11,000 Political Science Hacks Declare Socialism the Solution to a ‘Climate Emergency’

It’s getting to be a broken record. Begin with climate catastrophism, attack prosperity, proceed to utopianism, end with socialism. Below are four excerpts from More than 11,000 scientists from around the world declare a ‘climate emergency’. Andrew Freedman reports for Washington Post on November 5, 2019 Pay attention to the emphasized portions:

In a move that backs a term used to date mainly by climate activists and left-leaning politicians, a new study by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet ‘‘clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency,’’ and provides six broad policy goals that must be met to address it.

On the economy, the study states that improving long-term sustainability and reducing inequality should be prioritized over growing wealth, as measured using gross domestic product. 

‘‘We’re asking for a transformative change for humanity,’’ Ripple said in an interview. Many of the signatories to the warning do not list themselves as climate scientists but, instead, as biologists, ecologists, and other science specialists. Ripple says that is intentional, as the authors sought to assemble the broadest support possible.

‘‘The situation we’re in today with climate change,’’ he says, ‘‘shows that this is an issue that needs to move beyond climate scientists only.’’

Again, my emphasis. “Beyond climate scientists” has long been the goal of New Left socialists. Yes, terms like “climate emergency” has long been a political tactic of Left-leaning politicians. Contrary to the study’s claim of “broadest support possible”, it still is. The Left has been claiming science as the basis for their catastrophism scare mongering--a classic appeal to authority tactic. The tactic may not be working as well as hoped. So they dredged up as many Left-leaning scientists as possible to help stamp the prestige of science onto their socialist political designs. As Freedman reports:

The report is a stark departure from recent scientific assessments of global warming, such as those of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in that it does not couch its conclusions in the wishy-washy language of uncertainties, and it does prescribe policies.

Yes, policies--which can only mean government enforced policies to engineer “a transformative change for humanity.” Sound familiar? It does to me . . . a lot like the global communist goal of Marxism-Leninism. 

The convergence of science and politics is just as poisonous to liberty as the union of religion and politics. In fact, the climate emergency movement is a manifestation of the politics/religion union, masquerading under the banner of science. It was once declared by defenders of the Confederate slavocracy that black people have been scientifically proven to be incapable of supporting themselves and so would be better off remaining slaves where they can be taken care of. Marx advanced “scientific socialism” as a utopian ideal, resulting in 100 million deaths. American Progressives incorporated the science of eugenics into their political agenda, leading to racists, sexist policies and, when copied by National Socialist (NAZI) Germany, led to racial purity policies, including genocide and war. 

I believe we are witnessing a new and even more dangerous science/politics convergence. When by the middle of the 20th Century it became clear that socialism leads to widespread misery and terror and capitalism leads to widespread prosperity, the socialists faced a choice--abandon socialism or find a new way to discredit capitalism. Stephen Hicks calls the “the crisis of socialism”. Hence, the New Left arose in the 1960s to forge a new alliance between socialism and the emerging Ecology movement, the precursor to today’s Environmentalism. The new line for socialists: Capitalism fails because it produces too much prosperity, which is ruining the Earth through the exploitation of nature. Importantly, as Hicks notes, the socialists engineered a switch in its core “ethical standard from need to equality”—which explains why their climate crisis talk is always coupled with a war on economic inequality. This is manifested by Thunbergism and now with these scientists.

Related Reading:

The Anti-human Tyrade of an Ungrateful 16-Year-old

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

The 'Watermelon' Analogy is Real, and it is Dangerous

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels—Alex Epstein

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century—Ronald Bailey

Vaccine Mandates: What they Are, What They and Are Not, and Why Vaccines Should Not Be Mandated

The data is in: Vaccine mandates work, opines the New Jersey Star-Ledger Editorial Board (SLEB):

The numbers are in, and we hold this truth to be self-evident: COVID vaccine mandates work.

Or, if you prefer its prickly corollary: Where judgment and logic fail, employer mandates succeed, because the specter of job loss and financial hardship is apparently more persuasive than the threat of death.

This is the case in and around New Jersey, where data from health care and education sectors in our region is irrefutable: This tool works, and Gov. Murphy should use it to strengthen existing mandates and impose a passport system for public gatherings like the one used in New York City – because where persuasion fails, pressure works.

