Davos and the Holy Grail of Equity

“At what point will their good intentions lead to tyranny? Did we learn nothing from the pandemic, when government overreach led to economic, health, and educational disasters?”

Caroline Breashears January 25, 2023 @ American Institute for Economic Research 

 

Participants in the World Economic Forum (WEF) seem to have mistaken Davos for Camelot. After days of talking and revelry, they have sallied forth on their quest for the Holy Grail of global equity and carbon neutrality. Along the way, they have vowed to slay the dragons of disinformation. All this will be celebrated by approved minstrels. 

If that sounds like a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you’re partially right. Like Monty Python’s knights, they try to delude us as well as themselves. King Arthur mimes riding a horse while his servant bangs coconut shells; Al Gore jets to Switzerland while prosing about the dangers of climate change. 

More importantly, the attendees at Davos appeal to the misguided who believe they really do know the way toward global resilience, prosperity, and equity. Yet these self-appointed leaders are treading a path that is all too familiar: the road to serfdom. 

“Clear and Present Danger”

Among the dragons they are battling is free speech. The WEF panel “The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation” focused on a critical question: “How can the public, regulators, and social media companies better collaborate to tackle disinformation, as information pollution spreads at unprecedented speed and scale?” In this framing, “pollution” comprises toxic words as well as smoke. Perhaps one might even inhale a bad idea. 

The panel was chaired by Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN and now at Harvard University. It included Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton and Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, which published the 1619 Project despite errors flagged by its own fact-checkers. 

One would think Matt Taibbi a better panelist, given his work in exposing how the FBI pressured Twitter to spread disinformation. But the elite seem inspired by Monty Python’s script, where the knights’ minstrels who dared to criticize them (Sir Robin is no longer “brave” but “ran away”) are devoured during a blizzard. 

To be fair, Sulzberger expressed grave concerns over the state of the “information ecosystem” and the way that distrust in news sources leads society to fracture and shift away from pluralism, which endangers democracy. 

Terms like “fake news,” he opined, evoke periods of repression, such as Nazi Germany. Furthermore, society has accepted “how much the information ecosystem has been poisoned.” Fixing it “will require real sustained effort from the platforms, from political leaders, the business leaders, and from consumers themselves to reject that.” 

Yet linking President Trump to Nazis through one of his favorite phrases not only “poisons” the conversation but ironically reminds us of The New York Times‘s early support of Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s. It is hard to take seriously Sulzberger’s claim to address the toxic “ecosystem.” 

Nevertheless, like all the other knights at Davos, he has answers. The solutions are to educate young readers about trustworthy news sources and for platforms to “differentiate and elevate trustworthy sources of information consistently… Until they do, we have to assume that those environments are basically poisoned.” 

“The Road Ahead”

The Davos crowd believe they can make such judgments about what is trustworthy because they are the anointed (or “extraterrestrial,” if one is John Kerry). Falling prey to what F. A. Hayek termed “the fatal conceit,” they assume they can diagnose the world’s problems and plot a better path.

In his closing remarks, “The Road Ahead,” Børge Bende told panelists on the stage that he felt “we were very aligned.” Over the last five days, “progress has been made on scaling climate ambition, driving more equitable growth, and unlocking the benefits of frontier technologies.” Moreover, “by coming together like this, we can shape a more collaborative future.”  

Yet in mapping “the road ahead,” the elite assume powers not voted to them. Those invited to Davos might feel just as special as Arthur felt because the Lady of the Lake gave him Excalibur. But in our world people do not take kindly to self-appointed leaders any more than they do in a Monty Python film. As a peasant tells King Arthur, “You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”

Moreover, the results of such a “collaborative future” are questionable. Having established his roundtable of knights, Arthur and his crew ride forth in search of the Holy Grail. At one castle, they encounter a man who defies their questions: “Mind your own business.” Outrageous idea!

Assaulted by flying cows, Arthur’s knights retreat, but they return with a Trojan Rabbit, which is taken into the castle. They feel their cause is just, but they are unable to gain entrance to the castle due to bad planning: they forgot to place soldiers in the rabbit.

It’s hilarious on film, but not so funny when we think of the participants of the World Economic Forum urging collaboration between independent businesses and governments. How many failures in planning will occur? At what point will their good intentions lead to tyranny? Did we learn nothing from the pandemic, when government overreach led to economic, health, and educational disasters?

Destination Serfdom

These are the kinds of problems that F.A. Hayek addresses in The Road to Serfdom, which traces how the good intentions of central planners lead to disaster. When planners “dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results” and replace them with “collective and ‘conscious’ direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals,” they run into problems.

