract cancers may have implications for the prevention of these highly lethal diseases.

"People who are at high risk of the disease are most likely to gain the greatest benefits from aspirin."
The authors advise people to consult a doctor before taking aspirin for the prevention of cancer due to potential complications.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/15/one-aspirin-per-week-could-slash-cancer-risk-40-per-cent-study/?WT.mc_id=e_DM1235800&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_FAM_New_ES&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_FAM_New_ES20200416&utm_campaign=DM1235800

When you do the Maths, a Carbon-Free World may be Impossible

Inconvenient Energy Realities

Mark P. Mills

July 1, 2019

Energy

The math behind “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking”

A week doesn’t pass without a mayor, governor, policymaker or pundit joining the rush to demand, or predict, an energy future that is entirely based on wind/solar and batteries, freed from the “burden” of the hydrocarbons that have fueled societies for centuries. Regardless of one’s opinion about whether, or why, an energy “transformation” is called for, the physics and economics of energy combined with scale realities make it clear that there is no possibility of anything resembling a radically “new energy economy” in the foreseeable future. Bill Gates has said that when it comes to understanding energy realities “we need to bring math to the problem.”

He’s right. So, in my recent Manhattan Institute report, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,” I did just that. Herein, then, is a summary of some of bottom-line realities from the underlying math. (See the full report for explanations, documentation and citations.)

Realities About the Scale of Energy Demand
1. Hydrocarbons supply over 80% of world energy: If all that were in the form of oil, the barrels would line up from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, and that entire line would grow by the height of the Washington Monument every week.
2. The small two percentage-point decline in the hydrocarbon share of world energy use entailed over $2 trillion in cumulative global spending on alternatives over that period; solar and wind today supply less than 2% of the global energy.
3. When the world’s four billion poor people increase energy use to just one-third of Europe’s per capita level, global demand rises by an amount equal to twice America’s total consumption.
4. A 100x growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace 5% of global oil demand.
5. Renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global hydrocarbons in two decades. It took a half-century for global petroleum production to expand “only” 10-fold.
6. Replacing U.S. hydrocarbon-based electric generation over the next 30 years would require a construction program building out the grid at a rate 14-fold greater than any time in history.
7. Eliminating hydrocarbons to make U.S. electricity (impossible soon, infeasible for decades) would leave untouched 70% of U.S. hydrocarbons use—America uses 16% of world energy.
8. Efficiency increases energy demand by making products & services cheaper: since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33%, the economy grew 80% and global energy use is up 40%.
9. Efficiency increases energy demand: Since 1995, aviation fuel use/passenger-mile is down 70%, air traffic rose more than 10-fold, and global aviation fuel use rose over 50%.
10. Efficiency increases energy demand: since 1995, energy used per byte is down about 10,000-fold, but global data traffic rose about a million-fold; global electricity used for computing soared.
11. Since 1995, total world energy use rose by 50%, an amount equal to adding two entire United States’ worth of demand.
12. For security and reliability, an average of two months of national demand for hydrocarbons are in storage at any time. Today, barely two hours of national electricity demand can be stored in all utility-scale batteries plus all batteries in one million electric cars in America.
13. Batteries produced annually by the Tesla Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory) can store three minutes worth of annual U.S. electric demand.
14. To make enough batteries to store two-day’s worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by the Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory).
15. Every $1 billion in aircraft produced leads to some $5 billion in aviation fuel consumed over two decades to operate them. Global spending on new jets is more than $50 billion a year—and rising.
16. Every $1 billion spent on datacenters leads to $7 billion in electricity consumed over two decades. Global spending on datacenters is more than $100 billion a year—and rising.

Realities About Energy Economics
17. Over a 30-year period, $1 million worth of utility-scale solar or wind produces 40 million and 55 million kWh respectively: $1 million worth of shale well produces enough natural gas to generate 300 million kWh over 30 years.
18. It costs about the same to build one shale well or two wind turbines: the latter, combined, produces 0.7 barrels of oil (equivalent energy) per hour, the shale rig averages 10 barrels of oil per hour.
19. It costs less than $0.50 to store a barrel of oil, or its equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent energy of a barrel of oil in batteries.
20. Cost models for wind and solar assume, respectively, 41% and 29% capacity factors (i.e., how often they produce electricity). Real-world data reveal as much as 10 percentage points less for both. That translates into $3 million less energy produced than assumed over a 20-year life of a 2-MW $3 million wind turbine.
21. In order to compensate for episodic wind/solar output, U.S. utilities are using oil- and gas-burning reciprocating engines (big cruise-ship-like diesels); three times as many have been added to the grid since 2000 as in the 50 years prior to that.
22. Wind-farm capacity factors have improving at about 0.7% per year; this small gain comes mainly from reducing the number of turbines per acre leading to 50% increase in average land used to produce a wind-kilowatt-hour.
23. Over 90% of America’s electricity, and 99% of the power used in transportation, comes from sources that can easily supply energy to the economy any time the market demands it.
24. Wind and solar machines produce energy an average of 25%–30% of the time, and only when nature permits. Conventional power plants can operate nearly continuously and are available when needed.
25. The shale revolution collapsed the prices of natural gas & coal, the two fuels that produce 70% of U.S. electricity. But electric rates haven’t gone down, rising instead 20% since 2008. Direct and indirect subsidies for solar and wind consumed those savings.

