The climate change debate, is it a left wing conspiracy?

Thinking about the climate change debate.

Do I think the driver for the climate change debate is centralist or leftist political forces that want to slow down the economy through tax imposts?

I don’t think that the centralists are using their agenda to create the climate change hysteria. I think elites that believe in centralised government are hiding behind climate change, which is a real risk.

I think that the problem with the whole climate change debate is working in the opposite direction. I believe that climate change is real and that the marketplace needs to be freed up to be able to deal with it. However, there is a socialist, leftist ideology that is using climate change as an opportunity to leverage big government against small business paradigms. I do think that the market needs some direction in this and that incentives would be a better way of dealing with climate change than disincentives like taxation and carbon pricing. Do we need to incentivise renewable energy? The opportunity to do that was probably five years ago. Renewable energy systems are now relatively cheap and will halve in price over the next four years, while they double the capacity. Coal-based power will become redundant shortly.

Back to the question at hand. I don’t think that the centralists are using their agenda to create the climate change hysteria. I think elites that believe in centralised government are hiding behind climate change, which is a real risk. The political left-wing is using climate change to deliver bad economic policies and increased taxes.

Using my electricity paradigms: prior to the 1920s electricity was developed and distributed locally. In the 1920’s the British government realised that they could centralise power generation near coal mines and using Tesla’s AC principal lift the voltage to carry the power over long distances from centralised government generators.

They introduced the United Kingdom’s power act which was later followed in the United States, Europe and Australia.

New technology in the form of distributed energy systems like wind, solar, hydro and in some places tidal or geothermal energy, can now very cheaply generate power that can be distributed at lower voltages locally. In Australia and the United Kingdom we have the advantage of distributing power to houses at 240 V. More recently battery systems have been improving reducing the need for baseload power systems. Distributed energy, like distributed banking, changing automobile ownership patterns to leasing systems and decentralised small-scale public/private transport systems are a risk to the big government, big business, big union mentality. The advanced world is very rapidly moving from a collective society (Marxist paradigms) to a connected society. Prices are dropping very rapidly and the economy is democratising. This is a risk for the left-wing Socialist/ centralised control based ideology.

In the debate about top-down political control versus bottom up freedom of activity and speech there is a perpetual conflict.

There are forces to create an elitist framework to deliver caretaker state services. Distributed, democratised, individualised systems create destructive change from the bottom up. A threat to centralised thinking.