Professors Recommend WWII-Style Rationing To Combat Climate Change
We’ve seen some nutty ideas to combat climate change. But a proposal from a couple of nutty professors may take the cake.
Researchers at the University of Leeds in Great Britain propose bringing back WWII-style rationing to combat it. They released a paper that calls on governments to restrict and ration items such as meat, fuel, and clothing in order to save the planet or such nonsense.
From Fox News:
Researchers at the University of Leeds, a top British institution, wrote in the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment that rationing has been wrongfully “neglected” as a policy option for mitigating climate change, arguing such an approach would be more effective than the “slow and inequitable” results from tax hikes to promote a green agenda.
“We argue that rationing could help states reduce emissions rapidly and fairly,” the academic paper states. “Our arguments in this paper draw on economic analysis and historical research into rationing in the UK during (and after) the two world wars, highlighting success stories and correcting misconceptions.”
The authors added that the “rejection of markets, and a commitment to fair shares, is a key part of the value of rationing, and precisely what made rationing attractive to the public in the 1940s.”
For those of you playing at home, rationing is a form of socialism used in wartime or in extreme emergencies to make sure everyone receives a fair share of a substance. What these academics are proposing is a permanent Soviet-style command economy to distribute resources as these people see fit.
What exactly would these people propose to be rationed?
Specifically, governments could ration various goods, such as flights, petrol, household energy, and even meat or clothing, according to the paper, which also suggests limiting “the number of long-haul flights an individual could make in a year” or “the amount of petrol one can buy in a month.”
Another way to roll out the rationing scheme could be “carbon cards” to track one’s “carbon allowance.”
Such an idea is not new. Last year, the president of Alibaba Group, a major Chinese tech company, boasted at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting about the development of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” that will be able to track where people travel, how they travel, and what they eat.
In addition to a Soviet-style scheme to distribute resources, these people want to create an even more massive surveillance state to control what someone does. Honestly, I’ll take a much hotter planet than live in this hell.
The professors who wrote this paper say that most people wouldn’t mind rationing. After all, the WWII-era rationing programs are not viewed unfavorably by those who were around back then. But there is a difference between the quasi-permanent Soviet-style state these guys are proposing and a program instituted during a time of war.
But rationing only works when there is a scarcity of a resource. But these professors have a solution for that:
They suggest therefore regulating fossil fuels through limitations on activities such as oil exploration, long-haul flights, and intensive farming to create a scarcity in products that harm the planet. Then rationing could be introduced gradually to manage the subsequent scarcity.
These people want to make you poorer and less powerful in order to achieve their dreams of the Soviet Union 2.0. It is not surprising that many environmentalists propose solutions that sound more like communism.
If these people were really serious about lowering carbon emissions, we would hear a lot more about expanding nuclear power, planting more trees, and investing more in carbon capture technology. But those ideas don’t increase state control over society so we don’t hear much about that. Instead, we hear about stupidity like bringing back permanent WWII-style rationing.
