Why COP26 Refused to Address Planned Obsolescence

 Joaquin FLORES

Educated in the field of IR and IPE at California State University Los Angeles; previously served as a business agent and organizer for the SEIU labor union; has published internationally on subjects of geopolitics, war, and diplomacy; serves as the director of the Belgrade-based Center for Syncretic Studies, and is Chief Editor at Fort Russ News.

The ugly truth about cap and trade and all similar schemes is that they do not really reduce carbon emissions, if most other factors remain the same, Joaquin Flores writes.

The failure of the UN’s COP26 conference in Glasgow was spectacle of hypocrisy befitting of a moribund ruling class. These kinds of antics harken back to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, where its decadent ruling class was deadly out of touch with the causes of growing decentralization and dissatisfaction in the periphery. And so taking our historical analogy further, we may begin to unwrap an epochal catastrophe which today’s elite now faces.

The transition from the Roman imperial system, through the Carolingian period, into to the system of medieval Europe, saw a continual decentralization of power, and the evolution of slaves and serfs into land-owning peasants.

Boris Johnson arrives at COP26 by private jumbo jet ready to tackle other leaders on emissions

This economic decentralization was connected to localized power structures. Roman forts thereby formed the basis of the medieval system of castles, and the relative weakness of these lords and little kings correlated to an improvement in the rights and economic power of what became the small land-owning peasantry.

Therefore a method of re-introducing an element of centralization to these structures, to the Vatican in Rome, was the development of the Church and the refinement of its system of tithing from individual offering to an imposed and required tax, enforced by law and collectively. Significant theological and metaphysical questions and dissimilarities aside, here’s what’s critical:

The carbon tax system is a mystical system that cannot be justified by material sciences or concerns, and instead sits as a type of ‘new religion’ that the historical centres of capital have rolled out to justify a type of tithing upon increasingly sovereign and decentralized corners of the world.

Payment of tithing, like the carbon tax system, is an ideological project to maintain powers of a moribund economic system, after the decline of the physical structures of imperialism that held together the old empire.

The various carbon tax systems, (cap and trade CAP/ETS, etc.) are little more than a rehashing of a tithing system.

Like with the Church’s control over the scribes and monasteries, the new carbon cult relies upon its monopoly over the inherited centers of knowledge creation and distribution, to create a parallel reality which requires a payment into something which cannot be rationalized in either scientific or economic terms.

Likewise, one could argue that the influence of abstracted aims of the Church lent towards the management of high unemployment and inflation caused by this tithing tax, through the calling of crusades and counter-rational measures for dealing with plagues, which tended to account for the premature deaths of countless ‘worthless eaters’.

This very much parallels the gross neo-Malthusian solutions proffered by the elites in our day and age.

The amazing part of this? The entire catastrophe today can be avoided if planned obsolescence was eliminated as an economic practice.

Paying tithe from Bishop Roderik’s work ‘The Mirror of Human Life’ – wood cut, 15th century Varga Domokos: Magyarország virágzása és romlása. Móra, Budapest, 197 , p 58

Carbon Reduction as Cover for a Sinister Depopulation Agenda

The fundamental issue driving the COP26 population reduction scheme which parades as ‘carbon reduction’, therefore, is the hard problem of overcoming planned obsolescence. This single issue, almost more than any other, is definitive proof that there is no real concern for the environment, and that the ruling class is purely focused on population reduction and the suppression of actual 3D printing and eradicating a real Fourth Industrial Revolution.

That last point may come as a surprise to many, who are following the talking points of Klaus Schwab and company, at the World Economic Forum, who have incorporated these terms into their neo-Malthusian agenda.

They use these words so that we cannot understand them, so we will not look right where they are hiding their real meanings and implications – in their mouths.

So in place, they use the words and phrases – 4IR, 3D printing, IoT – but in actuality they are trying to subvert these while other technologies, entirely coercive and centralizing in nature, are rolled out onto the suffering faces of the masses.

As we have shown in our work on planned obsolescence, nowhere is the subject of planned obsolescence directly confronted – either in Schwab’s “Covid-19: The Great Reset” (in fact the opposite is proposed), nor is it confronted in the SDG Agenda. There is an oblique reference to repairable products and longer product lifespans only on page 62 of the 250 page manifesto. This adds justification to our charge that among the points of the ‘Great Reset’ is a serious reduction in human population.