What “works” and what restrictions on our freedom are morally justified are two entirely different things. The statist stops at what works, measured by how many people comply. The statist isn’t concerned with the consequences to all other areas of citizens’ lives and rights. The Enlightened American starts with individual rights and considers all facts and weighs the long term consequences of diminished liberties the precedent sets before granting the state the power to mandate anything.

But next, we need to untangle the confusion about vaccine mandates embedded in this editorial. 

Mirriam-Webster defines mandate as an act “to officially require (something) : make (something) mandatory.” As Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine explains, there is a difference between a government order to get something and the “employer mandates” that the SLEB speaks of. An “employer mandate” is not a mandate at all. It’s a job requirement. As Mulshine points out, 

If the government ordered all citizens to get vaccinated, that would indeed be a mandate. That happened in 1905 when the city of Cambridge, Mass, ordered all residents to get vaccinated or face a $5 fine. A few went to court to block the law, but the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the city.

Whatever you think of that law, it clearly qualifies as a mandate.

It’s different with workers. If an airline tells its employees that they have to get vaccinated against COVID, as United Airlines recently did, that’s not a mandate. It’s just one of many job requirements.

 

And as Mulshine also points out, “if for some reason . . .  workers want to remain unvaccinated, that’s their right. But keeping their jobs isn’t.”

 

So, employers, whether private or government, have a valid right to require vaccines. But the Star-Ledger goes further. It urges the Governor to order all employers, public and private, to require vaccines via “a passport system” which would extend to all public gatherings. As SLEB editorial page editor Tom Moran reports elsewhere, the passport would apply to customers also and include all “restaurants and theaters and museums” regardless of the establishment's wishes. 

That would indeed be a mandate. (As of this writing, NJ Governor Phil Murphy is resisting the pressure to mandate vaccines, perhaps because of the pending gubernatorial election.)

Which leads us to the question of whether such a mandate justifies the freedom restrictions that results from such a violation of individual rights. 

My belief is no, it does not.

A vaccine protects the individual from contracting the disease, or if a breakthrough occurs, from a serious case of the illness. If the vaccinated is protected from the illness, he is by definition protected from the unvaccinated. So why mandate the vaccine? The unvaccinated are willingly taking the risk, but are not an inordinate threat to the vaccinated. 

The SLEB is wrong in its terminology. It is correct to support employers’ right to voluntarily require vaccines as a condition of employment. It is wrong to call on the state to force such a requirement on unwilling employers. That is an unjustified restriction of our liberty, and liberty considerations -- the protection of individual rights -- comes first in any country that considers itself a free society.

Related Reading:

COVID vaccinations: They’re not a mandate; they’re a choice by Paul Mulshine

NJ’s School/Vaccine Battle Need Not Pit Public Health Against Individual Rights

Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith

On Mandatory Vaccinations, Protect Everyone’s Right to Object, Not Just Religionists’ Rights

Vaccine Exemption Bill Violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments, Fairness

Related Viewing:

Vaccine False Alternatives: Bribes vs. Mandates, by Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate, New Ideal Live

As an FYI, here is the text of Ayn Rand's statement about mandatory vaccination and quarantines:

"Now, requiring inoculation against disease: should this be a job for the government? Most definitely not and there is a very simple answer for it. If it is medically proved that a certain inoculation is in fact practical and desirable, those who want it will take that inoculation. Now if some people do not see it that way—do not agree or don’t want to take it, only they will be in danger since all the other people will be inoculated. Those who do not go along, if they are wrong in this case, will merely catch the disease. They will not be a danger to anyone else and nobody has the right to force them to do anything for their own good against their own judgement. They will merely be ill then, but they could not infect others.

“The next question in regard to quarantine is somewhat different, because in the state of, sense of a quarantine, if someone has a contagious disease, against which there is no inoculation, then the government will have the right to require quarantine. What is the principle here? It’s to protect those people who are not ill, to protect the people who, to prevent the people who are ill from passing on their illness to others. Here you are dealing with a demonstrable physical damage. Remember that in all issues of protecting someone from physical damage, before a government can properly act, there has to be a scientific, objective demonstration of an actual physical danger. If it is demonstrated, then the government can act to protect those who are not yet ill from contacting the disease, in other words to quarantine the people who are ill is not an interference with their rights, it is merely preventing them from doing physical damage to others.”

