Common misunderstandings of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged. You either love her or hate her!

But I read Atlas Shrugged without knowing that you were supposed to love her or hate her. I just knew that it was a title that kept popping up here and there, in a number of different contexts, and so eventually, I felt I had to read that book that so many people seemed to be talking about!

And my reaction was:

'Wow!... I've never looked at it this way before!... This woman is bright!'

Afterwards, when talking about this book, I discovered the strong emotional reactions people have to her. I also discovered how - as can be expected when feelings run hot! - most people had a rather incorrect idea of what she had actually said, and what she actually believed.

One common misunderstanding of her that I came across was this one:

"She claimed that rich people are some kind of altruistic, highly talented, good-hearted super-humans that if left alone will never do anything bad, but only use their talents and riches to improve the world."

This is not what she said.

Ayn Rand said that there are exactly TWO ways to become rich in this world. No more and no less. The first one is to be pretty much what was described above: Talented and productive. You produce some kind of value that people are prepared to pay for, willingly! They buy whatever you are producing, and feel that they have made a good purchase; that they got good value for their money. You get rich and they get satisfied. Everybody wins.

The second way to get rich, also the last way, since there are only two, is to loot somebody else who is productive. There are no other ways, she said! The value has to come from somewhere - it doesn't just fall from the sky or spring out of thin air. And so if you are rich, then either you produced that value or you stole it.

She also said that it's not necessary that the person you loot be richer than you, or as rich as you. She said there is also the Indian Maharaja: The only rich person in a country of poor. Because no matter how poor a population is, there is always enough to loot for ONE person to be rich! And she said the problem in our societies is that too many people want to be that Indian Maharaja. You often find them in politics. They don't care about the prosperity of society! They don't care if society plummets into utter despair! So long as they can steal enough from it to be rich, themselves. And the problem with this, of course, is that there can be only one Maharaja... So the only thing they will succeed at is to make society poorer, to the detriment of all. Everybody loses.

“When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law, men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims, then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.”

Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

 

 Another misunderstanding of Ayn Rand that I came across was this:

"She's such a hypocrite! She wrote 'The Virtue of Selfishness' only as a desperate attempt to justify why she didn't help her poor relatives back in Soviet, after she got rich in America."

Let me show you another quote from Atlas Shrugged:

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on."

 Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

Tell me: Can somebody who writes a quote like that be a hypocrite? No, I would say. Because a person who feels that a quote like that rings true wouldn't WANT to lie... It would be an act of self-abdication. Of making oneself the world's slave, condemned to trying to fake the kind of reality that the world approves of. Ayn Rand doesn't care what you approve of! She stands up for HER OWN beliefs.

The quote continues, in the book:

“There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”

This reveals even clearer how very strongly she feels about any kind of dishonesty or of bending the truth. But I intentionally put this separate from the lines before it, because I don't feel it fits the context! The lines before are a cool, logical reasoning - this is a sudden outburst of emotion! And as Virginia Wolf writes, in A Room of One's Own: "An angry writer is a bad writer". Ayn Rand is often a bad writer, because of her anger seeping through. She was, after all, an illegal refugee from the Soviet Union, and she is angry with her motherland, oh how angry she is!...

And I believe this is why most people love her! Not because they understand what she really meant with her philosophy, but because they share her anger towards communism and socialism! Because the villains in Rand's books do come out as very Soviet communist-like... That was the face of evil, to her. But when American Christian right-wing politicians expressed love for her philosophy, she protested! They were far too limiting of people's freedom for her. For one thing, she was sex positive, perhaps even polyamorous in her ideology, although those terms didn't exist at the time. She was also a staunch atheist and advocated abortion rights. American Christian Conservatives were, of course, far from this! Had she grown up in the USA instead of the Soviet Union, perhaps they would have been the paint that she painted her villains with? Who knows.

And had that been the case, the left-wing would have been the ones who loved her! Now, sharing a common enemy with her.

Ironic, though. Isn't it?

I warmly recommend you read the book. Not as a novel! It's not a great novel (although the story is also captivating), and you would have to put up with her anger, which gets rather bitter, at times... But in her good moments, Ayn Rand is, indeed, a very bright woman. She has some very clear thoughts, well worth reading for oneself, rather than through the lens of somebody else who either loves her or hates her, probably for the wrong reasons... 😏

Overall Mortality for Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Respectively

That's what we want to know, isn't it? So that we can see if the vaccines have saved lives or not, when considering not only the risk from the disease, COVID-19, but also the rare side effects of the vaccines.

However, there is no institute or agency that publishes this data that I've found. At least not directly. But here is my brave attempt at compiling this data myself, from statistics that are available. I will discuss uncertainties etc. below, as I narrate how I did my compilation, but this is the end result:

(A person here counts as "vaccinated" if they have had at least one injection. Most of those have also had two or three injections.)

This looks pretty good! Clearly, the vaccines have saved lives, especially in the 80+ group. But if we zoom in on the lower age groups, which are maybe a bit too small to see in the above graph, it actually looks like this:

Here, we see that the mortality is actually slightly higher among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated in the age group 10-39!... Now, the death numbers in this group are very low so it's likely this small difference is not significant, and the data is also preliminary. Therefore, this result may very well change when the numbers are finalized. Then again, if this does turn out to be the case, it is, of course, a huge scandal.

This is the data table:

About the data

There are uncertainties in the above data. Mostly so because even though there is rather good (if also preliminary) data for the number of deaths, and the health care knows exactly how many vaccination doses they have given, it turned out to be hard to find exactly how many unvaccinated people there were!... The number of unvaccinated is the population size minus the number of vaccinated, but population data is apparently just an estimate.

