(LifeSiteNews) — A plan to accelerate population collapse and redistribute global wealth is quietly being pushed by the globalist-backed Club of Rome, which declared in 1991 that our “real enemy” “is humanity itself.”
The Earth4All initiative, launched in 2020 at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is marketed with an innocent sheen, as if to children: a colorfully animated video explaining the impetus behind Earth4All cites a desire to end poverty earlier, lessen “social tensions,” and minimize climate change impacts.
But it is plain to see, even in this carefully crafted video, that what is being espoused is a global socialist or communist government, a monumental affront to human freedom and prosperity as well as national sovereignty. The Earth4All video reveals this when it proposes a “Citizens’ Fund for each country, where companies pay to use our commons, the wealthiest contribute fairly, and the funds are distributed to all citizens equally.”
“We need a global movement kicked off with citizens’ assemblies,” the video adds, seemingly attempting to warm the viewer to the idea by suggesting that such global governance will be democratic.
The video’s childlike facade attempts to sugarcoat a perverse, ultimately anti-human agenda that can be summed up in a 1991 report issued by The Club of Rome, titled “The First Global Revolution,” discussed earlier this year by LifeSiteNews reporter Frank Wright:
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.
While Earth4All downplays the role of population decline in its plan, accelerating such decline is naturally a key part of the agenda of those who see humanity as the “enemy.” One would think they would be pleased enough that the world is already on an auto-pilot trajectory towards population collapse, the economic effects of which even the World Economic Forum (WEF) has admitted will be “severe.”
Yet the Club of Rome, through its Earth4All plan, aspires to a faster, even more extreme population collapse. The plan seeks an added 81% reduction in childbirths by the year 2100 — that is, 24 million births per year by 2100 instead of 53 million births per year. This is to be achieved at least in part through increased access to education, especially for women; health care; and contraception, according to those behind the plan.
One naturally wonders: How can an initiative that claims to seek humanity’s well-being support exacerbated economic decline?
Earth4All is anti-economic growth
Earth4All proponents don’t bat an eyelash about such decline, because they view it — disturbingly — as necessary for a better future. The project champions what it calls “degrowth,” that is, a reduction in resources consumed, such as food and energy sources. In fact, one of the strongest beliefs behind Earth4All is that economic growth is detrimental to society.
Sandrine Dixson-Decleve, the project lead of Earth4All and co-president of the Club of Rome, declared during the Beyond Growth 2023 Conference that “the obsession with economic growth is clearly failing the majority of people,” claiming that such growth is incompatible with strong democracies. According to Dixson-Decleve, “the most important thing we can do right now is invest in social cohesion,” and “at the heart of that is human wellbeing, economic security and ecological resilience … not growth.”
In fact, a website devoted to the conference goes so far as to criticize the European Union’s flagship initiative, the European Green Deal, for being “ill equipped to address the interlinks between the ecological imperative and the reduction of socio-economic inequalities.” Why? Because it “relies on a green growth-centered approach which unrealistically assumes that it is possible to simultaneously sustain economic growth while improving environmental sustainability and social justice.”
Thus, Earth4All is anti-growth at its core. However, its supporters stress the fact that such an anti-growth worldview, with respect to both population and economics, is (supposedly) in service of higher goods, namely sustainability, equity, and “social cohesion.”
This idea of positive “degrowth” stems from another fundamental tenet of Earth4All: that economic inequality, which is assumed to be worsened by economic growth, in turn causes one of the worst societal evils, “social tension.” Therefore, resource consumption needs to be flattened and leveled by the force of a socialist world government (hence, the above-mentioned Citizens’ Funds).
The plan’s advocates admit that population growth alone will not overtax the earth’s resources, perhaps because the Club of Rome has already failed in its simulations of the future contained in its 1972 report “The Limits to Growth,” which all “invariably end[ed] in collapse,” a scathing New York Times commentary on the report noted at the time.
As the Times pointed out, the models used by the report’s researchers put “arbitrary” limitations on technological progress that interfered with their predictions for the earth’s “carrying capacity.” It would be like applying the capabilities of the 1880s to that of the 1970s: “ … as British editor Norman Macrae has observed, an extrapolation of the trends of the 1880s would show today’s cities buried under horse manure,” the Times noted.