This is from a Q&A session during her lecture “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” in 1963. (An edited transcript of this is found on pp. 12-13 of Ayn Rand Answers, edited by Robert Mayhew.)

Beware the Tactic of Political Activism Based on ‘Science’

I present the following two excerpts, courtesy of The Climate Discussion Nexus:

For God’s sake, do not platform climate denialists. We understand as well as anyone that opinion pages occasionally need to push the envelope with unpopular takes. But there is no longer any good faith argument against climate science—and if one accepts the science, one also accepts the imperative for rapid, forceful action. Op-eds that detract from the scientific consensus, or ridicule climate activism, don’t belong in a serious news outlet.

--Covering Climate Now

The question for CCN and all Climate Crisis-mongers is: Who are these “climate denialists” and what are they saying that the “climate activists” don’t want us to hear? 

There’s an assumption out there that if you “accept” the science of climate change, you are obliged to support drastic measures to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This is not true. The one does not follow from the other. Mainstream science and economics do not support much of the current climate policy agenda and certainly not the radical extremes demanded by activist groups.

--Ross McKitrick for The Financial Post

Tyrants have a history of using science to justify their totalitarian designs. The “science” of race was used to justify the enslavement of black Africans, and millions were unjustly enslaved, often brutally. Marxism was justified as “scientific socialism” and 100 million+ died. Nazism was justified by the “science” of eugenics, and tens of millions died. Today, “climate science” is being used to justify a totalitarian agenda, which if developed to its full logical conclusion will result in economic paralysis and collapse, an end to freedom and capitalism, and unlimited unprecedented genicide on a global scale. We should always be vigilant and skeptical against anyone who justifies a political agenda based on science

See below for a brief list of books by so-called “denialists,” which is nowhere near exhaustive.

Related Reading:

Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. Knappenberger

Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom by Patrick Moore 

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters by Steven E. Koonin 

False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg 

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All Hardcover by Michael Shellenberger 

The End of Doom Hardcover by Ronald Bailey 

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels Hardcover by Alex Epstein 

The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change by Roger Pielke Jr. 

‘Climate Denier’: The Leitmotif of the Climate Propagandist

It’s Time to Listen to the ‘Climate Denialists’

Think Globally, Shame Constantly: The Rise of Greta Thunberg Environmentalism--NICK GILLESPIE

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

QUORA: ‘Do you believe in free market capitalism?’

QUORA *: ‘Do you believe in free market capitalism?’

I posted this answer:

I do believe in free market, or laissez-faire, capitalism. My belief is not in the nature of a religious faith, but as a reasoned position drawn from the observable facts of human beings’ nature and life requirements. 

The basic attribute that separates man from other animals is reason. Reason is man’s basic means of survival. Reason is an attribute of the individual. I believe, therefore, that every individual must be free to live and associate with others based on his own judgement without coercive interference from others--including others in their capacity as government officials. Put another way, I believe that every individual possesses the inalienable individual rights to life, to liberty rights, including rights to property earned by work and free trade, and to the personal pursuit of one’s own values, goals, and happiness. Rights are principles that sanction the individual’s freedom of action, as well as the limits of those actions, in a social context; the limit being the same rights of others. 

The government—acting as the people’s agent, rather than ruler—ensures peaceful coexistence through laws designed for the sole purpose of securing everyone’s individual rights equally and at all times. To “secure these rights” means to protect against aggressive, or initiatory, force; i.e., to establish freedom from force by law. Since man’s survival and flourishing requires thoughtful long-range action on the individual level, his number one social requirement is to be free from the only action others can use to stop him--physical force. A government that is limited to banishing aggressive physical force from social relationships is the only type of government under which capitalism can exist.

As a matter of principle and political philosophy, capitalism is the only social system to secure voluntary consent to mutual advantage based on equality of individual rights as the only basis for dealing with others. This, I believe, makes free market capitalism the only moral social system. Therefore, based on my morals and the laws of nature, I believe in free market, or laissez-faire, capitalism.