But here, let me explain what I did, before presenting my conclusions below:

As I said, I wanted to know the overall, i.e. all-cause, mortality for vaccinated and unvaccinated respectively. This would give a robust measure of whether or not the vaccines have saved lives, and if so roughly how many, independent of differing definitions of what constitutes a "covid death" and other vagaries. Since both a death count and a vaccination count are so robust and straightforward, this also minimizes the risk of any human bias in collecting the data.

I chose England for my analysis, because someone tipped me off that their Office for National Statistics, ONS, publishes data over death numbers by vaccination status. They do so in a table looking like this:

That is the tab "Table 12" from the Excel file that can be downloaded here:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland?fbclid=IwAR3NI_xGROkmMEcyW48zKRffmVR2WNFJAxKcEsJhnkQBut9gSTAzh0q3GJs 

by clicking "Deaths occurring between 1 January and 31 December 2021 edition of this dataset".

Now, to find and compare the mortalities for the different groups, I needed to know how many people were in each group, vaccinated and unvaccinated respectively. I found such data by clicking "Download" here, on (the beautiful) date 2022-02-20:

That's the bottom graph on this UK Government page on COVID-19:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations?areaType=nation&areaName=England

(You have to choose "England" at the top of the page for this graph to appear.)

I downloaded the data in JSON format, and then converted it into an Excel file with some online converter, probably this one: https://www.convertcsv.com/json-to-csv.htm 

I noticed that this gave me the number of vaccinations given each day, plus the cumulative value on that day, and also the population size in each age group on that day. But when working with the data, I soon noticed that the population was exactly the same for every day of the year, in each age group. This obviously wasn't right, since every day people have birthdays, thus moving in and out of the age groups... As you can maybe see in the image above, they say: "For English areas, the denominator is the number of people aged 12 and over on the National Immunisation Management Service (NIMS) database." Why this is the same every day, I don't know. But anyway, if the UK Government felt it was good enough for them, I decided it was good enough for me!

But now, I encountered my first real problem. I had only the total death number for each group for the whole year, but people switched from unvaccinated to vaccinated during the year! Nicely illustrated in this BBC image:

So how could I know how many were in each group at the time of death? I.e. the denominator for the mortality.

I never found a complete solution to this problem. But unless I'm thinking wrong somehow, this is the effect I believe it will have:

If death numbers were evenly distributed over the whole year, it wouldn't be a problem at all. I just calculate the average size of each group over the year, and divide the death number in that group with that number.

However, deaths in our northern countries tend to congregate around the winter months, especially in the higher age groups. Therefore, for those groups that got vaccinated right by the end of winter, the mortality would be underestimated for the vaccinated, as they would have an unproportionally large share of summer months in the year in question. For those groups that got vaccinated just before the next winter, mortality would be overestimated for the vaccinated, as they would have an unproportionally large share of winter months in the year, and for those who got vaccinated in the middle of the summer, the mortality would be about right, as they would have the correct winter to summer months ratio. The error would also be small in the lower age groups, as their few deaths tend to be rather evenly distributed over the year.

Thus, I calculated the average size of the different groups over the year, by age and vaccination status, and used this as the denominator for the mortality. I.e. the number 166 for example, for unvaccinated 40-49 year-olds, means the whole-year mortality for unvaccinated 40-49 year-olds was 166 deaths per 100,000 (N.B. per 100,000 unvaccinated, not per 100,000 in the whole group of 40-49 year-olds).

The second problem that I wasn't really able to solve was the lowest age group. For one thing, ONS lumps together a very large group there! 10-39, to compare with all the other groups which have only 10 years in each group. It would be interesting to know the benefits for 10-19 year-olds and for 20-29 year-olds separately, but we don't have this data. For the other thing, the vaccine uptake data - and therefore the population size data - starts with the age group 12-15 year-olds... Thus, I am comparing the deaths for the group 10-39 year-olds with the population size of 12-39 year-olds. If, again, I'm not mistaken, this means that the mortality would be overestimated among the unvaccinated in this age group... because all the people aged 10-11 would be unvaccinated. Therefore, the real denominator for the unvaccinated group is bigger than in my calculations, which would give a smaller real mortality. On the other hand, the real denominator for the vaccinated group would be the same as the one I've used - including 10-11 year-olds wouldn't make a difference to the number of vaccinated.

I did find another ONS estimate of the population size of the 10-39 year-old group, here:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/populationestimatesforukenglandandwalesscotlandandnorthernireland 

That is the mid-2020 estimate, they say. But if I sum up the groups from 10 to 39 there, I get 21,358,326, which is smaller than the value 23,691,079 I got from the UK Government graph on vaccine uptake!... How can the population be 10% smaller, when I include 5% more ages? Has the population really grown that much since mid-2020, to whenever the NIMS took their data from?

I decided, in any case, to stick with the NIMS data given by the gov.uk page on vaccine uptake. But I did check, and even using the smaller denominator of the ONS mid-2020 data, the mortality is still slightly lower in the unvaccinated group than in the vaccinated group for this age group; 29 per 100,000 instead of 28 per 100,000 for unvaccinated, to be compared with 30 per 100,000 in the vaccinated group. However, as stated above, the real denominator should reasonably be larger than the NIMS data, not smaller, as the NIMS data is for the age group 12-39, not 10-39 as it should be.