Global Fight-back – The UN and Beyond

The same technologies to create the three industrial revolutions in the imperial core, were later used by developing countries, to grow and improve their physical economy. But these efforts were conducted in fierce opposition to the centrally directed model of modernity; a centralism coming from the financiers of the City of London and conducted through the geopolitics of the so-called Washington Consensus.

While accurately understanding some of the mutually shared concerns among and between nations, the Agenda 2030 solutions offered stem from the same kind of thinking, and from the very same actors, which produced the problem itself. Why would anyone trust these solutions?

Again, there is nothing profound or rhetorical in that question. The right-thinking leadership of many developing countries entirely understands that point. They are frustrated by the gas-lighting that comes from this globalist institutions which enforce austerity measures which breed corruption and poverty, all while preaching that these same countries haven’t done enough to increase transparency and fight poverty.

Real sovereignty for the so-called global south is intimately tied to two related factors: import substitution industrialization using 3D printing, and a physical economy based in automated production of super-long life goods. This must up-end the present planned obsolescence paradigm with its intentionally shortened PLC (product life cycle). A functional bridge between here and there, is an increased focus on regional trade, which encourages regional cooperation and enlarges spatial conceptions of the sovereign towards a growing multipolarity.

Instead of focusing on this very obvious solution to a whole range of problems which are, generously speaking, fairly represented in the UN Agenda 2030 goals, we are being corralled down a path which unjustifiably focuses on climate change. But critics like Vance Packard in ‘The Waste Makers’ (1960) already saw the problem, and the solution.

We are therefore in a race towards next-generation productive technologies, like localized 3D printing (3DP) which ultimately work against globalized production, against interdependency, and the supply-line security problems, like war, that comes along with it.

The underlying rationale of globalized production, is the exploitation of low wage labor and the maintenance of endemic global inequalities. But as techniques of production improve, and more materials can be synthesized, the twin drivers of this paradigm – low-wage production and raw material extraction – are overcome together.

Ending planned obsolescence vs. ending climate change, represent two different paradigms. The first is connected to a forward looking paradigm reflective of a real and sustainable 4IR, and the second is a cynical ruse not only to limit the rational development of the physical economy, but also human horizons.

The synthesizing of materials eliminates the ‘carbon emissions’ produced by the entire present model of resource extraction, including those emitted by hundreds of millions of workers who generate otherwise unnecessary emissions upstream and downstream, globalized supply-lines, while the carbon footprint for material synthesis will ultimately be smaller. And this much matters only if a real problem is carbon emissions, which is arguable at best.

In other words, we can eliminate those emissions without eliminating the human beings, and moreover, without limiting the quality of life they enjoy. To the contrary, overcoming artificial scarcity in its present form would see a great improvement in quality of life and life expectancy.

And so the focus on improving hyper-efficient methods of globalized distribution is missing the point, if relatively equivalent investment into R&D can get better results in the arena of material synthesis. Synthetic materials are based on polymers which are stronger and longer-lasting than natural or regenerated materials, and lend towards longer lasting products.

What is more efficient than the most efficient delivery system? Not having to distribute it at all.

Nations are not Bound to Agenda 2030 by Force of Treaty

Are most UN member states really ‘all in’ with the climate change game? The vast majority of countries tied into the IMF/UN system of neo-colonialism, are simply waiting out the clock, as alternatives such as BRICS grow against the petro dollar.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), known also as Agenda 2030, use the language of post-colonialism to reinforce a new kind of neo-colonialism. The system behind this push being so-called ‘sustainability’ is what is actually unsustainable, and so developing countries see they simply need to bear with it until it finally implodes.

A lot of unrelated environmental concerns have been collapsed into ‘climate change’. And climate change has been dogmatically tied to carbon emissions. The primary issue then deals with carbon emissions, therefore, even though it is just a single goal (goal 13) among the 17 goals of Agenda 2030.

