Be Terrified (tackling) Global Climate Disaster will Destroy the NHS

“MPs are voting today to commit to reducing Britain's CO2 emissions to 'net zero'. The cost is likely to be more than £1 trillion. Ministers say an impact assessment is not required.”

So, says spam Facebook posts from dodgy think tanks spamming my social media feeds today. Their slickly produced videos have pictures of nurses and doctors with an ominous title spelling out how many doctors and nurse £1 Trillion would pay for.

View more of the 'Global Warming Policy Forum's' drivel here: https://www.facebook.com/pg/theGWPF/videos/

They are attempting to frighten people into being terrified of confronting a global climate catastrophe—and judging by the comments, it is working. Yet such futile trade-offs and false dichotomies lie at the heart of how we approach all societal problems, whether saving wildlife, supporting those with physical and mental health difficulties, or educating our children.

It is, fundamentally, utter nonsense. Unfortunately, however, most people fail to recognise the misleading framing pushed both by those who actively manipulate the discourse in the name of saving us from catastrophe, and by those determined to bury their heads in the sand and deny the looming disaster. The only winners are those who ensure this false narrative persists on both sides of the argument, exploiting public outrage to shape Government policy for their own advantage.

Whether it is companies or banks seeking to own ‘carbon credits’—positioning themselves as the new land barons with a tradable right to pollute—or landowners and natural resource holders looking to exploit nature’s bounty for personal wealth, both are gaming the system for their own benefit. They hoodwink the public into accepting their avarice by harnessing fear and outrage.

The false dilemmas and futile trade-offs presented here are profoundly disingenuous. Allow me to explain.

Genuinely tackling global warming would cause no real problems; in fact, we could increase wealth and job opportunities for most people simply by shifting taxes from earned incomes to carbon and land value taxes. Yet those who profit from economic rents derived from land and natural resources deliberately obscure this solution. Such a tax shift would create efficiencies in production, using the free market to reduce both carbon output and land use in goods and services. Lower land use would allow carbon to be reabsorbed into soils and ecosystems, rewilding landscapes for wildlife. This common sense is buried, however, by the foolish and self-serving policies of a corrupt system—one wedded to monopoly capitalism rather than true free-market principles that properly account for monopolies and externalities.

This is compounded by widespread public misunderstanding of the most effective policies to tackle climate breakdown. Policies often promoted by politicians and groups invested in preserving our monopolistic economic system play on the fears of those terrified by global warming—declaring, “if it costs a trillion, so be it.” Yet without an understanding of economics and money supply, such well-meaning people enable another section of a corrupt elite to steal their future incomes, this time under the guise of averting disaster. Under the current system, the costs of inefficient carbon reduction would fall disproportionately on the poorest, deepening social divides and entrenching poverty, while doing little to actually curb carbon use.

If we adopted land value taxes and shifted taxation to externalities, we could resolve this futile dilemma and create a world fit for our children to inherit—one that truly values the natural world by making people pay for its abuse, and which makes sound economic sense. But the wealthy would grow poorer, and their political cronies would lose influence. So it will not happen until we educate ourselves on the basic economic principles governing how we use and abuse natural resources and land. We must all understand that it is monopoly—above all in the ownership of land and nature’s gifts—that drives poverty.