Finally, we can note that the vaccination coverage in the very lowest age groups is only around 60%. It is reasonable to assume that the vaccine coverage is higher in the high-risk groups within this age group, than in the age group at large. This would give a higher mortality for the vaccinated, without indicating that the vaccines are at fault, as the high-risk individuals would have had a higher mortality in any case.

Conclusions

Let me repeat the images again, so that we have them at hand:

The  data indicates that the COVID-19 vaccines have indeed saved lives. Mortality in England in 2021 was 30 - 60% lower in the vaccinated groups than in the unvaccinated groups for ages 40 and above, with a bigger difference the higher the age.

This made a huge difference in the higher age groups, where mortality was high. In the 40-49 group, on the other hand, the mortality was very low in both groups. (You hardly see them in the first graph.) The 30% relative reduction in this group therefore corresponds to an only 0.04 percentage units of absolute reduction. (From 166/100,000 to 122/100,000, i.e. from 0.166% to 0.122% = 0.044 percentage units.)

However, in the large group of 10-39 year-olds, the data indicates that the vaccines may have taken more lives than they have saved - mortality was 9% higher among vaccinated. It is worth noting that this is based on "only" 6,831 deaths, of which 4,181 among the unvaccinated and 2,650 among the vaccinated. The difference may therefore not even be significant, in which case the only correct conclusion we can draw is that it doesn't matter to mortality if you are vaccinated or not, in this age group.

An analysis of the error sources in this group, however, gives at hand that the final number might be even more to the disadvantage of the vaccines than the above. This is primarily because the death numbers were given for the age group 10-39, but the population number was given for the age group 12-39. Since none of the 10-11 year-olds would be vaccinated, all in this age group would be in the unvaccinated population, thus lowering the mortality (deaths per 100,000) for the unvaccinated group even further. However, it might also be the other way around, that the vaccines have greater advantages in this group than this data has shown, as the higher mortality among the vaccinated may be caused by more high-risk individuals in this group.

In any case, it is unlikely that we will ever find any large positive effect of vaccinating the younger age groups, except maybe for the high-risk individuals. This because the risk from the disease COVID-19 in this age group, as the mortalities above confirm, is very near 0, and thus can't very well be lowered much further.

Final words

In this analysis, I have only differed between "vaccinated" and "unvaccinated", where "vaccinated" includes anyone who has had at least one injection of COVID-19 vaccine. Even though the majority of those who have had at least one injection have also had two or three injections, the result might be different if we compare the mortalities for the groups with more than one injection. This could go in either direction, as the protection against COVID-19 would increase with more injections, but so would likely also the risk of side-effects, including death.

ONS also has data over people who died within 21 days of an injection. Also this data might reveal results that differ from the above, but I have not looked into that at this point.

Comments and inputs are most welcome! I'll also be happy to send you my Excel files where I've made my calculations, on request.

If You Could Have Cancelled Hitler

“If you could have cancelled Hitler, and thus stopped his lies from inciting the hatred that lead to the Holocaust, wouldn’t you?”

 

This was a question that was asked in my Facebook group a while ago.

I think it’s wrongly asked. Because that’s not a realistic scenario!

 

Who is more likely to cancel others with the “wrong opinion”, Hitler or a non-Hitler? If Hitler could have cancelled everybody who didn’t share his views, wouldn’t he? Didn’t he? Didn’t he put political dissidents in those death camps?

 

“Yeah, but that’s not a problem if you only cancel things that are false!”, you may say. “Because true or false is not a matter of opinion, it’s objective.”

 

Is it, really? Don’t you think Hitler actually believed in his alternative world-view, in which the Arian race sprung from some forgotten deities, and the Jews were the root of all evil? When he cancelled all Jewish scientists and put his own Arian scientists there instead, who said, for instance, that the sun was made of ice, don’t you think he truly believed he got better science that way? He marched his army into Russia wearing summer uniforms in winter, because his Arian scientists had told him it would be such an extraordinarily mild winter in Russia that year!... Surely, he didn’t do this because he was longing for the utter humiliation that followed, when his soldiers froze to death? Surely, he believed that what his Arian scientists had told him was the truth!

 

So if somebody can be so thoroughly convinced that something that is actually false is true, whom can we trust to decide what is ok to cancel and what is not ok to cancel? Hitler would surely have cancelled all modern talk about “all people being equal” for instance, because according to him, that would be “false”. So would the statement “homosexuals are not a threat, and deserve to live a life in peace like everybody else” be.

 

 

Mark Zuckerberg is not a political leader, like Adolf Hitler was. Many people point this out when we talk about Freedom of Speech, that it only applies to governments. And it is true that the way that that human rights clause has often been incorporated in national laws, it mostly limits how government can stop anybody from speaking freely. However, back when those laws were written, and the Internet didn’t even exist, what was the greatest power of any nation? Probably the government. And what is now the greatest power? Facebook has nearly 3 billion unique monthly users. That’s more than one third of the population of the world… just saying. Now, Zuckerberg uses this, what used to be only a technical platform where people from all over the world could discuss whatever they wanted with each other, as his own gigantic propaganda machine for what he regards as true!...

 

Mark Zuckerberg happens to believe that Global Warming is a really dangerous thing, and that vaccines are the only way to stop COVID-19. So he cancels anybody who says differently. Anybody who even criticizes those two “truths” just a little bit, is cancelled on different levels. Posts are down-rated, attached with “additional information”, deleted, blocked from even being posted, sometimes leading to the user who posted them being suspended from Facebook and entire groups being deleted. One group that was deleted was “COVID19VACCINE VICTIMS AND FAMILIES” – a group where people who felt they had had side-effects of the vaccines could meet and share their own personal experiences.

