Editors at Issues and Insights offer a warning about the latest frightening idea from the elite class.
From the world’s largest gathering of hypocrites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, we have learned that a personal carbon footprint tracker is in the works. In the wrong hands, it would be the equivalent of the ankle monitors used to ensure that criminal offenders don’t escape their house arrest.
“We’re developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their whole carbon footprint,” J. Michael Evans, president of Alibaba Group USA, said Tuesday while on a panel discussion on responsible consumption. “What does that mean? Where they are traveling. How they are traveling. What are they eating. What they are consuming on the platform.”
This will excite the virtue signalers who will be happy to post their carbon footprint scores on social media. But for the rest of us, those still wishing to live freely, who don’t want elites establishing the limits of “responsible consumption,” it’s deeply troubling.
Evans described the tracker as if it were just another way for people to keep up with their activities – like a smart watch that monitors health.
But the existence of the technology plays straight into the hands of the wrong people, which in the developed world is roughly half of all elected officials and nearly all of the regulators and bureaucrats of the administrative state. Don’t think that they will decline the opportunity to someday require, in the name of saving the climate, each of us to have a carbon footprint tracker so that our lives can be monitored, and our behavior adjusted as needed. …
… It’s inevitable that the elites-governmental industrial complex will use technology to control the growing number of smart devices in our lives. … It will be their pleasure to continue to increase their authority over our lives.
