George Monbiot and the things he doesn't know

We get treated, again, to a Monbiot column outlining the things that George doesn’t know.

But to suggest that the public assault on truth is new, or peculiarly Russian, is also disinformation. For generations, in countries such as the UK there was no epistemic crisis – but this was not because we shared a commitment to truth. It was because we shared a commitment to outrageous lies.

Well, yes, lying is bad, truth is better. But what, specifically, do we need to correct?

Nearly everyone who appears in the media, across almost the entire political spectrum, seems to accept that economic growth can and should continue indefinitely on a finite planet.

The finity within which economic growth is constrained is the knowledge of how to add value. For economic growth is the adding of value, not the consumption, nor even use of, any particular physical supply. Therefore the agreed finity of physical supply is an interesting, but not conclusive, constraint upon economic growth.

Almost all believe that we should take action to protect life on Earth only when it is cost-effective.

Doing things which use more resources than they save would be an odd way to save those finite physical resources, no? But these two are arguments that we’ve all had before with Monbiot and he simply will not accept the truths being told to him.

But this one really does take the biscuit:

Research by the Indian economist Utsa Patnaik suggests the inflation that pushed food out of reach of the poor was deliberately engineered under a policy conceived by that hero of British liberalism, John Maynard Keynes. The colonial authorities used inflation, as Keynes remarked, to “reduce the consumption of the poor” in order to extract wealth to support the war effort. Until Patnaik’s research was published in 2018, we were unaware of the extent to which Bengal’s famine was constructed. Britain’s cover-up was more effective than Stalin’s.

Patnaik is the activist who claims that Britain sucked $45 trillion out of India during the Raj. Less than connected with reality we’d say.

But this idea that no one knew. That it has all been under-researched. Total codswallop. You see, they gave the Nobel in Economics to the laddie who studied that Bengal Famine. Amartya Sen. His foundational work was on precisely that famine.

George is trying to tell us that the groundbreaking research by the guy they gave the Nobel to is all hush hush stuff unknown. No George, no. Funny as it may seem other people have examined the world too.