Don’t pit money and the planet against each other – Christopher Barnard :
Spending trillions of dollars to fight the apocalypse is unconvincing to people. Innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic prosperity are concepts that relate much more convincingly to human psychology.
Climate solutions, therefore, shouldn’t come “at any cost.” They should be attractive, realistic, and optimistic. Empowering innovation and the development of clean technologies is a solution that not only benefits the planet but is also economically viable and ultimately affordable for everyday citizens. Our goal should be to create solutions that are less expensive and more efficient than the status quo. Then and only then will the cost of climate action be worth it for the average individual. It’s simple economics.
Ultimately, the reality is that we want to tackle climate change because it greatly affects human life. More severe storms, flooding, droughts, and warmer temperatures are already affecting our food supply, health, and economies. Yet, the solution can’t be worse than the disease. Climate policy must be measured by cost-benefit analyses, not extremist predictions or utopian, anti-capitalist rhetoric.
If we pit money against the planet, the planet will lose every time.
The problem with sustainable development – Bjorn Lomborg :
The developed world has promised to help the developing world fulfil the so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. These were set out in 2015 by the United Nations. The SDGs have essentially promised everything to everyone, everywhere, all the time. The West has said that it’s going to fix poverty, hunger, war, corruption, global warming and education. And it’s somehow also going to get organic apples and community gardens to everyone on Earth.
In an ideal world, it would be great to fix everything, but we don’t live in that world. Doing all the things we have promised would probably cost between $10 and $15 trillion more each year. That’s money we don’t have. For reference, that’s the same amount as the whole world’s tax intake last year. And we’d have to spend that extra every year. That means we would have to stop everything we’re doing right now and just spend all our money on trying to solve these problems. Of course, that’s not going to happen.
We’re halfway to the SDG deadline, but we’re nowhere near halfway to fulfilling these goals. So, as I argue in Best Things First, why don’t we do the smartest stuff first? We need to identify where we can spend money to do the most good first.
The 12 goals I lay out in my book are the things that will deliver the most economic benefits for the minimum cost. That means they would help people become richer, more productive and socially better-off. Fewer people would die, get sick, lose their parents or lose their children. People would also be environmentally better-off – they would have better wetlands, fewer CO2 emissions, and more arable land to grow crops. This is all about achieving the greatest improvements, at the lowest possible cost. . .
If we want to do good in the world, let’s do the best things first. Let’s do the things that will actually have the most impact. If you add up the cost for all the 12 things I suggest in my book, it’s $35 billion a year. That’s not much in the grand scheme of things. On a global scale, that’s certainly something we can afford. If we spent that $35 billion smartly, we could save 4.2million lives each year. And we can make the developing world $1.1 trillion richer, each and every year.
Tuberculosis (TB) is a great example of a huge problem with a relatively simple fix. In the West, this terrible disease was pretty much eradicated with the invention of antibiotics. But that never happened in the developing world. In 2021, TB killed 1.6million people worldwide. It’s one of the leading causes of death in South Africa and India. Ridding the world of TB might seem like this huge impossible task, but the solution is actually very simple. All you need to do is make people take their prescribed medication for six months. And to do that, you can gamify it or give people incentives to stick on this long course of antibiotics. The other thing you can do is increase testing, especially in communities where TB has a certain stigma attached to it. The total cost of all these solutions would be around $6 billion. That’s a small cost to get TB under control and save millions of lives.
In this incredibly divisive age, it’s important that we have something we can all agree on. And who wouldn’t agree that it’s a good thing to spend a little money on doing a lot of good? We might not be able to fix everything. We’re not going to eradicate all diseases or wipe out poverty. But we can dramatically reduce those things. That by itself would be an incredible outcome.
It’s a heat wave not the end of the world – Brendan O’Neill :
Hold the front page: it’s hot in Greece. Italy, too. And – if you can believe it – in the south of Spain. Blaring sunshine on the Costa del Sol in the middle of July – will wonders never cease? Reading the newspaper coverage of this sunshine, you could be forgiven for thinking it was unheard of. That the Mediterranean had never sweltered before. That the streets of Athens and beaches of Alicante had never baked in the midday heat. ‘Italy swelters’, ‘Holiday hell’, ‘Unbearable’, scream the headlines, as if a most unusual calamity, unknown in the annals of time, had struck southern Europe.
