Where Does Carbon Dioxide Really Come From?

PLIMER:

“The volcanic eruption in Iceland since its first spewing of volcanic ash has, in just FOUR DAYS, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet – all of you.” (2010)

Of course, you know about this evil carbon dioxide that we are trying to suppress – it’s that vital chemical compound that every plant requires to live and grow and to synthesize into oxygen for us humans and all animal life. I know….it’s very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kids “The Green Revolution” science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, vacationing at home instead of abroad, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your 50 cent light bulbs with $10.00 light bulbs…..well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just four days.

The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere in just four days – yes, FOUR DAYS – by that volcano in Iceland totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud at any one time – EVERY DAY.

I don’t really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it
spewed more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth.

Yes, Mt. Pinatubo was active for over one year – think about it. Of course, I shouldn’t spoil this ‘touchy-feely tree-hugging moment and mention the effect of solar and cosmic activity and the well-recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle, which keeps happening despite our completely insignificant efforts to affect climate change. And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud, but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western USA and Australia this year alone will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two to three years. And it happens every year.

Just remember that your government just tried to impose a whopping carbon tax on you, on the basis of the bogus ‘human-caused’ climate-change scenario. Hey, isn’t it interesting how they don’t mention ‘Global Warming’ anymore, but just ‘Climate Change’ – know why? It’s because the planet has COOLED by 0.7 degrees in the past century, and these global warming bull artists got caught with their pants down. And, just keep in mind that you might yet have an Emissions Trading Scheme – that whopping new tax – imposed on you that will achieve absolutely nothing except make you poorer. It won’t stop any volcanoes from erupting, that’s for sure.

But, hey, relax……give the world a hug and have a nice day!”

These funds are unwinding the Global balance and it is indeed time that we all cotton on.  If we don’t want our unborn to be born into a world that is sold to Privatisation. Modern day Slavery on a global scale 

Operating through Hedge Funds, Derivatives, Leverage buyout firms, real estate purchase, Speculators in the commodity futures market, Foreign currency, and god only knows in what else.

These Funds are impairing the spread of democracy as they are creating “Rentier States” where governments will not need their citizens to raise revenue.

They are offer protection to Authoritarian Regimes from the vicissitudes of the free market.

They will end up as weapons. Financial muscle in global power struggles.

They will change the equation of World cooperation, on trade , climate change and will eventually cause what I call a “Financial balance of terror or a Nuclear Financial threat.

If you don’t believe me.

Here a few items that a few SWFS own in Britain.

A consortium of Canadian SWFs currently own the Railway Link between London and the Channel Tunnel.

Blue Water Shopping Center owned by Singapore SWFs.

Kelda Group ( water and wast management) owned by Singapore SWFs.

Qatar SWFs owns:

20% of the London stock exchange.

20% of Camden Market.

6.67% of Barclay’s Bank

26% of Sainsburys.

The Olympic Village Buildings.

The Shard.

Chelsea Barracks and NI Hyde Park flats.

Harrods.

Swathes of Canary Wharf.

95% of all liquefied Gas supplied to Britain.

Heathrow Airport 10% China Investment Corp SWFSs

The recent Royal Mail sale.

On the list of priority investors were hedge funds and overseas sovereign wealth funds.  Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Black Rock, Capital Research, Fidelity Worldwide, GIC, Henderson, JPMorgan, Kuwait Investment Office, Lansdowne Partners, Och Ziff, Schroders, Soros, Standard Life, Third Point and Threadneedle.

The proposed HS2 which is estimated to cost 800 million will be financed by SWFs.

There are now more people in the world than the world’s total population in 1950 living on less than a $1-$5 a day. 24 countries own 64% of the world wealth with only 15% of the world’s population.

If nothing is done to curb their growing power we can all be classified as FOOLS

Have a look at my Flipboard  Magazine ” Silent witness to Sovereign Wealth Funds. 

 

 

 

As feudalism was collapsing, a new way of extracting the surplus wealth from the direct producers had to be found. The invention of capitalism was the answer to this need. 

We are now living in a very unequal world and will continue doing so.

Here are a few thought provoking Quotes.

“Capitalism is that commercial system in which supply immediately answers to demand, and in which everybody seems to be thoroughly dissatisfied and unable to get anything he wants.” – How to Write a Detective Story, The Spice of Life.

“Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues.” – The Thing.

“Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.” – Reflections on a Rotten Apple, The Well and the Shallows, 1935.

“The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.” – Speech to Anglo-Catholic Congress 6-29-20.

“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” It was a clever phrase when William Gibson coined it, but now it is well past its expiry date: it has become a lazy way to brush aside questioning voices. (85)

1. The Internet makes communication cheaper, but it wrong to say it “democratizes the control of information”. (121)
2. Facebook does not “want to strengthen the social ties that allow humans round the planet to connect, organize, converse, and share”

No hours contracts.  A form of modern day slavery.

 

 

There has never been such a high number of poor. By poor I dont just mean those living on $1-$5 a day I mean those deprived of opportunity in the World.

 

 

My last blog ( The language of poverty is changing) stated:

“That Inequality is full of blame, while poverty is full of reality.”

True or False.

To answer, let me take you on a journey into what the word poverty describe,s in our world of modern day Poverty.

But first let us attempt to agree on what we mean by poverty. Can it be easily defined?

What does the World Bank say?
Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom.

The European Union’s working definition of poverty is:
Persons, families and groups of persons whose resources (material, cultural and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the Member State to which they belong.

There is no single, universally accepted standard definition of poverty. Modern definitions of poverty have moved away from conceptions based on a lack of physical necessities towards a more social and relative understanding of Inequality.

This is now the most commonly used definition of poverty in the industrialised world.

It recognises that poverty is not just about income but also about the effective exclusion of people living in poverty from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities.