Related Reading:

Why Capitalism is Selfish--and Why That’s Good

QUORA *: ‘Is Ayn Rand wrong about altruism?’

QUORA: Is Ayn Rand's 'Selfishness' 'the middle between altruism and selfism?'

Books to Aid in Understanding Rational Selfishness

Capitalism and the Moral High Ground by Craig Biddle

Why Capitalism Needs a Moral Sanction

The Capitalist Manifesto by Andrew Bernstein

* [Quora is a social media website founded by two former Facebook employees. According to Wikipedia:

Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[3]Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[4]

[You can also reply to other users’ answers.] 

NJ’s School/Vaccine Battle Need Not Pit Public Health Against Individual Rights

New Jersey has been trying to pass a law that eliminates the religious exemption from its school vaccine mandate. Potent anti-vaccine activism has thus far stifled the bill. In The vaccine bill is an adequate compromise. For now, the New Jersey Star-Ledger editorializes:

It’s been 115 years since the Supreme Court ruled that states can mandate vaccines to protect the public health, and 98 years since the court ruled that learning institutions could exclude unvaccinated students from attending schools in their districts.

Every challenge to both rulings has been swept aside, apparently due to a cosmic awakening to the wonders of indisputable medical science. Or perhaps it was just common sense: In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the US were children less than 5 years of age. Today, it’s barely 1 percent, because children who would have previously died from childhood infections live full lives now, thanks to vaccines and antibiotics.

So it is with some ambivalence that we hope both chambers pass the vaccine bill Monday [1/13/2020].

It isn’t the mandatory compliance bill that lawmakers had promised for nearly a decade, because the anti-vax forces brought their percussion instruments and windy cascade of First Amendment rhetoric to Trenton to blow open a loophole that may not benefit anyone at all.

The compromise bill “allows private schools or day care centers to accept unvaccinated children.” 

I posted the following comments:

I’m always suspicious when science is used to push a political agenda. Science is not an infallible omniscient authority. Science should be consulted when making law, but only in conjunction with the broader picture. For example, individual rights, the foundation of free societies, should always overlay the law. Rights are not mere “rhetoric.” Properly understood, individual rights are inviolable. They are crucial protectors against all forms of tyranny. With that perspective, some points:

1. Individual rights means equality of rights. For both 1st and 14th Amendment reasons, there should never be a strictly religious exemption from any law. If there be exemptions, it should extend to all conscientious objectors, religious or non-religious. 

2.            Schools public or private have the right to establish entry requirements, including vaccine requirements. Parents’ right not to vaccinate their kids does not mean the “right” to force a school to risk infecting other kids.

3.            But if kids are excluded from a school, the parents should not be forced to pay for that school. This is clear with respect to private schools. But the same should go for public schools. If a kid is excluded from a public school, the education tax dollars should follow the unvaccinated kid to whatever alternative the parents choose.

I side with the vaccine requirement. I believe science should always be consulted, and its clear to me that vaccine benefits far outweigh the risks, both regarding personal health and the health and rights of others. But individual rights should always be respected and protected as well. On this basis, there is a compromise that can protect both “public health” and individual rights; a vaccine mandate coupled with parental school choice.

Rights “properly understood” means every individual has the right to live by his/her own judgement so long as his actions don’t violate the same rights of others. Clearly, walking around with an airborne infectious disease crosses the line into other peoples’ rights.

On Monday, January 13, 2020, the bill failed to pass. It is now dead, as the current legislative session is over. The bill will have to be reintroduced in the next session and begin the approval process anew. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney vowed to get the bill passed eventually.

Related Reading:

Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith

On Mandatory Vaccinations, Protect Everyone’s Right to Object, Not Just Religionists’ Rights

Vaccine Exemption Bill Violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments, Fairness

America’s ‘Science Problem,’ America’s Ideology Problem

Arizona Governor's "Religious Freedom" Veto Was the Right Move

Two Views on Religious Exemptions from Anti-Discrimination Laws

Related Viewing:

The War on Vaccines: A Conversation with Dr. Amesh Adalja from ARI