Energy Physics… Inconvenient Realities
26. Politicians and pundits like to invoke “moonshot” language. But transforming the energy economy is not like putting a few people on the moon a few times. It is like putting all of humanity on the moon—permanently.
27. The common cliché: an energy tech disruption will echo the digital tech disruption. But information-producing machines and energy-producing machines involve profoundly different physics; the cliché is sillier than comparing apples to bowling balls.
28. If solar power scaled like computer-tech, a single postage-stamp-size solar array would power the Empire State Building. That only happens in comic books.
29. If batteries scaled like digital tech, a battery the size of a book, costing three cents, could power a jetliner to Asia. That only happens in comic books.
30. If combustion engines scaled like computers, a car engine would shrink to the size of an ant and produce a thousand-fold more horsepower; actual ant-sized engines produce 100,000 times less power.
31. No digital-like 10x gains exist for solar tech. Physics limit for solar cells (the Shockley-Queisser limit) is a max conversion of about 33% of photons into electrons; commercial cells today are at 26%.
32. No digital-like 10x gains exist for wind tech. Physics limit for wind turbines (the Betz limit) is a max capture of 60% of energy in moving air; commercial turbines achieve 45%.
33. No digital-like 10x gains exist for batteries: maximum theoretical energy in a pound of oil is 1,500% greater than max theoretical energy in the best pound of battery chemicals.
34. About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent of one pound of hydrocarbons.
35. At least 100 pounds of materials are mined, moved and processed for every pound of battery fabricated.
36. Storing the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil, which weighs 300 pounds, requires 20,000 pounds of Tesla batteries ($200,000 worth).
37. Carrying the energy equivalent of the aviation fuel used by an aircraft flying to Asia would require $60 million worth of Tesla-type batteries weighing five times more than that aircraft.
38. It takes the energy-equivalent of 100 barrels of oil to fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil.
39. A battery-centric grid and car world means mining gigatons more of the earth to access lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, rare earths, cobalt, etc.—and using millions of tons of oil and coal both in mining and to fabricate metals and concrete.
40. China dominates global battery production with its grid 70% coal-fueled: EVs using Chinese batteries will create more carbon-dioxide than saved by replacing oil-burning engines.
41. One would no more use helicopters for regular trans-Atlantic travel—doable with elaborately expensive logistics—than employ a nuclear reactor to power a train or photovoltaic systems to power a nation.

Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a McCormick School of Engineering Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University, and author of Work in the Age of Robots, published by Encounter Books.

If there’s just one thing you need to read on climate science…

This could be it. None of the contents are new or original, but in this longer-than-an-average opinion piece, Bjorn Lomborg distils all the elements of the argument he has been making for the past decade or two – coincidentally, from a position of someone who is not a “climate change denier” at all – into the perfect elixir of truth:

This year, the world will spend $US162 billion ($230bn) subsidising renewable energy, propping up inefficient industries and supporting middle-class homeowners to erect solar panels, according to the International Energy Agency. In addition, the Paris Agreement on climate change will cost the world from $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion a year by 2030. Astonishingly, neither of these hugely expensive policies will have any measurable impact on temperatures by the end of the century.
Climate campaigners want to convince us that not only should we maintain these staggering costs, but that we should spend a fortune more on climate change, since our very survival is allegedly at stake. But they are mostly wrong, and we’re likely to end up wasting trillions during the coming decades. I will outline how we could spend less, do a better job addressing climate change, and help far more effect­ively with many of the world’s other ills…
The present approach to climate change isn’t working. If fully implemented, analysis of the leading climate-economic models shows that the Paris Agreement will cost $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion every year in slowed economic growth. Our response to climate change is so expensive because alternative energy sources remain expensive and inefficient in most scenarios. It is still very expensive to switch from fossil fuels — hence the fortune being spent on subsidies, to little overall effect.