First, Hayek explains, planners trying to make judgments based on “fairness” discover that “nothing short of a complete system of values in which every want of every person or group has a definite place is necessary to provide an answer.” Planners must have powers “to make and enforce decisions in circumstances which cannot be foreseen and on principles which cannot be stated in generic form.” In fact, they must have practically unlimited powers: “a directed economy must be run on more or less dictatorial lines.” 

The result, Hayek observes, is moral corruption: “just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictators would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure.” And such moral corruption, along with the corruption of language, seeps into every level of society. 

But the Davos elite are different, supporters say. They’re trying to bring prosperity to everyone and save the planet. 

If that were true, why would participants include the leader of a country who is holding an ethnic minority, the Uyghurs, in what is essentially a concentration camp? Would “equity” mean similar concentration camps everywhere? Would China provide the plans?

Davos is, like the Camelot in Monty Python’s film, an ideal projected by people unwilling to acknowledge the unintended consequences of their knight-errantry. At the end of Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, the knights are hauled away from their movie set by the police.  In the process of playing knight, one actor accidentally slit the throat of a scholar reporting on the legend of King Arthur. How much more damage might the elite from Davos do? 

Rather than looking to the World Economic Forum for solutions, we should seek the wisdom of Hayek and others who founded the Mont Pelerin Society. As they knew, the best path forward is not the quest for a holy grail of equity, but the open road of freedom. Let’s take it. 

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Caroline Breashears

Dr. Caroline Breashears is a Professor of English at St. Lawrence University. Caroline received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and specializes in eighteenth-century British literature. Recent publications include Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and articles in Aphra Behn Online and the International Journal of Pluralistic and Economics Education.

She was recently an Adam Smith Scholar at Liberty Fund, and her current research focuses on Adam Smith and literature. She teaches courses on fairy tales, eighteenth-century British Literature, and Jane Austen. Get notified of new articles from Caroline Breashears and AIER.

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It’s a cult: The WEF are the “select few” touched as saviors of the world to master the future

By Joanne Nova |January 20th, 2023 Economy 276 Comments @ CFACT

 

What would it look like if a doomsday cult had a billion dollars to spend on a skiing holiday?

Maybe like the World Economic Forum: Here are people who think they are the select few, saviours of the world. They’re touched, they say by something (like an extra terrestrial maybe?) It’s an apocalypse, you know, like 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs says Al Gore. They’re boiling the oceans.

They might be powerful and rich, but the good news is they are utterly absurd.

The modern prophets are here to rescue you Especially US climate envoy John Kerry: “When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we – a select group of human beings, because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives – are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” Kerry told a WEF panel on Tuesday. “It’s so… almost extra-terrestrial to think about, saving the planet. If you say that to most people most people, they think you’re just a crazy tree hugging and lefty liberal, you know, do-gooder, whatever,” he added.

From somewhere above Earth in an omnipotent kind of place, here’s someone who thinks he’s God:

Editor's Note:  There's a video here I can't reproduce, so go to the original post to view it.  This shows just how elitist, arrogant, dumb, and truthfully, embarrassing, this man really is.  The nation escaped a bullet by not making John Kerry President.  However, I can't reproduce it, so go to the original post to view it. RK

As Jordan Peterson says:

“Who are you gong to sacrifice to save the planet @JohnKerry  — and do you think and how will you ensure that they have any say in the matter?“

Thanks to Umang Sharma at Firstpost - Meanwhile Al Gore tells us 600,000 atomic bombs are boiling the oceans

It’s the hellfire and brimstone formula, with hyperbole, sensationalism and big-scary-numbers.  Chris Donaldson, BizPac Review, claimed the overstuffed prophet of climate doom delivered a deranged rant, and all Donaldson had to do was quote him:

“We’re still putting 162 million tons into it every single day, and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the Earth,” Gore said.

“That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach 1 billion in this century,” he ranted.

“Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees. What about a billion? We would lose our capacity for self governance on this world.

Have you seen a bomb going off? Me neither.

 Editor's Note:  There's a video here I can't reproduce, with the High Priest of the Warming Globe ranting out logical fallacies, out right lies and hyperbole.  It clearly shows just how absolutely certifiable Al Gore is.   The nation also escaped a bullet by not making this elitist nut President.  However, I can't reproduce it, so go to the original post to view it. RK

Give us your money - It all comes back to one thing.

Or that other thing at €2,300 a night: Prostitutes gather in Davos for annual meeting of global elite – where demand for sexual services rockets during economic summit You’d think planetary heroes would be more popular with the girls?  My favourite description of the WEF is that they are globalization’s “Mafiocracy” of bankers, industrialists, oligarchs, technocrats and politicians.

This article originally appeared at JoNova

Author

• Joanne Nova

  A prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology. She has given keynotes about the medical revolution, gene technology and aging at conferences. She hosted a children’s TV series on Channel Nine, and has done over 200 radio interviews, many on the Australian ABC. She was formerly an associate lecturer in Science Communication at the ANU. She’s author of The Skeptics Handbook which has been translated into 15 languages. Each day 5,000 people read joannenova.com.au

If You're Reading This Message, You're Ready to Resist Tyranny

June 9, 2022 By J.B. Shurk

Great Reset. Green New Deal. Build Back Better. New World Order. Bilderberg. Davos. Council on Foreign Relations. World Health Organization. The list of secretive global societies and their mission directives for humanity are daunting. Many people who would prefer to be left alone to live their lives free from government interference have an understandable sense of impending doom.

The COVID Crisis showed Westerners how quickly (and easily) their governments would impose unilateral mandates against their will, destroying any illusion that self-congratulating "democracies" have any more respect for individual rights or bodily autonomy than the authoritarian regimes the West routinely condemns.  If an unsuspecting citizen once took "freedom" for granted, forced experimental injections, arbitrary and capricious closures of private businesses, mass surveillance, vaccine passports, and government-sponsored censorship of dissenting medical opinion have demonstrated how rapidly undefended freedom slips away.  Westerners were not prepared to take a vigorous stand for freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of conscience, or personal privacy.  Their silence was interpreted as acquiescence to government control and rewarded with only more intrusive and authoritarian measures............To Read More... 

 

 

Deceptive rhetoric at Davos could bring disaster

There is nothing ‘cohesive’ or ‘sustainable’ about ‘solutions’ demanded by WEF ‘stakeholders’

Paul Driessen

The World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland is billed as the globe’s most prestigious annual gathering of movers and shakers. Its mission is to “improve the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”

This year’s theme was “Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World.” Unfortunately, the lofty rhetoric belies the misleading, potentially disastrous realities of agendas supported by many participants.

A primary basis for this year’s theme is the repeated assertion that the world faces a climate cataclysm. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen thus wants to tax carbon-based energy imports into the EU and end humanity’s practice of “taking resources from the environment and generating waste and pollution in the process.” She (and others) insist that “green energy” would do no such thing.

Climate crisis claims in turn are based on computer models that are only as good as the assumptions built into them – and on attempts to blame temperature changes, extreme weather events and future crises on fossil fuel emissions, because the assumptions and models say it’s a cause-effect relationship.

The most cited model is (naturally) the most extreme: RCP8.5, which predicts temperatures way above what we are actually measuring and all manner of future calamities. But it is based on the assumptions that: methane and plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide (a tiny 0.0402% of Earth’s atmosphere) are vastly more important than the sun in driving climate change; our planet will have 12 billion people by 2100; there will be no energy innovations over the next 80 years; and therefore coal use will increase tenfold by the end of the century. On that we’re supposed to base restrictive energy policies, and Davos meeting themes.

Who are the stakeholders that Davos attendees will consult? Greta Thunberg was invited, to present her patented tirade that fossil fuels are destroying her future. But no climate realists (alarmism skeptics) were given the podium, nor were representatives of EU or US factory workers or the world’s poorest citizens.

The good news is that several bankers made assurances that they were not going to stop lending funds to fossil fuel companies or “major polluters.” (Will that latter category include the mining companies that will have to provide voluminous raw materials for a US and global “green new deal,” as discussed below?) The bad news is that Davos bankers and politicians allow themselves to be pressured constantly primarily by far-left “stakeholders,” who hold the stakes that they and global ruling elites want to drive through the hearts of developed nation living standards and poor country aspirations for better lives.

Indeed, contrary to its assurances at Davos, despite consultation with indigenous peoples supposedly being a core company business principle, and without consulting with Alaska Native stakeholders who want to drill carefully and ecologically for oil and gas on their own lands, to improve their people’s living standards, Goldman Sachs has decided it will no longer fund such development in the Arctic.

With “mainstream” outlets and social media increasingly controlling news and opinion, and siding with climate alarmists and anti-fossil activists, that pressure will continue to build – to our great detriment.

Will Davos themes, agendas and policies usher in a more “cohesive” world? The opposite is infinitely more likely. Deprive people of abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel (and nuclear) energy, as eco-activists seek to do – and you deprive them of jobs, living standards, food, health and life. People die in droves (itself a goal of more rabid environmentalists panicked about an over-populated world). Implement “green new deal” policies, and the results will be anything but cohesion. The policies will bring rage, protests, violence and anarchy – as France and Chile vividly demonstrated over the past two years.

Turn African, Asian and Latin American countries into vassal states, with enormous mines serving “ecologically responsible, climate-focused” nations that don’t tolerate mining within their own borders – and any cohesion will rapidly disappear. Tell American, European and other families they must accept massive wind and solar installations in their backyards or off their coasts, and the results will be similar.