Seeing the UN graphic below, we can see that the following goals are actually all important matters: 6 (Clean water and sanitation); 7 (Affordable and clean energy); 9 (Industry, innovation and infrastructure); 11 (Sustainable cities and communities); 12 (Responsible consumption and production); 14 (Life below water); 15 (Life on land).

And so it’s of peculiar interest that 13, climate action (which is merely carbon emissions), is the guiding logic behind all of these, when in fact it is failure to address goal 12 (Responsible consumption and production) which represents the entire economic, social, and environmental cancer of this age, a danger so clear and present and yet rooted so deeply in this paradigm, that the IMF cannot propose a solution that can tackle this.

Goal 12 – responsible consumption and production – is the foundation of all the other goals, if we are to take them seriously. Not goal 13 – climate action – as that in fact goes in the opposite direction. This point will be underscored.

All of this seems so terrible, so why did the majority of UN member states sign on? In fact, Agenda 2030 is not a treaty, it is non-binding and not a criteria for UN membership, and its provisions are not enforceable through the mechanism of treaties between sovereign states. Rather, it was reached ‘by consensus’, whatever that means. What has been constructed as Agenda 2030 presents an outline at best, using input from many UN member states, of what they ‘could’ agree to someday.

Therefore, many countries will make their own sovereign announcements about reaching this part, or that part, of the various goals. This will receive a lot of press, much of it misleading, because these were decisions these countries make on their own. Many of these already overlap with their own national agenda (poverty reduction, clean water, gender inclusiveness). But they do so on their own accord, and this point is critical.

Predatory multinationals like to use provisions on 2030 to place the spectre of global governance and shared goals as justification for policies which undermine the economic and sovereign foundation of developing countries.

But the 17 goals of Agenda 2030 (SDG) represent merely a ‘plan of action’, which countries are not obliged to separately from various accords and treaties which they might presently or later agree to, or which multinationals may attempt to unilaterally impose as a condition of trade, (often backed by the IMF) but which carry their own names and legal details.

Many of the concerns that these goals address are the right ones for countries to be focusing on, and therein lies the rub. Just like with the 4IR, Agenda 2030 turns these on their head, and cynically misdirects them towards a neo-Malthusian genocide.

The ugly truth about cap and trade, and all similar schemes to enforce this globally, is that they do not really reduce carbon emissions, if most other factors remain the same. Among the other factors required for this scheme to approximate ‘working’, is to reduce population size. Note that this is not to reduce the rate of population growth, but to reduce the total human population in absolute terms.

In other words, at the heart of the 17 SDG for 2030, the primary source of carbon footprints are human beings.

Overcoming this Paradigm’s Problem

Just like with the human development indexes, and broader economic concerns, Agenda 2030 seizes upon legitimate concerns for the environment, human exposure to carcinogenic materials, birth defects, and clean air and water.

But these become subsumed under the heading of global warming (or, in explaining cooling spells, ‘climate change’), in such an incoherent way that one cannot speak about the legitimate concerns without being forced to answer for climate change.

Innovations that potentiate a 4IR, like 3DP, contain much potential. But there are already existing solutions to the production/income and distribution/purchase cycle plaguing humanity in the face of the rapid automation process underway.

These solutions are as simple as using higher quality parts to substitute the ‘planned to break’ parts in already existing products, all other factors of production being left untouched.

Indeed, we hold that while there are hypothetically limits to growth, the biggest limitation at present is limited thinking about what growth looks like and what new possibilities and discoveries it holds.

Taken together, we can see that overcoming the wastefulness of economies of scale is not the problem which the elite’s conception of Agenda 2030 is aimed at. They want to preserve some type of system of subsidized commodity production, perhaps making products less sturdy, and commonly shared through a drone-delivery rental system.

This would decrease product lifespan while also requiring less goods to be produced, connected to the rental system and a lower total human population.

In some tenacious balance between population reduction and flimsy rental goods, the WEF proposes that this will result in a net decrease in carbon emissions. In looking at the second part of that balance, we can conclude that the population reduction must be significant in order to justify the net reduction claim.

Instead, we maintain that ‘two heads are better than one’, that the increase in human population has a multivariate, non-linear effect towards improvement not only of the human experience, but its positive interrelation with the entire noosphere.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/11/08/why-cop26-refused-to-address-planned-obsolescence/