I could easily quote the whole article, and maybe I should). This, in my mind, has always been the problem with the current approach to the greenhouse effect, which became global warming, which became climate change, which most recently became climate emergency:

1. The actions proposed under all the relevant international treaties and agreements so far to tackle the CO2 emissions will have a negligible effect on global temperatures and climate while at the same time sporting a mind-boggling price tag and therefore a dire impact on economy and standard of life across the world.
2. This is because the world needs energy* and if that energy won’t be provided by fossil fuels it has to be provided by various “alternative”, “green”, “renewable” sources, which at this point in time are significantly more expensive than traditional carbon-based energy.
3. To solve the problem of the high cost and save us the economic and social consequences of such high cost, instead of subsidising the renewables to make them more economical vis-a-vis coal and gas, we should instead be investing in research to develop technologies that will actually in the long term make the renewables cheaper than fossil fuels and as reliable in provision of base power.
4. As Lomborg never tires of pointing out, people across the developing world suffer from a multitude of problems which have nothing to do with global temperatures, but are not as sexy as all the usual hot causes that transfix the activists in the developed world, like climate change or AIDS. They might not be sexy but they are relatively inexpensive to fix and can have far-reaching positive implications for the world. Imagine if some of the money we currently waste under the pious guise of addressing climate change was redirected to such ends.
5. We should strive towards cheap and reliable renewable energy, whether or not you believe that CO2 is harmful to the Earth. Fossil fuels, while more abundant than their critics posit, are finite and unevenly distributed. Renewables, on the other hand, have the potential to democritise energy by bringing it to all those who currently lack a sufficient supply on account of their paucity of natural resources or the economic underdevelopment. Thus, they can help to break the vicious cycle of poverty by spurring economic development with all its positive externalities for the “bottom billion” or two.

Idiots like members of Extinction Rebellion glueing themselves to busy intersections for the cause of “100 per cent renewables by 2030” are doing zilch to advance the debate or bring the solution any closer. As it currently stands, you wouldn’t be able to go all-green without completely collapsing our societies. The only way it can be achieved is by making green energy cheap, and that, in turn, will only come about through more research and development. You want to “save the world”? Lobby governments to spend less on subsidies and green spivs and rent-seekers and more on science and technology. Also, ditch animal onesies and industrial glue and study science and engineering. We need less Greta and more Bjorn.
*Not according to everyone; many on the post-industrial left see climate change as a great opportunity to combat modern capitalism with its “fetish” for economic growth. Take, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff:

Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” Ricketts greeted this startling notion with an attentive poker face. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

In other words, some sort of socialism, a notion that would strike old-style Marxists as ridiculous though they would no doubt appreciate the naked and shameless cunning in the pursuit of one’s radical political ends.

Arthur Chrenkoff blogs at The Daily Chrenk, where this piece also appears.

Socialism and Capitalism Explained

Socialism and Capitalism

By George Friedman

Socialism is a global political movement that emerged from the French Revolution. Its goal was to speak for the dispossessed, only sometimes as a democratic political party. In all of its guises, it has been a powerful political force in most of the world. In the United States, however, it has been relegated to the political margins, seen largely as alien to the American ethos. It has now emerged explicitly as a subject of debate in American politics and therefore requires some thought.

Origin Stories

The important difference between socialism and capitalism – even more important than what each actually preaches – is that capitalism is less an intellectual or moral system than a reality born of the industrial revolution. Socialism, on the other hand, has always been an intellectual movement, crafted by intellectuals such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Lassalle and Marx, all of whom made the moral case for socialism and imagined what such a system would look like. These intellectuals loathed inequality and despised the intellectual shallowness of the rich and sought to create a political movement that could bring their vision to life. It was commandeered by politicians such as Karl Kautsky in Germany, and Vladimir Lenin in Russia.

Socialism argued that the private ownership and control of investment capital, which created the means of production, was flawed in two ways. First, it diverted wealth from the common good to the private benefit of the rich. Second, in investing on the basis of the highest return on capital, capitalism neglected investment in social goods that had a lower or no return on capital. It limited human possibilities.

In general, socialism advocates a radical restructuring of society – the means of production should be transferred to state control, and the state should determine the investment strategy. There were three underlying goals to this argument. First, that socialism would make possible the political equality that wealth inequality did not allow for. Second, that the state would produce for the common good, since state officials would not profit from the decisions they made. Finally, that the state would be controlled democratically, and therefore be under control of the public.

Capitalism did not attempt to make the case for itself. In fact, it was not something imagined and planned for. It was the reality that emerged alongside the Industrial Revolution. The industrial revolution could not develop without investment, and the investors hoped to make a profit, and that profit was reinvested. The capitalists’ wealth came to dwarf that of the old European aristocracy, and it grew larger as capitalists pursued more wealth. The capitalist did not contemplate the virtue of wealth, or the effects of industrialism on the human condition. The capitalist considered the moment and acted on it. Capitalism was not an ideology, nor did intellectuals defend it until the 20th century, when Hayek and Friedman, among others, sought to make the moral case. In the United States, capitalists bound their work to Christian notions of charity, but they had no systematic vision of their own.

