LOL!!! Mmm Donuts! A Commie's Guide To Doughnuts....... Or Is It A Donut's Guide To Communism? Hmm

 

 

No, Homer, apparently, there’s nothing they can’t do.  In fact, our friends at OxFam have found a great new function for the donuts……. Global totalitarian communism!

It all started with a misguided environmental paper which identified nine natural processes and their alleged planetary boundaries. 

Identifying and quantifying planetary boundaries that must not be transgressed could help prevent human activities from causing unacceptable environmental change, argue Johan Rockström and colleagues.

This seems to be a top ten ….. sorry a top nine list of the lunatic fringe memes.

Climate change, Rate of biodiversity loss, Nitrogen cycle, Phosphorus cycle, Stratospheric ozone depletion, Ocean acidification, Global freshwater use, Change in land use, Atmospheric aerosol loading, and Chemical pollution.

See, these all have boundaries which must not be transgressed!!!

Our friends at OxFam demonstrate it thusly…..  (pdf)

So, this got our friends thinking about donuts.  These boundaries would act as an outer edge and then without exceeding the parameters of these, we have the human condition on the inside, with the hole representing poor human conditions.  Our donut!

Not wishing to be outdone by the first group of econuts, they came up with their own list…. of human social issues.  I’ll just show you the table they made.

I like this table.  I share concern about most of these issues as I would imagine most of the readers here.

Now most rational people understand that the world is never in a static state.  It can’t be.  We also understand that to raise people out of poverty, there are some requirements which would make the environmental boundary people cry.  No, really, I’ve seen this happen!  They cry!  Unless………..

……… But well-designed policies can promote both poverty eradication and environmental sustainability – bringing humanity into the doughnut from both sides.  Would eradicating poverty put planetary boundaries under stress? No. Available data imply that the social foundation could be achieved for every person alive today with strikingly few additional resources:

 Food: Providing the additional calories needed by the 13 per cent of the world’s population facing hunger would require just 1 per cent of the current global food supply.

 Energy: Bringing electricity to the 19 per cent of the world’s population who currently lack it could be achieved with less than a 1 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions.

 Income: Ending income poverty for the 21 per cent of the global population who live on less than $1.25 a day would require just 0.2 percent of global income.  In fact, the biggest source of planetary-boundary stress today is excessive resource consumption by roughly the wealthiest 10 per cent of the world’s population, and the production patterns of the companies producing the goods and services that they buy:

 Carbon: Around 50 per cent of global carbon emissions are generated by just 11 per cent of people;

 Income: 57 per cent of global income is in the hands of just 10 per cent of people;

 Nitrogen: 33 per cent of the world’s sustainable nitrogen budget is used to produce meat for people in the EU – just 7 per cent of the world’s population.

Adding to the pressure created by the world’s wealthiest consumers is a growing global ‘middle class’, aspiring to emulate today’s high-income lifestyles. By 2030, global demand for water is expected to rise by 30 per cent, and demand for food and energy both by 50 per cent. In addition, the inefficiency with which natural resources are currently used to meet human needs – for example through wasted food, leaky irrigation, and fuel inefficient vehicles – further compounds the pressure.  Moving into the safe and just space for humanity means eradicating poverty to bring everyone above the social foundation, and reducing global resource use, to bring it back within planetary boundaries. Social justice demands that this double objective be achieved through far greater global equity in the use of natural resources, with the greatest reductions coming from the world’s richest consumers. And it demands far greater efficiency in transforming natural resources to meet human needs. 

……. Given this context, the question of how to agree on fair shares of effort for staying within planetary boundaries – e.g. through ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’23 – is clearly a crucial but complex one.

The Brundtland Commission’s 1987 report, Our Common Future, paved the way for far-reaching international commitments, set out in the 1992 Rio Declaration and Agenda 21.

I love this stuff!  This is Das Capital reduced to a donut!  This gist of the paper is clear.  And, they’re presenting this at Rio.  You see, all the wealthy nations need to do is spread their wealth to the poor nations, and quit eating and using electricity so darned much and then whammo!….. all fixed.  This will bring us to happy-donutland…….

 

There’s a few erroneous assumptions in this paper, but the biggest one is that Marxism can work.  It can’t.  It has failed time and time again.  I do like the full circle though.  Economic fairness and social justice.  All you have to do, is give up your liberties and opportunities for human advancement, and achievement, and there we’ll be, in the land of rainbows, unicorns and happy donuts. 

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