Sweden Becomes a Trash Dump

Timothy Birdnow

Under the Greens, Sweden is turning into a garbage heap.

From the article:

A fire started at the dump in a southern Stockholm municipality on Dec. 23 and continued for months, covering an area about 10,000 square meters, that included 100,000 tons of debris.

At first it seemed impossible to put out the Botkyrka blaze, because of the potential risk from landslides when covering the fire with sand or water, according to the local fire brigade. After months heavy equipment was finally used to begin to control the conflagration.

The flames will probably erupt again in this flammable mixture with warmer and dryer weather.

You might assume this trash tragedy is a result of some evil corporation, seeking greedy profits.

It’s not.

Proponents of the New Green Deal and the Club of Romehave united to change Sweden’s future into a "circular economy.” Goals include limiting GDP growth, recycling/reusing, promoting small economies of trades-persons and independent contractors, as well as limiting population growth, so allegedly the earth’s resources won’t be depleted.

One focus is to eliminate employer/employee relationships and replace them with contracted workers, who work a few hours for each of many small operations. The plan also promotes using foreign workers by moving populations globally, wherever cheap labor is needed.

Until this year Sweden boasted a flagship energy/recycling program that extracted electricity from waste, solving the problems of disposal and power shortage simultaneously. When new politicians took power this year, they decided to reduce energy production, as well as its use.

To begin this shutdown the government instituted an energy tax in January on the waste conversion to energy industry. That levy was steep enough to curtail production (the goal), but so onerous that it quickly put the processors out of business. That’s why the trash and garbage mountains are climbing in Sweden, instead of being recycled.

Under their strange new economy, Swedes now get circular spirit tax deductions for screwing together furniture, leaving clothes at dry cleaning and installing solar cells, according to author Henrik Nilsson

At the same time, a fully functional nuclear reactor is being shut down. The justification is that it is no longer profitable. This is because the government has introduced an energy effect tax, which is fully in line with the Green Party’s philosophy of either taxing or closing down.

To be effective over time, the circular economy needs the Internet of Things, with constant connection where all material flows and are followed in real time throughout the life cycle.

According to the philosophy, this should lead to a world without waste, since clothing, furniture, lighting, appliances and means of transport are not owned, but rented, which is giving producers incentives to make products more sustainable.

This would end most private property, and the big question becomes: who will own what we rent?

Under the circular system the source of goods must be either the government or an arm of the state. Since the goal is to minimize use of resources, that means rationing either by need or to satisfy Green New Deal objectives.

The Circular Economy goals are originally from Barbara Ward’s book Spaceship Earth (1966), where this planet is described as a closed system – a spaceship – with limited resources.

"Spaceship Earth – The Life Support System” is also the title of a chapter in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s 1977 publication "The Unfinished Agenda", a book advertised by the Club of Rome. This fund currently promotes more cordial relations with China, and advocates BDS activities against Israel, supporting "J Street” and its efforts to almost solely promote Arab interests in Mideast negotiations.

This was the inevitable outcome of this economics of scarcity and control. We saw this kind of thing in the old Soviet days, with piles of trash and filthy air, a result of a society too stifled to clean itself up. It shouldn't surprise us.

What is surprising is so many are hell-bent on this future of poverty and despair.

Earth is not a closed system. We have enormous resources, and can invent/develop new ones. We also have an entire solar system chock full of wealth, waiting for us to come and get it. There is more metal in one medium sized nickel Iron asteroid than has been mined over the whole Earth in the last five years! Not long ago there was a twenty mile diameter nickel iron asteroid that would, if we were to mine it, wreck the world economy by collapsing the metals market. We are rich, rich, rich in our own backyard, yet these people want to make us poor, and limited.

So much of this thinking comes from the 60's and '70's, too, and much of what inspired it has been overcome or proven wrong, but we keep chasing these bad solutions. These people are still thinking along the lines of the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" and "The Population Bomb" none of which made a single accurate prediction.

We don't need any barbarians to destroy our world; we are the barbarians.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:10 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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