A “sustainable” world? Yes, fossil fuels are ultimately finite resources – hundreds of years from now, after we run out of huge coal deposits, oil and gas from fracking, methane hydrates and other supplies, assuming policy makers don’t lock them up and “keep them in the ground.” But long before that happens, human innovation will create far better alternatives than wind turbines, if we let creativity flourish.

Meanwhile, just remember: Wind and sunshine are sustainable. But lands and raw materials required for the technologies to harness this intermittent, widely disbursed energy absolutely are not.

Sustainability is a useful concept for assessing hidden costs, risks and fiduciary responsibilities – such as those associated with climate change, as we are constantly reminded. But we must apply those same considerations to wind, solar, battery and biofuel operations; and to impacts on habitats and wildlife, air and water quality, human health and wellbeing in green new deal mining and manufacturing regions, and human welfare in an energy-deprived world of increasing hunger, death, anger, riots and chaos.

As my new Heartland Institute reports and previous articles note, fossil fuels and nuclear currently provide over 8 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity and electricity-equivalent power annually, to meet America’s industrial, commercial, residential and transportation needs. Using solar to generate all that power – and charge batteries for a week of sunless days – would require 19 billion state-of-the-art sun-tracking photovoltaic panels, completely blanketing an area equal to all of New York and Vermont.

But that assumes the panels are all located where the sun shines with summertime Arizona intensity 24/7/365, which will never happen. So we’d probably have to double (perhaps even triple) the number of panels and affected acreage. The impacts on habitats and wildlife would be significant.

Using 1.8-MW wind turbines instead of solar panels would require more than 4 million turbines on farm, wildlife habitat and scenic lands equal to Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon and part of Washington State combined. But the more we install, the more we have to put turbines in poor wind locations. We’d probably have to double (or even triple) the number of turbines, and acreage impacted. Their rapidly turning blades (200 mph at their tips) would slaughter millions of eagles, falcons, other birds and bats.

Going offshore instead would require hundreds of thousands of 650-foot-tall 10-MW turbines. Their impact on birds, bats, marine mammals, vistas, and ship and aircraft navigation would be intolerable.

Each 1.8-MW turbine requires some 1,200 tons of steel, copper, aluminum, rare earth elements, zinc, molybdenum, petroleum-based composites, reinforced concrete and other materials. Each ton of materials requires removing thousands of tons of rock and ore – and processing ores with fossil fuels. In fact, wind turbines need some 200 times more material per megawatt than a modern combined-cycle gas turbine!

Storing a week of electricity for windless and sunless periods would require some 2 billion half-ton Tesla car lithium-cobalt battery packs – and more materials; more mining. Connecting wind, solar and battery facilities to distant cities would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines, and more mining.

This doesn’t include materials to replace existing cars, trucks, heating systems and other technologies.

And that’s just for the United States. Imagine how many turbines, panels, batteries, transmission lines, raw materials, mines, processing plants and factories we’d need for a global transformation!

But green new deal advocates detest mining, at least by western mining companies in western countries. So it’s mostly done in faraway places that have virtually no environmental, health, safety, wage or child labor rules. Places like Inner Mongolia, where rare earth operations have fouled the air, created a huge toxic lake, and poisoned thousands of people. And Africa’s Congo, where 40,000 children labor in mines just for the cobalt needed in today’s cell phones, laptops and electric cars; not for any green new deal.

This eco-imperialism and false sustainability must end. As to all those self-styled stakeholders, You first. Lead by example. Slash your energy use and living standards. Then you can (nicely) ask the rest of us to do likewise. That means you, Greta, Leo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Emma Thompson and all the other climate scolds. (But of course they won’t. So why should we? And why should the world’s poor?)

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on environment, climate and human rights issues.

 

Scientists set up camp in Davos to warn about global warming and get buried by snow

January 24, 2018 by Michael Bastasch, 0 Comments

Scientists have once again set up a mock Arctic base camp to educate world leaders about man-made global warming at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Climate scientists hope their mock camp illustrates how global warming could impact the Arctic, but the “Gore effect” may make it harder to get the message across. Davos has seen frigid temperatures along with about six feet of snow in the last six days.........To Read More....

'Morning in America'... Davos 2018

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

As I watched President Trump speak at Davos, I couldn't help but remember the Reagan 1984 TV ads called "Morning in America." Those ads were a 60-second promotion for the U.S., a signal that things were good again. All that VP Walter Mondale could do was work very hard to make sure that Minnesota didn't vote for President Reagan, too.

President Trump was a salesman for the U.S. in Davos: "The world is witnessing the resurgence of a strong and prosperous America," Trump said. "I'm here to deliver a simple message. There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest and to grow in the United States. America is open for business and we are competitive once again. The American economy is by far the largest in the world and we've just enacted the most significant tax cuts and reform in American history. We've massively cut taxes for the middle class, and small businesses to let working families keep more of their hard earned money."……….To Read More….