It's here: let's implement WWII-style rationing to fight climate change

(AP Photo/U.S. Navy, File)

You knew it was coming. I knew it was coming. Everybody should have known it was coming. But of course, the powers-that-be are doing their best to turn up the temperature so slowly that the frogs don’t jump out of the water before the water is boiling.

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Rationing. Scientists in the UK are now proposing rationing of food, gas, and other necessities of life in order to save Mother Earth.

Climate change could be tackled with the help of a World War II-style rationing of petrol, meat and the energy people use in their homes, UK scientists say.

They claim that this would help countries to slash their greenhouse gas emissions ‘rapidly and fairly’.

Researchers from the University of Leeds also said that governments could restrict the number of long-haul flights people make in a year or ‘limit the amount of petrol one can buy in a month’.

The beauty of the rationing system over others designed to save the planet is that two religiously-held ideals of the Left are combined into one perfect solution. Both the climate change and equity gods get their pound of human flesh. What could be better? Slip in a 15-minute-city or two and you have the urban planning gods satisfied as well. Package it, sell it, and voila, you have your communist dystopia in a nicely wrapped package.

They said that previous schemes put forward as a way to fight global warming – such as carbon taxes or carbon trading schemes – would not work because they favoured the wealthy, who would effectively be able to buy the right to pollute.

The experts also made a comparison with the need to limit certain goods as they grew scarce in the 1940s, adding that trying to achieve this by raising taxes was rejected at the time because ‘the impact of tax rises would be slow and inequitable’.

But rationing in Britain during the war was widely accepted, the authors wrote in their paper.

‘As long as there was scarcity, rationing was accepted, even welcomed or demanded,’ they said.

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In much the same way as during World War Two, the researchers argue that carbon rationing would allow people to receive an equal portion of resources based on their needs, therefore sharing out the effort to protect the planet.

Lead author Dr Nathan Wood, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Utrecht University’s Fair Energy Consortium, said: ‘The concept of rationing could help, not only in the mitigation of climate change, but also in reference to a variety of other social and political issues – such as the current energy crisis.’

The researchers add: ‘Rationing is often seen as unattractive, and therefore not a viable option for policy-makers.

‘It is important to highlight the fact that this was not the case for many of those who had experienced rationing.

You will own nothing and like it.

Or else.

It’s impossible to read the musings of modern Leftists without concluding that scarcity, even suffering, are considered positive goods worthy of embracing for their own sake.

Which is actually really weird. That certainly wasn’t Marx’ take to begin with. Marx was actually a big fan of industrialization, and his theory was that modern industrial societies could produce more than enough for everybody, that labor would become less onerous, and that the only thing left between humanity and an abundant utopia was a new relationship between capital and labor.

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It was an idiotic idea, but not anti-human.

The modern Left is and has been anti-human for over a century, combining the tendency of the early Left to embrace violence (the French Revolution forward) with the love of sacrifice that the new god of communism adopted in the Soviet Union. Add a dash of modern environmentalism and you get the modern Left, complete with rationing and Antifa.

The Left combined all these elements in the 1970s, complete with Leftist terrorism, population control, limits to growth, and the like. It didn’t end well for them politically, ushering in Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, and a reinvigoration of capitalist animal spirits. Great Britain in particular benefited from the rejection of Leftism, emerging from the utterly miserable 70s into a livable country again.

The problem with rationing energy, meat and petrol, the researchers point out, is that people might not be as willing to accept it as they would if resources were scarce, because they know there is an ‘abundance of resources available’.

To tackle this, the researchers said, governments could regulate the biggest polluters, such as oil, gas and petrol, long-haul flights and intensive farming, which would therefore create a scarcity in products that harm the planet. 

They added that rationing could then be introduced gradually to manage the resulting scarcity. 

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Perhaps the rapidity with which the transformation of society has taken place will shock people into sanity again. Certainly, no attempt to explicitly ration food and energy will be blithely accepted here, outside the Bluest of the Blue states which are headed in that direction.

But perhaps not. They have been boiling the frog for much longer now, and the younger generation is all on board this particular ideological train. The 1970s are a historical example that gives hope, but 1940s Britain and 1920s Russia are less so.

In any case, the id of the Left is becoming fully exposed, and it’s not pretty.

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John Stossel 8:30 AM | October 12, 2024
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