And the United Nations, in a statement in June 1998 said:
Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and cloth a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living on marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation.

Where does this get us? Trawl the web and you will find many other attempts to define poverty – some even distinguishing between Absolute and Relative poverty.

Is poverty man made?

Poverty is an unnatural state. Man has dominion over all the animals and plants and yet he is the only animal to be afflicted by poverty. When did you last see a warren of rabbits begging for work? Or blackbirds begging for bread?

So it would seem that poverty must be an unnatural condition for which man has only himself to blame.

The entry in Wikipedia suggests that poverty is a personal failing:

When it comes to poverty in the United States, there are two main lines of thought. The most common line of thought within the U.S. is that a person is poor because of personal traits. These traits in turn have caused the person to fail. Supposed traits range from personality characteristics, such as laziness, to educational levels. Despite this range, it is always viewed as the individual’s personal failure not to climb out of poverty.

So there you have it. If you live in poverty it is your own fault.

However, ‘Poverty’ writes Peter Townsend, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at Bristol University, a man who has devoted most of his life to making people aware of poverty and its causes, says:

” Poverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply-rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term. Poverty is caused by private monopoly, landlordism, employerism, ownership.”

Private monopoly? Landlordism? Whatever does he mean?

What experts say about the cause of poverty?

The ‘Dollar a day’ organisations says:

There is no single cause of poverty. Poverty is too complex an issue to be the result of just one problem. There are, however, many interrelated factors that contribute to poverty in developing nations.

Lilian Brandt, writing in the Political Science Quarterly, 23 (1908), suggested:

Around the world, the causes of poverty are similar. Lack of finances, health care and education are common causes of poverty. Still, the causes of poverty aren’t just about going without materials. Of all the causes of poverty, the most devastating is the lack of hope — a feeling that “I don’t matter.” Compassion International

Child Poverty Action Group:
The main cause of poverty is inadequate income, arising cfrom worklessness, low wages and the low level of benefits.

Ask yourself:

Why is income inadequate? What is the reason for unemployment? Why should man, with all his creative powers and manual strength be reliant on benefits? There has to be another factor. There has to be a fundament cause.

An organisation called Smallstock in development comes close:

Poverty is diverse and comes in many forms. However, there are many common factors, and these mostly tend to be related to limited access to land, assets, and services.

One more quotation, from Fight Poverty, will serve to illustrate the confusion of thought:

Poverty has many causes, some of them very basic.

Some experts suggest, for instance, that the world has too many people, too few jobs, and not enough food. But such basic causes are quite intractable and not easily eradicated. In most cases, the causes and effects of poverty interact, so that what makes people poor also creates conditions that keep them poor. Primary factors that may lead to poverty include overpopulation, the unequal distribution of resources in the world economy, inability to meet high standards of living and costs of living, inadequate education and employment opportunities, environmental degradation, certain economic and demographic trends, and welfare incentives.

Did they say ‘primary factors’? They did but they didn’t. The ‘primary’ factors they suggest are in fact all secondary factors. What are ‘primary factors?’

Economics is a science and definitions have to be precise in order to distinguish between cause and effect. The effects of poverty are myriad. But poverty has a single cause.

Poverty is caused by a lack of production of basic necessities.

The primary factors of production are land and labour. Labour applied to land produces wages and wealth. David Ricardo postulated in 1817:
Where land is free (unenclosed) wages depend on the margin of production, or upon the produce that labour can obtain at the highest point of natural productiveness open to it without the payment of rent. Where land is all enclosed the level of wages are reduced to the least a man will accept.

So immediately we have a focus on land and the level of wages – so often quoted in the statements above.

Adam Smith writes from (true life) to reinforce the suggestion that wages are not limited where land is freely available:

In treating of the Causes of the Prosperity of New Colonies (Wealth of Nations, book 4, chapter 7), he says: “Every colonist gets more land than he can possibly cultivate. He has no rent, and scarce any taxes to pay…. He is eager, therefore, to collect labourers from all quarters, and to reward them with most liberal wages. But those liberal wages, joined to the plenty and cheapness of land, soon make those labourers leave him in order to become landlords themselves, and to reward, with equal liberality, other labourers, who soon leave them for the same reason that they left their first master.

Now let us try to examine the problem of poverty and why all the money and charity in the world have not provided a long-term solution.

There will always be people who are poorer than others but there should be no paupers. Poverty is an unnatural state.

The world is endowed with untold resources. Man has unlimited powers of initiative and ingenuity. Why are millions of human beings unable to provide adequately for themselves and forced to live in degrading poverty? Dependent on ‘benefits’ whether they come from their own government or international charity.

Humanity acknowledges that to harness the labour of others in slavery is wicked. But to claim land as private property is considered a natural right. Until we can see that land is a free gift of nature and is the inheritance of all people we will continue to endure all the social evils we attribute to poverty throughout the world.

The root cause of poverty for me lies in private ownership of the natural resource essential to life.

Private property in land has been long established. In giving all men equal rights of access to land it is not necessary to confiscate land, undo titles or nationalise land. It is simply a matter of collecting the land value rental thereby returning to the community the value created by the community. This can be achieved through Land Value Taxation.

The real tragic truth is that the accumulating of capital by the rich is the real cause of Poverty.

This accumulating is causing society to become too unequal. With the distribution of wealth remaining at the top of society causing inequality of opportunity.

According to the Inter- Nation Labor Organisation (ILO) there are 215 million five to 17 year olds trapped in child labor to day. By 2020 there will still be 170-190 million.

Thomas Piketty in his new book suggest a global wealth tax which in my view is impossible to ACHIVE.

It is also impossible to stop the poverty of Inherence capital.

The only way to spread wealth is to place a world wide Aid tax or Commission on all stock exchange transactions.