Everyone needs to calm down. It’s a heatwave, not the end of the world. Yes, it’s hot. Temperatures are surpassing 40C in parts of Greece, Italy, Spain, Croatia and Turkey. It was 41C in Seville this week. It might reach 48C on some Med islands, including Sicily and Sardinia. ‘Some scientists believe’, says the Washington Post, that we’re witnessing Europe’s hottest days in 125,000 years. The last time it was this hot there were ‘hippopotamuses in the Thames’, says a breathless BBC. I’m taking it all with a pinch of salt. Right now I’m looking at a New York Times report from 8 August 1933 which said two cities in Spain had just experienced temperatures of 42.5C. It was like a ‘steaming cauldron’, apparently. Heat is as old as time.
Strikingly, that old New York Times piece was a tiny column on page 14 of the paper. Summer wasn’t frontpage news in the early 20th century, no matter how hot it got. It is now. The totally dog-bites-man story of scorching weather in southern Europe is being reported in apocalyptic tones. The word ‘hell’ abounds. ‘Deadly’, too. It’s an ‘apocalyptic round of heat’ and it’s ‘pounding the continent’, says the Mirror. Europe is ‘boiling in sweat’, we’re told. Not all of Europe. It’s pissing down in Britain. Where’s our global warming?
Even the name of the heatwave is designed to conjure up visions of hellfire and torment. Cerberus, it’s called, after the three-headed hound from hell of Greek mythology. Subtle. Extreme storms tend to get normal names – Storm Doris, Hurricane Laura – but heat in July is named after a beast from the abyss. It makes it impossible to have a rational discussion. The name Cerberus cajoles us into thinking of the heatwave as a retributive inferno. ‘Hound-from-hell heatwave sweeps across [Europe]’, as one headline puts it. The language dictates the thought. Just uttering the name of the wave gives credence to the ahistorical idea that it’s an End Times event. ‘Cerberus’s inferno’, newspapers cry.
Indeed, in Dante’s Inferno Cerberus torments sinners by tearing them apart. How apt. For this heatwave is viewed by our cultural elites as yet another of Mother Nature’s punishments of sinful mankind. The melting temperatures are down to climate change, apparently, which is to say: it’s our fault. Every heatwave in recent years has been interpreted by the hysterics of the misnamed intellectual classes as a ‘heat apocalypse’ brought about by man’s hubristic industrial behaviour. ‘[It] seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, said one observer of the ‘heat of late’. No wonder the mad dog Cerberus has come from the Underworld to boil us alive in our own sweat.
Every weather event now gets folded into the misanthropic narrative that says humanity has gone ‘too far’ and is being avenged by the Earth. Every flood, storm and rush of heat is marshalled to the neo-medieval claim that the heavens are divinely displeased with our marauding species. Weather is never just weather anymore. It’s a portent, a sign, a lashing out. ‘Nature is sending us a message’, leading greens say. Nothing better captures the irrationalism of our times than the rehabilitation of the ancient belief that natural calamities are a punishing visitation from a higher force. God, Gaia, Cerberus – someone’s reprimanding us.
Amid all this madness it can be difficult to speak the truth about heatwaves. But we must try. The first truth is that there have been heatwaves forever, long before modernity. Bald’s Leechbook, a guide to health compiled in the 10th century, advised people to avoid summer’s ‘boiling heat and the venomousness of the air’. There was a mega-drought in northern Europe for 37 long years between 1437 and 1473. There was burning sunshine in parts of Europe in 1616, leading to a ‘great heat’ and ‘dried-up rivers’. What caused those ‘heat apocalypses’? Factories, 4x4s, airplanes? It is a testament to the new clerisy’s doomerism and narcissism that they think our weather is without earthly precedent.
The second truth about heatwaves is that people are pretty good at dealing with them.
Then there’s the third truth, the most unutterable one: it’s possible that the rising heat of recent years is good for us. For here’s the thing: extreme cold kills far greater numbers than extreme heat. . .