 

And when I was trying to find the name of that group for this blog post, this was the result I got on Google:

 

All about how “false claims” and “misinformation” about COVID-19 vaccines are circulating on Facebook, and at the very top, a paid ad from the WHO with the “correct” information about the said vaccines.

 

And this is the result I got seconds later, on DuckDuckGo:

 

All the 3 first hits were related to exactly the piece of news I was looking for. Nobody believes that this is because DuckDuckGo is more competent at finding relevant information than Google is…

 

A prominent scientist, Dr. Judy Mikovits, famous for her groundbreaking achievements within the treatment of HIV/AIDS, gave an interview talking about COVID-19 and also about how she had already been going through a “judicial murder” for a discovery that she felt she had made years ago and which wasn’t popular. I found the video interview interesting and posted it on Facebook. It was deemed “Featuring unsupported and inaccurate information”. I read the fact-checkers’ comments, and found that the fourth claim that they “debunked” was when Dr. Mikovits said she was not anti-vaccine!... She said that her job is to work within immune therapy, and vaccines are a type of immune therapy, so she’s definitely not anti-vaccine. But the fact-checkers said that the type of immunotherapy that Dr Mikovits works within is different from the COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines that “anti-vaccine movements” are usually against… as if wanting to say that she actually IS anti-vaccine after all, or at least could be, despite her own statement to the contrary!... As if it’s not entirely up to her to declare if she is “anti-vaccine” or not! How can this be called “fact-check”?

 

Many of their other “debunks”, at least those that actually concern COVID-19, admit that there is a debate about the issue where Dr. Mikovits is giving her view, but that “most experts” or “the consensus” have a different view from hers. Something she, of course, never denied.

 

But isn’t this the kind of discussion we could have on equal terms? Dr Mikovits could give her views, Zuckerberg and his mates could give theirs, and everybody would get wiser in the process! Is it sound that Zuckerberg’s mates instead be given the status of “Bringers of The Truth”, while an expert within immunotherapy, with many years of experience on the highest level, be down-rated, deleted and banned for voicing an educated minority opinion? Because surely, if this is how little it takes for a claim to be labeled “false” or “misleading”, is there anybody in the world who can manage to actually give a completely “accurate” or “true” interview?... Can’t ANY statement that one person utters be deemed “misleading” by another, simply because it doesn’t lead to what that person feels we should focus on and talk about?

 

And isn’t this discussion about where facts and observations should lead us, exactly what Freedom of Speech is for? Isn’t this kind of public debate, on equal terms, what has long been held as the safest and most effective way to produce the best decisions, and isn’t that precisely why it is considered so crucial to our societies that most nations have chosen to protect it in their constitutions?

 

 

Hitler and his mates were clearly wrong about the Russian winter. This mistake largely lead to their demise. What if Zuckerberg is wrong about the best way to tackle COVID-19? What if Hydroxychloroquine, zinc, Ivermectin and vitamin D are actually much safer and more efficient treatments than rushed vaccines, and what if this minority opinion would have been able to become a majority opinion had it been given an equal opportunity to be heard on the platform that counts more than a third of the world as its users? How many people will then have died in vain, because it wasn’t given this equal opportunity?

 

 

Would I stop the Holocaust by cancelling Hitler if I could? Sure. But since, in reality, it’s much more likely that I will produce a Hitler and unnecessary mass-death with my cancel culture, I’m going to stick with the principle of Free Speech, instead. Because I still believe that Free Speech is the safest, most effective, most robust way for a society to reach at the best decisions. Anything that hampers Free Speech – be it a government that prohibits critical newspapers or brilliant nerds who truly want to save the world using their technical inventions as giant propaganda machines for their personal views – can only make this decision-making process less safe, less likely to lead to the best decisions, and thus more dangerous. Lies and harmful opinions have a much greater chance of gaining majority support in a world that accepts cancel culture than in a world that doesn’t.

Recipe for a Climate Alarm Article

I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like if I still believed in the climate threat... Then I would read articles like this one and try to find something meaningful in it. Perhaps even read it and believe that I HAD found something meaningful in it... until somebody asked! Then, I would go back to this article looking for the hard data of the impending catastrophe I thought I had read, and realize that the article doesn't have any.........

Their recipe is so classical:

First a title to imply that they really have lots of solid data to present to us, and an introduction that confidently claims that "The Earth is changing faster than at any point in human memory as a result of human-caused global heating".

Then, they say that the current warming started in the mid-1800s "when we began burning fossil fuels at an industrial scale", without mentioning that the CO2 emissions were minute up until the 1950s and 60s, when they exploded. The warming thus started long before any significant CO2 emissions, and the connection they want us to believe in is therefore false. But they didn't lie!...

After having made the false connection, they say what the greenhouse effect "causes hotter temperatures, rises in sea level, disruption to ecosystems and more extreme weather.

Scientists have forecast that if the world passes 2C of heating above pre-industrial levels, the consequences will be catastrophic for billions of people around the world." But this is just talk... No data has yet been presented!

Finally, after all this introduction, when the reader already has been told exactly what to expect, we go into the actual data... And what data do they have? A temperature increase of about 1 °C since the end of the Little Ice Age, CO2 rise, some modest ice loss and a sea level rise of 7 cm in 30 years (2.5 mm/yr, 25 cm/century)... No data over the beginning of the alleged eco-system disruption, the extreme weather or anything at all to indicate the impending catastrophic consequences for billions of people!

