Al Gore in China: “Efficiency is the Number One Solution” Praises Their “Unusual Success”

““We have to tell our children that they must redefine their relationship to the sky, and they must begin to think of the sky as a threatening part of their environment.” – Al Gore.

 

Al Gore, the man formerly the next President of the United States (as he likes to joke), is currently in China attending the Global Urban Development Forum on ways to tackle global warming and other ‘related issues,’ reports Bloomberg.

Addressing the forum in Beijing, Gore praised the communist dictatorship for their “unusual success” and stressed that when it comes to tackling global warming “efficiency is the number one solution”.

Gore applauded the way China had taken a “strategic approach” to addressing global warming, and called on the United States and other nations to emulate them, saying that redesigning cities in an ‘eco-friendly’ manner would be the “number one solution”

“We have to change our thinking and adopt a strategic approach and the United States and China could do no better than to focus on cities as the principle venue in which these changes can be made,”

AFP News-Wire Service, Al Gore Urges China, US to Build Greener Cities

As Alex Jones reported recently, the design of “eco-friendly” cities is one of the new hot topics being discussed as a “number one solution” to global warming. Forum for the Future, a London-based organization that advises governments as well as multi-national corporations has produced a short video to explain it’s vision of this ideal city of the future, complete with calorie-ration cards and carbon allowances:

Am I the only one who gets creeped-out by the way these people always have to talk like this? In terms of “efficiency” and “number one solution”? Maybe. But as John Dewey pointed out years ago, ideas have consequences.

To take just one example. Al Gore’s praise of the Chinese dictatorship’s approach to tackling global warming reminds me of what is still a little-known fact: that China’s “one-child” policy was launched as a direct result of the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” 1972 manifesto for the world.

As Columbia University professor, Susan Greenhalgh has extensively documented, Chinese scientists used the warnings and projections of the “Limits to Growth” manifesto to impose their one-child policy, including forced abortions up to nine months, and forced sterilizations:

In 1978-89 the Song Group used the COR [Club of Rome] notion of an “optimal population” determined by its environmental “carrying capacity,” as well as control theory, to perform two sets of crucial calculations . . . Their quantitative research showed that the “only solution” was a policy to encourage all couples to have one child beginning immediately, regardless of the cost to individuals and society.

Professor Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China.

You might think – “Yeah, that was awful, but China’s not as brutal now as it was in the past. I mean, even people like Al Gore are praising their approach to solving global warming these days”. But news reports from November 2010 show that China’s “efficiency” still extends to tactics such as kidnapping relatives and holding them in detention centres until pregnant mothers come in for abortions and forced sterilizations, as women’s magazine Marie Claire revealed recently in an investigative report:

Wei, a bird-thin woman with bobbed hair, let lunch burn on the stove as she heard more. “My husband said we had broken the law by having two children. The authorities were imprisoning his brother until we were punished,” she says. “As soon as I learned it was about birth control , I began to cry and shake.” Family-planning officials in the southern county of Puning, in Guangdong province, were going to shocking new extremes to catch and punish violators of the country’s infamous one-child policy: They were seizing family members of women who had given birth illegally and were holding them hostage. The aim? To coerce the women into submitting to sterilization. Says Wei, “The officials said there was only one way to get my brother-in-law released: I had to undergo forced sterilization.”

Marie Claire: “This woman Was Forced to Be Sterilized: What Would You Do?”

As Donna Laframboise has observed, such shocking revelations are made even more chilling when we remember that Ted Turner, Chairman of the UN Foundation, called for the world to follow China’s example at the recent Cancun Summit on global warming:

Mr. Turner – a long-time advocate of population control – said the environmental stress on the Earth requires radical solutions, suggesting countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. He added that fertility rights could be sold so that poor people could profit from their decision not to reproduce.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ted-turner-urges-global-one-child-policy-to-save-planet/article1825977/

It’s interesting that the same phrase runs throughout all these comments from those at the forefront of global warming -“Only solution” / “radical solution” / “Number one solution” /”Final Solution” (okay, I added that last one). Perhaps the “solution” they have in mind is a climate tax on children?

Planned cities, optimum populations, carrying capacity, sustainable development. These are all euphemisms with no real scientific content, only ideological content.

But then, ultimately, ideological content is “the number one solution”.

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