Capitalism’s greatest explicator was Adam Smith, who wrote “The Wealth of Nations.” In it, he described how individual decisions, driven by self-interest, would culminate in an increase in the wealth of nations. In one of his lesser-read books, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith made the argument that moral principles do not derive from external theories (by which he implicitly meant socialism and religion) but rather from pragmatic, necessary solutions to problems. So, Smith’s ultimate defense of capitalism is that it worked. But by this he meant that it maximized wealth – not that it limited inequality.

The capitalists determined where money was invested, based on expectations of returns on capital. In this sense, they controlled the direction capitalism would go, in that they didn’t care where it went so long as their wealth increased. From this came the towering structures of Euro-American civilization, along with the reality that the wealth of nations left vast swaths of society serving the system as workers and excluded many others from the system. Human action usually comes at the expense of others.

Reallocating Capital

The socialist argument was that, so long as capitalists pursued their own immediate interests, the wealth of society would accumulate in their hands, and the matters of inequality and poverty would not be addressed. At the core of the socialist argument was that the very indifference to ideology by the capitalists would create vast wealth for the few, without alleviating the suffering of the many. Therefore, there had to be a reallocation of capital. Some capital would go toward easing the suffering of the excluded. But even more would go to the state, which would assume responsibility for investment. The state was a superior agent of investment the individuals making investment decisions would either be civil servants or an elected representative of the people, and, having no personal interest in the outcome, would make the best decisions possible based on democratically defined ends.

The clash between capitalism and socialism has many dimensions, but the most important is this: Capitalist investment is not centralized. Investment capital comes from many sources, and there are countless investors making decisions. The diversification of capital limits the consequences of any single decision. It makes capitalism vulnerable to cycles and fads, but devastation is not the same as annihilation. It can and (and regularly does) recover from devastation. But the emphasis is on what the investment process can recover from, not the havoc that the devastation might cause to the public.
Socialism places confidence in the state, and control of the state in the hands of the public. The public as a whole has an understanding of what it needs but is not sensitive to the price paid. The state, then, must either abide by the will of the many or make investment decisions regardless of the public will, but for the good of the public (or at least what the state regards as their good). Since the state is an abstraction, the decisions are actually made by state officials. Given the vastness of the decisions made by the state, it must devolve to an army of civil servants who individually hold minimal power, but who collectively would take the place of investors, unbound by the demand of self-interest.
Democratic socialism cannot be democratic because of the scope and scale of modern economies. It either evolves in a Soviet direction, to name one extreme, or, as in oft-cited Sweden, leaves most investment decisions to private investors, taxing them and transferring money to the rest of society. In the Soviet model, the state tries to manage mid-level civil servants by terrifying them with death. In the Swedish model, the battle is formed by demands of increasing social benefits and decreasing investment capital.

Under capitalism, the diversification of capital sources protects against bad decisions made by centralized governments. But it must, by its nature, create inequality and occasional social crisis. The flow of money into the hands of the investor class must generate crises as industries are shut down and as new ones are created. The speed of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” generates rapid and intense crises that can turn just as rapidly into social unrest, chaos or repression. Capitalism has generally solved this in the same way that social democracy has: It has left investment to private investors and then imposed taxes on them to cushion social dislocation.

In short, the distinction between modern industrial capitalism and social democracy is minimal. Leaving aside socialist fantasies about the abolition of greed or capitalist fantasies in which a state will expect nothing from its citizens, the two systems have more or less merged. Capitalists and socialists accept private investment. Both expect economies to grow and from that growth they will pay taxes. In both Sweden and the United States, taxes are hated by the public, but the benefits are loved. Still, the political system decides the taxes and the politicians do what they were meant to do in a democracy – pander to the public. What may differentiate one politician from the next is the amount of taxation they propose, but even that is used to balance the system.

Even within today’s hybrid system, democratic socialism has risen as a topic of debate within the Democratic Party. I would argue that the reasons for the emergence can be explained this way. The Democratic Party was defeated by Donald Trump in the last presidential election because he seemed to speak for the interests of the industrial working class that is in decline. This class had been the foundation of the New Deal coalition that had dominated the Democrats and from which the Democrats shifted, focusing instead on other sectors of society.

The conversation around socialism in the Democratic Party represents an attempt to woo the voters feeling intense pain who voted for Trump. Whether this group will respond is a key question. For the most part, the conversation will appeal most to those already committed to the Democratic left. That is where the battle is going on now. So it seems designed to win the Democratic nomination and lose the general election. But I am not a politician, so they may see things I can’t. What I can say is that the discussion of socialism is purely symbolic and intended to indicate a commitment to unspecified radical change. But structurally, there is little there that can substantially change the economic system, because there has been a massive convergence between the socialists rising from the French Revolution and the industrialists rising in the factories of Edinburgh. The debate is functionally archaic – but perhaps of some symbolic power.