Surely, if such data existed, they would have been overjoyed to show them!... But of course, they don't. There IS no measurable increase in droughts, heavy rainfall, storms, tornadoes, forest fires, crop loss or ANYTHING that's bad and climate related... Instead, we have crop gains, a greening world, reducing poverty and improving human health and life length all around! The article, however, asserts that if the entire Antarctic icecap would melt, this would "prove catastrophic for global sea level rise"... carefully avoiding to mention that at the melt-off rate given – 150 gigatonnes/yr – this would take 177,000 years... That's almost two ice ages from now! Will people even be people at that time?

The Guardian ends their article with a little box saying "If there were ever a time to join us, it is now". Oh Guardian... I guess there wasn't ever a time to join you!

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2020/oct/05/climate-data-dashboard-carbon-atmosphere-sea-level-arctic-ice?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR1PFJxJQeEnfAc9dnxDWXjc4W9Npqo8Tbu6UBxcBkbiNGJshf3dA1mi32I 

Sea Level Rise Creating Refugees

All this talk about "sea level rise creating masses of refugees"...

Sea level rise is measured in millimeters per year. It is currently said to be very fast, at over 3 mm/yr... Well, say it's 4 mm, to make it extreme! That's 4 cm in a decade, 40 cm in a century. In a CENTURY!....

How many houses that people live in today are more than 100 years old? Very few, right? 40 cm of sea level rise means the sea line moves a number of meters inland. But the sea line already changes a lot, between high tide and low tide, normal tide and super full moon tide, not to mention storms that always happen now and then! Thus, nobody builds a house JUST by the water line. And thus, by the time it's time to demolish your house and build a new one, because the old one is approaching 100 years of age and is falling apart, you'll build your new house a few more meters inland and you'll be fine for another 100 years.

Even the worst, most extreme outcome of the worst, most extreme IPCC scenario, predicts less than 90 cm sea level rise in 100 years:



"But some countries are already below the sea level in large areas!", you may say. True, but they're managing, and we're still talking about a very small and slow change here. Plenty of time to adjust your strategies.

"But the sea rises faster in some areas than in others!", you may say. True. But even if it's 40 cm (or 90 cm) in 50 years instead of in 100 years, that's STILL plenty of time to adapt and move your buildings inland.

"But some countries, like Bangladesh or Djibouti, don't really have much room to move inland! They are already over-populated, and large parts of their territory will be lost if the sea rises!", you may say. Well, this is a very interesting argument, isn't it? Let's talk about that!

So we agreed that moving your house a few meters every 50 or 100 years is not really a big problem in itself, and certainly nothing that should be termed "fleeing". But what if that space is already occupied? What if the entire country is already full? Then, you would want to settle a few meters into the next country, wouldn't you? But you can't... because you're not a citizen there. So it seems to me that the real problem here is not actually the sea, but our human idea of "national territory". Had this slow sea level rise happened in the Stone Age, nobody would even have noticed it! Nobody would live long enough to see any change with their own eyes, and buildings didn't stand for more than a few years, anyway (if even). And of course, there were no countries! People kept moving around with the changing conditions all the time. In fact, since the last glacial maximum, around 18,000 years ago, the sea level is said to have risen with astonishing 130 m, and the Stone Age saw over 30 such glacials come and go. With every one of them, people would have had to move large distances. And if we didn't have national territories, we would, too!



The term "anthropogenic climate crises" gets a new meaning, doesn't it? Yes, we created the crisis, but not by changing the climate!... By building a rigid social structure that cannot handle a changing climate. So wouldn't it be fair to discuss changing the system as a way to solve the problem? Instead of sending billions of dollars to countries for lowering or not increasing their CO2 emissions, maybe we could discuss a system of land sharing? That if the sea has eaten 20 square kilometers of a country, this could be shared between the nearby inland countries, so that the net loss will be maybe just 2 square kilometers or so instead?

"But this will never happen!", you may say. If so, I must object that this argument falls rather flat, if at the same time, you want to stop climate change...! THAT, if anything, will never happen! But let alone climate change, even just the idea of the entire world stopping using fossil fuels while they are still abundant, cheap and easily available is something I could easily argue "will never happen!"... but alarmists still invest a lot of money and efforts into this, don't they! Why the preference for one 'impossible thing' over another? If you think about it, 'countries' are something that has only existed for a split second in the history of humanity; There's nothing saying that this system will necessarily be the one prevailing to the end of time. And fossil fuels, on the other hand, save lives. With their help, some regions in the world have doubled or tripled their life length, and cut child mortality down to a fraction of what it used to be... But that's the thing you say we will give up more easily?

Obviously, it would be much more convenient for us all if the sea level stayed exactly where it is, no doubt about that. And so, if indeed human activities affect the sea level, then this is something that should be factored in, when we decide on our line of action. However, I say "factored in", because as mentioned, there are other factors! The extended life length and reduced child mortality must be factored in, too! The questions we must ask ourselves are therefore e.g. "Is it better for Djibouti that the sea level stays exactly where it is, and they remain on a life expectancy of 67 years and a child mortality of 57 per 1,000? Or indeed, that the latter values worsen? Or is it better that they use fossil fuels to reach Swedish style life expectancy of 83 years and child mortality of 3 per 1,000, and then solve the possible land problem if and when it happens some several hundred years into the future?"

And in any case, just because sea level rise could, indeed, become an inconvenience in some places, this does not in any way justify the alarmist and greatly misleading talk of "masses of refugees"!... There won't be any masses of refugees as a consequence of sea level rise. There could only possibly be problems with over-population of certain areas as national territories shrink, which could be solved by a more pragmatic approach to national territories, or indeed by the use of levees and other technologies, as is already happening in e.g. the Netherlands and New Orleans.

