Hey proles! How will you spend your “carbon budget”?

Monday/Tuesday blog

Yesterday’s dystopia becomes today’s reality?

Regular readers will know that, in addition to trying to promote my own book about climate catastrophism – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS – I have several times recommended journalist Ross Clark’s satirical novel about climate lunacy – THE DENIAL:

In his novel, Ross Clark envisages a world in which every person has their own ‘carbon budget’. In this dystopia every purchase will have a carbon value and nobody is allowed to spend more than their ‘carbon budget’. So anyone eating meat or imported fruit or trying to take a foreign holiday will soon use up their carbon budget and be unable to buy any product or service which supposedly produces that ‘deadly’ greenhouse gas – CO2.

China shows the world how it’s done

That brings us to China. Here (in blue text) is a brief extract from Wikipedia’s piece on China’s social credit system:

According to the Chinese government’s 2015 Plan for Implementation, the Social Credit System was due to be fully implemented by 2020. Once implemented, the system will manage the rewards and punishments for businesses, institutions and individuals on the basis of their economic and personal behavior. Punishments for poor social credit include increased audits and government inspections for businesses, reduced employment prospects, travel bans, exclusion from private schools, slow internet connection, exclusion from high-prestige work, exclusion from hotels, and public shaming. Rewards for positive social credit include less frequent inspections and audits for businesses, fast-tracked approvals for government services, discounts on energy bills, being able to rent bikes and hotels without payment of a deposit, better interest rates at banks, and tax breaks.

As of June 2019, according to the National Development and Reform Commission of China, 27 million air tickets as well as 6 million high-speed rail tickets had been denied to people who were deemed “untrustworthy (失信)” (on a blacklist). Certain personal information of the blacklisted people is deliberately made accessible to the society and is displayed online as well as at various public venues such as movie theaters and buses while some cities have also banned children of “untrustworthy” residents from attending private schools and even universities. On the other hand, people with high credit ratings may receive rewards such as less waiting time at hospitals and governmental agencies, discounts at hotels, greater likelihood of receiving employment offers and so on.

Hopefully you get the picture of how technology-based social control works.

They’re developing the technology

I thought the company Alibaba was just the Chinese version of Amazon. But Alibaba seems to have greater ambitions. Below is a brief excerpt of a talk given by the president of Alibaba Group, a Chinese multinational technology company, at last week’s Davos World Economic Forum in which he bragged about developing technology which would monitor the “carbon footprint” of consumers.

“We’re developing through technology an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint,” Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans said at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Annual Summit in Davos, Switzerland. Evans described the technology as, “an individual carbon footprint tracker.”

They’re only trying to help us save the planet

Once this technology is developed, we’ll be told that it’s for our own benefit as it will help us each measure and thus reduce the damage we are each supposedly doing to the planet through what we eat, what we buy and how much we travel. But you don’t need much imagination to see how this technology can be turned into an instrument of control limiting how much we useless proles can buy or own or travel.

Within 10 to 20 years (or maybe sooner?) we’ll all have our very own ‘carbon budget card’. This will be loaded up with our carbon budget each year or each month and we will have to present the card every time we make a purchase. The carbon cost of that purchase will then be deducted from our carbon budget. Once you’ve used up that month’s carbon budget, no more food, travel or fun for you.

Of course, the ruling elites won’t have carbon budgets. Carbon budgets will just be for us worthless lumpenproletariat.

Someone much cleverer than I once said something like “George Orwell’s 1984 was meant to be a novel, not a user’s manual”. You could say the same for Ross Clark’s satirical novel – THE DENIAL

It’s odd how satirical novels about a dystopian future can so easily become reality.

Here’s the great man from Alibaba excitedly explaining the future he and his Davos chums are preparing for us: