Advice to scrimp and be thrifty is gaslighting. We need a deeper policy, we need a nurture life policy platform.


"Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less." Oscar Wilde


This image is doing the rounds at the moment - for whose benefit is this being viralised?

How would you feel if someone advised you to eat less if you and your children were already eating less, due to poverty and speculation on necessary commodities driving prices up?

1. Asking people who, for the most part earn a low income (in order for corporations to pay high dividends to shareholders) to scrimp on Energy use in our homes, by 'raising consciousness' of the expense of daily use, with a tacit implication suggesting that if we made better 'informed' choices, we'd not face such intense bills is deliberate cruelty.

2. The price rises are entirely a matter of market speculation. UK generates 97% of it's own Energy needs. It has not become more expensive to drill, produce and ship oil. Speculation is all about using Wealth as an economic weapon.

Extreme inequality is a form of economic violence, where policies and political decisions that perpetuate the wealth and power of a privileged few result in direct harm to the vast majority of ordinary people across the world and the planet itself. 

3. Where's the chart for the energy costs of Tanks, Jets, Missiles, AirCraft Carriers, Mars Missions, Moon Missions, Yachts and Palaces? 

4. Where's the chart advising industry to be 'thrifty' with using energy?

Ordinary folk are responsible for at most, 25% of all Carbon emissions. USUK and EU populations are often presented as the biggest per capita Carbon emitters. Industry accounts for the most of carbon emission, with the US Military being the single biggest institutional carbon polluter on Earth. People point at China as the biggest polluter but ignore the population differences. If you combine Europe, UK and USA as one population it turns out that it is a population similar to that of China, and China's Per Capita Carbon Emissions are still below those of USUK and EU. Well below.

5. Carbon Footprint was initially designed as a tool to help us become more aware of the environmental costs of our day to day activity. Most ordinary carbon use is in getting to and from work, and in working for the Industrial Systems that refuse to pay the costs to prevent pollution and prevent environmental degradation. Because to do so would erase their profitability.

6. In it's great wisdom and benevolence, in 2004 BP recycled and popularised Personal Carbon Footprint as a way to make us ordinary people feel guilt, shame and hopeless hope (if we all did our little bit - which amounts to less than 10% of total) we could help save the planet) whist the Industrial Cult continued stomping on us all with their Carbon Wealth Extraction Boot Print. 

We little people were directed to obsess about our day to day use, so that BP, Shell, Exxon and their allies in Finance Markets could continue to obsess about Wealth Extraction in the 'most efficient' manner - by refusing to pay the costs of prevention of harm (pollution, disease casued by pollution and environmental degradation) and by speculating the price of energy fuels.

7. The Ukraine War is not causing Energy prices to rise - England produces 97% of it's energy needs from available domestic supplies.

So whose carbon foot print matters, and why?

https://toxicnews.org/2017/08/07/whose-carbon-footprint-matters/

"consumption and market exchange only represents a thin surface of our economy and its ecological consequences.

150 years ago, Karl Marx argued that the secret to profit, or what he called surplus value, laid in analyzing the “hidden abode” of production. 

We need a similar project to understand climate accountability in our carbon-based society. Of course, the most obvious producers of climate change are the fossil fuel producers themselves. 

A recent study suggests a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions since 1988 (in this case, it is important to remember that half of total historical emissions since the industrial revolution have come since that year of 1988).

Yet, fossil fuel companies are not the only ones profiting off carbon emissions. Energy-intensive industries like steel, chemicals, cement, and aluminum consume ungodly amounts of fossil fuels to power and materially feed their production. 

The cement industry alone is responsible for 5% of global carbon emissions. Fertilizer uses natural gas as a source of hydrogen to combine with atmospheric nitrogen to form ammonia (NH3). When they extract that hydrogen from methane (CH4) carbon dioxide is the main byproduct. 

A fertilizer plant I visited in southern Louisiana claimed to consume a staggering 9% of natural gas consumption in the entire state (a state that already hosts an enormous industry of natural gas consuming chemical factories). 

This single fertilizer plant has the highest carbon emissions in the entire chemical sector of the United States."

8. Calls to tax these companies are largely a way to distract attention from the hidden roots of all industrial profitability - the deep roots of Externalised Costs as the very foundation of industrial wealth extraction.

9. Nationalisation is a way to 'take back control' and set pricing according to the needs of the population, us little people, whose need for the utility of energy, water, transit systems, health care systems, education systems ect is a life need, it is not a luxury. Such a move would massively help to alleviate general poverty, and for that reason alone it must be done.

It is important to understand that such a policy is designed to not touch the sides of Externalised Costs.

10. Cost externalizing is a socioeconomic term describing how a business maximizes its profits by off-loading indirect costs and forcing negative effects to a third party. An externalized cost is known to economists as a negative externality.

"The corporation is an externalizing machine (moving its operating costs and risks to external organizations and people), in the same way that a shark is a killing machine." - Robert Monks (2003) Republican candidate for Senate from Maine and corporate governance adviser in the film "The Corporation". Moving industries to where cheaper workers can be sourced is an externalising procedure. It's sole purpose is wealth extraction efficiency.

What we need. Starting now.

In my opinion Nationalisation must be followed by legislation that demands that industry prevents harm, pays the costs they have externalised from the beginnings of the Industrial 'Revolution' - from material sourcing through processing, manufacturing, distribution through to point of sale, use, consumption and end of life disposal - as the most basic measure of industrial health and legitimacy.

We must challenge every attempt to place the burden for such deep change upon us little people, many of us on low incomes, many more well paid yet trapped in mortgage debt; diligent workers and so-called 'scroungers' struggling to stay financially afloat are not the problem here.

We must not pass our life jackets to the Industrial Giants who are throwing us off the ship, as they sail towards the destination of continued, maximised Wealth Extraction.

We must mutiny, we must peacably take the ship over, be the majority in our legislatures that we fund, and we must plot a new course towards a nurturant industrial economic system that abolishes poverty, regulates industry well, eschews warfare as a a tool, prevents pollution and nurtures human and environment as one. and is honest and transparent.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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