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Further reading:

The Poor and Fossil Fuels, 2021-04-06

The Poor and Fossil Fuels

I’m from Sweden, but I’ve spent a large number of years in Kenya, where I first came to work with biogas and do my share in saving the world. I now have two children with a Kenyan man. I hear them playing in the next room as I write this, here in beautiful Chaka, Nyeri, by the foot of Mount Kenya.

I first came to Kenya in 2005, 27 years old, as a part of my master project for Chalmers University of Technology. They had allowed me to start my master project early because of how very motivated I was. Once here, it immediately started changing my perspectives. Since then, it’s like a whole new universe has opened up in my mind… I really recommend it to anyone! For the first time, I could look at my own Western culture from the outside, and that’s the only way you can really see it. “I can imagine fish have no word for ‘water’”, as Terry Pratchett had a character say, in his book Small Gods. One major thing that I thus came to realize about my culture is this:

We have forgotten that money means lives!

In Sweden, we look down on money as something filthy and corrupting, I came to see. To us, it’s a matter of how many cars you can have, and how often you can buy a new mobile phone. Things to brag about to your neighbors, making them jealous. But “money can’t buy you happiness”, we say. I once told a Swede that in Kenya, they truly believe that it can, and the Swede annoyed me a bit by expressing ridicule for the silly Kenyans… But who is silly, really? Because for the great majority of people in the world, money is not about cars and mobile phones!... It’s about how long you live, and how many children you lose.

On Our World in Data, you can see an amazing animated map of how life expectancy has changed in the world over time, all the way back from 1543 (although it was only the UK that apparently collected such data at that time). The color codes start from 20 – 30 years, and amazingly, as late as the 1950s, several countries in especially Africa were still in this category! Many more were in the 30 – 40 years category, as were both Sweden and the US back in the 1800s:

Here is a chart with some of the countries, as well as the world:

We can see that the US was a good half century before the world in surpassing a life expectancy of 50 years. Then, Japan caught up with them and surpassed them, despite their disastrous dip of the atomic bombs in WW2. India and Kenya are slightly behind the average but coming strongly. Kenya has a tragic recession from what I assume is HIV/AIDS starting in 1991, and when I first came here in 2005, life expectancy was still below 55 years, which I remember shocked me and grieved me. Little did I imagine what a remarkable recovery she was to make in the one and a half decades that followed!

The interesting thing about this chart is that, apart from the blows from such things as the atomic bombs and HIV/AIDS, it could almost have been a chart over CO₂ emissions, couldn’t it? The two look almost the same! Rising at almost the same time, in almost the same rate…

Our World in Data also has a report called:

The world’s energy problem
Without cheap, safe, low-carbon energy sources at scale we are stuck between the alternatives of high greenhouse gas emissions and energy poverty

Here is a quote from the summary:

“The energy problem that receives most attention is the link between energy access and greenhouse gas emissions. But the world has another global energy problem that is just as big: hundreds of millions of people lack access to sufficient energy entirely, with terrible consequences to themselves and the environment.”

Here is one of the graphs from the report, showing the correlation between CO₂ emissions and GDP:

And here is a part of another image, showing the link between GDP and Life Expectancy, as well as with Child Mortality:

GDP on the x axis, Life expectancy and Child mortality on the respective y axis.
From: https://ourworldindata.org/worlds-energy-problem?country= part of the 4th graphic from the top.

The correlation is quite undeniable, isn’t it?

But when talking with especially the Green Party members in Sweden, where I have many friends since I was a member there myself for 18 years, they often categorically deny that the burning of fossil fuels has had anything to do with this extraordinary and unprecedented boom in life-length seen in the past few hundred years. They say that it’s the discovery of penicillin and other modern medicine that is behind most of it. But tell me, how would that explain the above differences between the countries then? Isn’t penicillin equally discovered in Kenya as it is in the US, yet Kenyans still live 15 years shorter? Why do 21 countries still have a life expectancy below 60 years, and why are almost all of them in Africa? The bottom record is held by Central African Republic, with a life expectancy of only 51 years.

To put it in yet another way, here is a screenshot from an excellent presentation called “200 Years of Global Change” by Hans Rosling, the famous Swedish “statistician entertainer”, at the IPCC’s release of their 2013 report AR5, in Stockholm:

Video: “Hans Rosling – 200 years of global change”, Stockholm, Sept 28, 2013, https://youtu.be/grZSxoLPqXI

He shows the population from the poorest billion on the left to the richest billion on the right. Then, underneath, he has put how much energy each billion utilize in a year, and of what kind. The black blocks are fossil carbon fuels, coal, oil etc. Purple is nuclear energy, green is biofuels and orange is solar and wind power. “The halo of the rich”, as Rosling commented when placing this tiny little block on top of the richest billion’s stack. Over the energy blocks, Rosling then places seven white blocks symbolizing the seven million children under the age of 5 dying each year. (I can console you that this number has gone down significantly since then. It’s now “only” around 5.5 million per year (although even this number puts the <3 million COVID-19 deaths in a new perspective, doesn’t it?).) As you can see, the child deaths make a curve exactly mirroring the energy consumption curve. Rosling’s comment, at timestamp 16:24 in the video is:

“If you burn coal, you save children. Did you hear?... You burn coal – you save children.”