Why don’t we hear about all these cold deaths? The reason is as straightforward as it is callous – because the suffering of these freezing folk, most of whom are elderly, doesn’t lend itself to the political narrative about dastardly mankind setting the planet on fire. These victims of cold are an inconvenience, grit in the eye of the climate ideology, and thus they’re subtly erased. And yet, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, if cold is the major temperature killer, then surely the warming of our planet will reduce deaths in the round? Right now, he says, the warming of our planet ‘reduces more deaths than it causes’, possibly saving ‘100,000 lives each year’. That might change, if things get really hot. But for now, let’s welcome the reduction in cold deaths, even as we prep for future heat.
If things are getting hotter, we should mitigate the consequences. It really is that simple. And we know how to do it. More air-conditioning, more open public swimming baths, more electric fans and fresh drinking water. This is how the US halved its heat deaths over the past 60 years even as its number of hot days increased – by deploying tech to the great task of cooling people down. The idea that our response to hot weather should be to beat ourselves up over modernity and wind back industrial society is preposterous and undoable. Instead, enjoy the sun and fortify for the future. And Cerberus, don’t forget us – it’s miserable in London.
What Labour’s wealth tax plan tells us about our leaders – Damien Grant :
Sometimes by design, but usually by accident, we reveal ourselves. This week we gained a glimpse into the thinking of several of our senior political leaders, thanks to the release of a delightful Treasury document commissioned by Messrs Robertson and Parker on a wealth tax.
The idea was that by taxing the wealth of the rich, the working poor could get a tax-break. It sounds wonderful, but you do not need a 37-page Treasury report to tell you that taxing wealth will have perverse economic impacts that will, in short order, mean that there will be fewer jobs available for the working poor. . .
The report is punchy. If a wealth tax was introduced, “expect some reduction in investment in entrepreneurship and innovation”; and on the risks of human flight, “there is a real risk that the number of people who leave is higher than estimated, resulting in less revenue collected from the wealth tax than we have forecast and larger economic costs”.
The civil servants knew what they were doing. It is a report designed to put a stake through the heart of David Parker’s ambitions. But why was this report commissioned at all? . . .
In addition to revealing the cavalier approach to governance and a post-modernist approach to election promises, the consideration of a wealth tax reveals something else. Let’s take a step back. To 2017.
When Bill English was relieved of the responsibilities of office, the state’s revenue was $77 billion. Five years later, the state is taking in $113 billion and is forecast in fiscal year 2024 to bring in $126 billion, rising to $151 billion within two years.
We should give some allowance for inflation, an expanded budget for sausage rolls and Treasury reports, but in nominal terms this Government will, if re-elected, have doubled the tax take in eight years.
It isn’t as bad in real terms, thanks to the recklessness of their other policies that have resulted in the value of our currency being debased, but that isn’t much in terms of mitigation.
This massive increase in revenue has not been achieved off the back of economic growth, but thanks primarily to fiscal drag.
The last time the tax brackets were adjusted was in 2010 when the median wage was around $40,000. It is now closer to $55,000. Most of this increase is due to inflation, and it means we are all paying a substantially higher portion of our income to Wellington.
And yet, incredibly, it is not enough. It is never enough. The rapacious need for cash and the inability or unwillingness to restrain spending resulted in this administration looking at the fixed assets of elderly Kiwis with covetous envy.
Under the most aggressive proposal, if you own more than $3m in net assets you would have to pay 2% of this extra value each year. It does not matter if you have no income. It does not matter if you stopped working a decade ago and are pottering about in god’s waiting room. You must surrender 2% of your assets every year until either you die or your wealth falls to an acceptable level.
There were less egregious settings, with thresholds up to $10m and taxation rates at 1%, but consider for a moment the mindset of a politician who would contemplate that this is an acceptable means of raising cash.
It appears that the entire exercise was abandoned because it was too much work to do in too little time, but be clear-eyed about what has been revealed.
A wealth tax is far more pernicious than a capital gains tax. With capital gains you have to pay a percentage of the increase in the value of your asset. Under a wealth tax, merely owning an asset of value will result in a fine equal to a percentage of the value of that asset.
And Labour thinks this is fine. It was only dropped because it wasn’t politically possible right now.
