Thursday, September 02, 2010


AKA buffoonery:

Shortening working time by 1% reduces the environmental impact by 0.8%, according to research carried out by Jörgen Larsson at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

"This indicates that reduced work time would limit energy use," he said.
So a decaying level of output yields progressively less greenie messianic style salvation the deeper into the back-breaking middle ages that you delve. This is uncritically accepted as a public good, on precisely that basis, despite the fact that the greater your “décroissance” or “dismantling” of civilization, the less the environmental benefit.

Moreover, encouraging poverty has been redefined as something like a virtue:
Larsson argued that shorter working time helps to combat climate change in two ways. It reduces the energy use of individuals while changing their consumption patterns by limiting their income.
Knock yourself out, Spanky – but the hilarious experiments in societal crash-testing don’t stop there:
Shorter hours are also seen as key to getting to grips with rocketing unemployment figures triggered by the economic crisis. In the US, 11 million new jobs will have to be created to return to pre-crash levels, Schor pointed out, adding that the euro zone has not escaped the crisis either.

She argued that the standard approach of creating jobs by increasing GDP growth rate is not working and no stimulus is forthcoming amid political austerity measures. Moreover, the required increase in energy use would not be acceptable due to the ensuing greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

"We need to reduce the rate of GDP growth or we won't be able to reach climate targets," she said. "The other way to think about it is that we're pulling some of this demand out of the system."
Eveidently the critic isn’t very familiar with the fact that poorer societies are FAR more polluted, FAR unhealthier, and have demonstrated environmental improvements through... wait for it... development and GDP growth. What these twits DO measure isn’t environmentally meaningful at all as a metric: CO2.
Growing vegetables, generating renewable energy or manufacturing goods in small laboratories are just a few examples of how people and communities can provide for themselves or spark the emergence of a new green business sector, the researcher argued.
Which is the coded way of saying that she’d prefer to see a retrograde, agricultural society that takes centuries to find minor medical advancements and dooms all of the “little people” to endless backbreaking work.

Have you ever wondered why it is that the only kind of energy these clowns are willing to use liberally is other peoples’ physical effort? The very purpose of development is to IMPROVE human life by reducing dangerous labor and lengthening lives. What these idiots seek OBJECTIVELY is to reverse that through coercion, and later on by force of legal compulsion.
This would be justifiable as people would not be getting lower incomes - instead simply receiving some or all of their productivity gains in free time instead of higher salaries, Schor explained. "People are far less attached emotionally to income they haven't yet gotten than to income they have," she added.
Actually, they get very attached to things taken away from them by compulsion, by the force of a government authority, or by the brutal laws of regimes pretending to be a nanny state “caring for you” by making your personal decision for you.

What they are doing it trying to make “the new man” who need not be made to act by use of force because they have been well programmed to be pliant and servile under the direction of social engineers. It’s the failed and destructive philosophical model of early 20th Europe on parade again, and it’s going after a public that they deem so worthless, that they can’t be let to think for themselves. Here’s one that clearly doesn’t, and he’s all green, and all lefty. It's the surprisingly "normal" garden-variety nature of the demands of a man who took hostages at the Discovery Channel building in teh Washington, DC suburb of Silver Spring, MD:

Got that? More of that great math, “décroisance” and state coerced eugenics in there too, just like the unnamed “Economic researcher” cited in the Euraktiv item.


11. You're also going to find solutions for unemployment and housing. All these unemployed people makes me think the US is headed toward more war
Same damned thing.