His words, not mine. Worth noting is that the late Hans Rosling was a firm believer that climate change was a major threat to humanity, and his presentation starts with him praising the new IPCC report. He thus draws this conclusion about the use of fossil fuels and child deaths very much in spite of his personal conviction on climate change, not in line with it. These are the best conclusions, since if at all he is biased, his bias would be directed the other way and thus couldn’t be the cause of this conclusion, as is otherwise so very common in the world.

Just the other week, one of my Green Party friends posted on Facebook a link to some article claiming that the combustion of oil was behind some 20% of all deaths in the world. I commented that this was a greatly unfair way of putting it, as the same oil had also saved so many especially children’s lives, and expanded our life expectancy so much. In fact, how many of those people that the oil allegedly killed would have even been alive at that time, if it hadn’t been for that same oil? How many would have died decades earlier, or not even been born, as their parents would have died before the age of 5? The poster found this too dumb to even respond to (he later revealed), but another Green Party friend of ours picked up the ball and said you can’t reason that way. It wasn’t the oil in itself that saved all those people, it was just the energy. If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened, but without the negative effects that the oil brings.

And of course, I had no objections to this! If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened. But first of all, this does not take away the fact that it still was the oil (and the coal and the gas) that did bring about these positive effects, in the real scenario that actually happened. The “other energy source” scenario is interesting but hypothetical. It didn’t happen that way. So to fairly gauge the effects of fossil fuels on human health, we must evaluate the different aspects by themselves: How much energy do they bring? How easily accessible is the energy? How much does it cost? How practical is it to handle? How clean is it? And how many lives does a certain amount of accessible, cheap and easy-to-handle energy save? How many lives does the pollution take? I haven’t made careful calculations on this, but just looking at the charts above, as well as Rosling’s presentation, it is clear without a shadow of a doubt to me that fossil fuels have saved a great many more lives than they have taken, and that they still do. If you burn coal, you save children.

(It’s funny to remember what a novel thought this was to me, when some probably right-wing sympathizer first pointed it out to me some two decades ago… He said that most things had actually become better and better in the world in the 1900s. Poverty had reduced and health and life-length improved, etc. So how bad could the oil be?... I almost doubted this, at first! In my world-view, people were living shorter and shorter because of environmental destruction and pollution, and they were becoming poorer and poorer because of oppression and inequality in the world… This was the impression I had gotten from my leftist and environmentalist parents and friends. But I looked into the data, and slowly, little by little, I came to accept it. I still want to limit pollution mind you! Especially since much of it accumulates. Thus with time, the bad effects increase more than the good effects. But I had to change my perspective that industrialism was an almost pure evil, to that it was actually an immense and almost pure blessing.)

My second objection to the “other energy source” scenario must be that even if we could go back in time, say, and with our current knowledge about the dirtiness of oil and other carbon fuels try some alternative energy source, it is far from certain that this would even work. The Green Party friend promoted wind power as a great alternative “more reliable than nuclear energy” etc (which he justified in a very funny way). Well, Elsa* has already, in other parts of this book, talked about wind power and its environmental and health problems. In the context of poverty and life-length however, the most important aspect of it is probably that it fluctuates all the time. Every hour and every day, the output from wind power is different from another hour and another day, not just for the single plant but also for all of Sweden, for example. This is, of course, an impossible situation for any kind of industry. Thus, industrialization could definitely not have happened the way it did, with just swapping fossil fuels for wind power! For industrialization to be able to work on wind power alone, we would need techniques for energy storage and power transmission over large distances for smoothing of the fluctuations, that even today are not invented.

I will translate this pic... but anyway, it's a graph by the Swedish Power Grid showing the production of wind power in Sweden for two recent winters.

But let us leave the past: Could we transition to a renewable-energy based industrialism from this day forward? And could those countries that are still hustling on a life expectancy of some 50, 60 years do the rest of their much desired life-length expansion and child death reduction based on these new energy sources? Well, we would hope so, wouldn’t we. But fact remains that these techniques are not there yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing my best to spread the biogas technology here in Kenya! This already has the potential of saving many lives here in a short time. Just the smoke from cooking fires with firewood and charcoal is estimated to kill some 22,000 Kenyans every year, many of whom are children. (COVID-19 has now killed around 2,000 Kenyans as of 28 March 2021, just as a comparison. The population is 50 million.) Biogas burns without smoke or soot and is thus harmless for the lungs. It also gives an excellent organic fertilizer which preserves the soil, and since it takes much less time to maintain the digester than the collection of firewood takes, it can give especially women the chance to find some form of income, thus reducing poverty. Solar panels are also big here, especially in such remote areas where no power grid is expected in yet another 10 or so years. This helps children study in the evenings – another very important factor for reducing poverty. And money means lives, as we recall.

But all of this is still on a low level of development. What really boosts GDP and thus life length is large-scale industrialism, and as stated, this cannot yet be achieved on solar and wind power, and certainly not on biogas, since there just isn’t enough feed material around to produce enough biogas for this. Biogas is great for household solutions and small businesses, but not a solution for industry. Millions of brilliant engineers are out there right now working on solutions for a future industry based on renewable energy, but let’s face it:

With every year that industrialism and economic growth delays, children die. Young and middle-aged people die.



I’m a stout environmentalist. I love nature and I care for the world. I changed my entire life once to save it, when moving from Sweden to Kenya. But our ambitions to save the world should not be based on lies. Don’t tell me that the combustion of oil takes more lives than it saves, when this is not true. Don’t tell me it’s a piece of cake; we can just do it all on renewable energy instead, when the necessary techniques for this, despite our best efforts, are not yet invented.