The Green Party are openly campaigning on a policy of a 2.5% wealth tax on assets over $2m, and Te Pāti Māori are excited about a bit of post-colonial redistribution.
It does not matter that, as the Treasury report makes clear, a wealth tax will erode the tax base, impose negative impacts on social cohesion, have a very high compliance cost, and drive the wealthy and innovative offshore.
There is a popular electoral base for what can be described as an envy tax. This isn’t about paying for more health care or extra pay for teachers, but the pleasure of bringing down a peg those who have worked harder, who have achieved more, who have paid taxes on their income to acquire assets over a lifetime.
We reveal ourselves when we clamour for a policy that achieves nothing other than the satisfaction of beggaring our neighbour, and politicians who stoke this desire, and pander to it, reveal themselves to be unworthy of elected office.
This will not stop them being elected. And it is why, in time, we will get a wealth tax.
Did New Zealand’s mainstream newspapers collude to collectively cancel an unobjectionable advert? – Katrina Briggs :
I swear New Zealand’s mainstream media are not only going to bore their readers to death eventually, but they’ll also bore themselves into their own demise. As time goes on, our MSM gets evermore tedious, risk-averse, mundane, and uniform. The only ones who get a thrill out of all this are the wokerati¹, simply because they’re so scared of controversy that not messing their pants from the fear of a different opinion is an actual thrill.
Sure, there are some blokes who say they’re women getting a huge thrill from milking the free pass the wokerati have given them to go into female spaces to be voyeurs and exhibitionists with complete impunity. They’re getting a buzz a minute, for sure — but I’m not talking about them right now. Although, it can’t be denied that their pervy presence is gratis of the wokerati, who need smelling salts at the thought of any offence given to pervy blokes who say they’re women, but it’s completely fine if women are offended.
Nah — I’m talking about the collective shudders from our mainstream media when — gasp — someone’s values don’t align with theirs. Yep, your values now have to align with our mainstream medias’ values before they’ll condescend to take your money off you to advertise with them. Those values are usually vague and undefined, and seem to depend on who’s offended about what on which day of the week. Gone is the time when different values were valued by the media, because it was a reflection of the society we live in, and it kept the money-pool broad and deep. Now, different values are scary.
Recently, a conservative Christian organisation called Family First got advertisements approved to run in some of New Zealand’s mainstream newspapers for a campaign — and then they all cancelled it, seemingly after colluding with each other. The advertisements were going to be full page, so we’re talking about a reasonable loss of revenue for the newspapers. However, no rational explanations for the cancellations were provided. Neither was the campaign subversive, but it did ask people to “Sign our petition to ensure that ‘woman’ is to be defined as ‘an adult human female’ in all our laws, public policies and regulations.”
Cue what can only be surmised as a wokerati meltdown.
Bob McCroskie, the CEO of Family First, showed the acceptance and then cancellation of the advertisements in a Twitter thread on his account @bobmccoskrienz. . .
I’m not a Christian conservative, nor do I follow any faith-based religion. Family First and I would part company on some beliefs, but on the matter of not believing that any man whomsoever says he’s a woman is one, we’re in lockstep. Christian conservative women and girls have as much right to not have their rights and language eroded upon demand by these men as anyone else. They too need rights and language they can rely on, in order to thrive in public life. I say good on Family First for being a faith-based group not only going public about it, but willing to do something about it.
If there are those who prefer to hold the line and keep their politics or faith ‘pure’ by not allying with people on this issue who would be in opposition to them on other issues, I don’t mind, but I’m not one of those. In fact, I’d argue that purists are necessary, in a way. However, when women’s and children’s rights and wellbeing are under threat like they currently are, I’m prepared to ally with ‘strange bedfellows’ as the saying goes.
My worldview has been turned upside down in the last few years, and I clearly understand that no one is safe from being ‘cancelled’ if there are no brakes applied to it. It might be an organisation you disagree with now, but it could be any of us next week. And just a parting word of wisdom, because I flatter myself I have a few of those now as a b’older woman (😊) — sometimes we have to hear things we don’t like, in order to be clear in our hearts and minds about what we do like, what our own boundaries are, and why.
Homepaddock 