And we may never invent them. It is possible that the golden age for humanity has already passed. When we finally do run out of fossil fuels (and rare metals and other finite materials that we use), it is possible that our industries will be less economical and efficient all over, and that life will be harder and shorter again as a result. We may never reach the era of Star Trek, and whatever we might want to believe in this regard is irrelevant. In the meantime, let us boldly look with open eyes at what we do know. Which is that fossil fuels save more lives than they take, certainly before we factor in climate change. So many of my friends and former political colleagues – as well as celebrity Greta Thunberg – talk as if it is just sheer stupidity that stops people from simply ending the use of fossil fuels, right now! Greta pronounces the words “money” and “economic growth” in her speech to the UN as if they were the dirtiest words she knows. (But at least she refuses to believe that her audience is evil, which is sweet of her!) Well, here’s the news for Greta and all of her Western World followers:

People are neither evil, nor stupid. They just want to live, that’s all. And fossil fuels save lives. Look no further: This is the reason why it is so hard to give up fossil fuels, even though most leaders now say they want to. Even if we believe that climate change might lead to disasters some time in a distant future – which I personally don’t – it would still be extremely hard for the people alive today to want to sacrifice their own lives, and the lives of their own children right now, for the sake of some other children some time in the future.

It would help us all if my fellow environmentalists would follow in Hans Rosling’s admirable footsteps and just accept this, the tremendous upside of the fossil fuels. Without necessarily giving up their criticism of them in other respects! From there, we could start discussing the best way forwards. A discussion based on reality, not on some hypothetical alternative scenario that may sound ever so pleasant, but which isn’t real.

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* Elsa Widding. This text is going to be a chapter in her book, The Climate Circus, which I'm currently translating.

New Green Perspectives

“Despite knowing that life is so much more than money and gold
I fall in line like a good boy, and close my eyes to my guilt and others’
My heart is heavy and my head is bent, my steps echo grey and empty
The snow lies black and toxic on the roofs
I turn on my TV and sleep it off

And when the acid rain falls, I put up my umbrella…”

http://dfg.rosnix.net/musik/det_sura_regnet/

A freely translated song by The Lost Generation that I fell in love with when first I heard it. It’s so heavy and melancholic! It captured so well the feeling I had...

I have later realized that this is the lefties’ idea of how rich people are, or the greenies’ idea of how “normal people” are… and that they’re wrong. The rich or normal are not closing their eyes to any guilt. They’re not FEELING any guilt!... It is these “progressive” people’s idea that they SHOULD be feeling guilt, and so they wrongly assume that they do. The progressives also feel this guilt, themselves, and so naturally – but wrongly – expand their feeling to all of human kind.

Our hearts were heavy and our heads bent… not theirs. And I truly, genuinely believed that this depended on them closing their eyes to reality!... Because I felt that this was how it had happened for me… That one day, I opened my eyes to all the misery in the world, and all the pain came gushing in… and ever since that day, I was carrying all the grief of the world. Those who didn’t hadn’t yet opened their eyes.

But you know what, it doesn’t have to be that way! Because I still have my eyes open to all the misery in the world… but my heart is not heavy and my head not bent! It is a fantastic world we’re living in! And an absolutely fantastic time!... Sure, there’s lots of misery in the world, but it’s only a tiny, tiny part of it. And most of it is actually part of life, part of nature, part of what makes life so fantastic! Death, for instance. Suffering, dangers and death are parts of nature, and included in the things that make life fantastic. But just look at how much we have actually reduced these, over the last few hundred years!... We humans defy nature by having a survival-rate to adult age of more than 50%!... This is unmatched. In Sweden, this rate is over 99%... which is insane. And fantastic!

And if you look at it that way, there is of course no reason at all to grieve. On the contrary, these are times for celebration.

The funny thing is that you seem to have surpassed me in grieving, now!... This was NOT a development I saw coming 10 years ago, that I can tell you! But now, you “normal people” are walking around feeling guilt over the climate and are all worked up over Covid-19!... You think it’s a tragedy that 200,000 Americans – most of them already near their deaths – have died in Covid-19, and you think I’m cold and lacking of empathy because I don’t. But how could I, when I’ve already been aware for over a decade that 20,000 children die every day from poverty, and I’ve found peace with that knowledge? That’s 7 million dead children every year, and pretty much ALL those deaths could have been prevented if resources had been there… I used to feel THAT was a tragedy… but I’ve gotten over it! I’ve realized that 20,000 per day, in a population of 8 billion, is after all extremely little. No other organisms have a youngling mortality that low! People never had it before. 200 years ago, more than half of all children died before they were 5 years old.

Also, I’ve lived for several years now in a country where the child mortality is skyrocketing compared to Sweden, and I can see that it doesn’t mean that people are walking around suffering. Quite the opposite! They have much more peace and happiness in their everyday life than the Swedes have. I would have gladly lived here the rest of my life, if they only hadn’t harassed me so much for my white skin.

And so it appears to me that the great tragedy is not death, but the modern Westerners’ attitude to death. Which probably springs from the fact that we have too little death in our lives, rather than too much. Had we had more of it, we would be wise enough not to grieve so much, but instead to celebrate every day that we are alive.

I’ve become like the guy in the song, who puts up his umbrella when the acid rain falls. But I don’t close my eyes, I don’t bend my head and I don’t grieve!... My eyes are completely open,
as I’m singing
and dancing
in the rain.

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Read also:

How I've changed in my foundation over the last few years, July 30, 2018

The terrorism in France and me, Nov 17, 2015

Karolina and the Climate, July 20, 2015

A small bubble of peace and harmony, Oct 31, 2015