Global wealth redistribution
Instead of emphasizing the need for population reduction, Earth4All proponents stress wealth redistribution and the importance of reduced and altered consumption patterns, particularly by those in more prosperous nations.
Earth4All’s 2023 working paper declares that according to all of its simulations for a “Too Little Too Late” future scenario and an “ideal” scenario, the “Great Leap,” “the primary issue is not overpopulation in comparison with available resources, but rather the current (too) high consumption levels among the world’s richest quarter. Or, put even more concisely: humanity’s main problem is distribution rather than population.”
“Therefore, we would argue that the most appropriate and important measure to reach a long-term sustainable global population is a strongly progressive taxation, targeting primarily the richest elements of the global population,” the paper continues.
It is only by such wealth redistribution from richer to poorer countries that the plan can claim to aim to “eliminate poverty.”
The working paper elaborates on other elements of this global socialist vision, proposing “An international corporation tax (agreed in 2021)” that “provides additional income for redistribution and investment by active governments seeking common prosperity.”
It also proposes that “More countries adopt a Universal Basic Income (or similar) to provide economic security and help fight inequality, particularly as a stimulus during major shocks.”
This is madness. It is delusional enough to think that the world will be better off without economic growth, and misanthropic enough to want to worsen population collapse. But its deeply socialist ideology further guarantees more human misery. As the real world has borne out, socialism harms everyone.
Most fundamentally, this is because, as the English journalist John Strachey (1860-1927) noted, socialism diminishes the world’s total wealth, meaning “there will be less to go round, and, therefore, the share of each person will be less. That is, Socialism would injure instead of benefiting the poor.”
As Angelica Walker-Werth has pointed out, its harms are compounded by the fact that socialism diminishes all of society’s incentive to work. This doesn’t take a genius to understand. “However hard you work, whatever you achieve, whatever value you create — it won’t be reflected in your earnings,” she noted.
And at its core, such policies are immoral, because to enforce them, governments must control people’s property, “whether by fully nationalizing businesses, mandating what and how much a company must produce, or seizing and distributing their products — thereby violating people’s right to the product of their own effort,” Walker-Werth observed.
In addition to wealth redistribution, Earth4All envisions a dramatic transformation of agriculture/food systems, as well as energy usage. Its 2023 working paper shows its plan will require very sharp drops in carbon emissions (necessary in order to achieve its goal of zero net emissions by 2050), and that it seeks to “electrify almost everything.” The plan also calls for an “end to agricultural expansion against nature” with the help of farming techniques that use less fertilizer, and for a “transformation to healthy diets,” which are to include “grass-fed livestock and new proteins.”
A shared globalist vision
Earth4All’s goals might be dismissed if they were not supported by powerful figures and organizations. These include significant portions of the European Union (EU). For instance, the European Economic and Social Committee, a consultative body of the EU, put its weight behind the Beyond Growth 2023 Conference, as did 20 Members of European Parliament (MEP) who supported it, including organizer MEP Philippe Lamberts (Greens/EFA).
It is noteworthy that the Earth4All plan deliberately dovetails with the UN’s Sustainable Development goals and the European Commission’s European Green Deal. As Dixson-Decleve noted during the Beyond Growth 2023 Conference, Earth4All’s “Great Leap” plan aims to utilize “a small set of actions … to reach as many Sustainable Development Goals and Europe’s vision of a social and green region.” That is, it seeks to meet both UN and EU goals for a sustainable future.
Pope Francis, who is considered to be one of the world’s most influential people, has also expressed support for Earth4All goals, which are echoed in his encyclical Laudato Si. Earth4All has produced a documentary, aired on Wednesday, called “Earth4All and the World of the Pope,” showing that Earth4All’s vision is shared by Pope Francis and showcasing his encounter with Dixson-Decleve and other Earth4All supporters.
According to Earth4All’s website, the documentary “aims to reveal the convergence of scientific evidence, the activists’ objectives, and the Pope’s vision — driving towards a unique goal: to awaken global consciousness and urge governments to take bold action for a just ecological transition.”
Dixson-Decleve emphasized in the documentary that Earth4All’s goals align with those of Francis, not just on the issue of climate change and sustainability, but even more importantly (in her eyes), on the question of economic “equality.”
“[Francis] has continuously indicated that we must actually work together to shift from extractive economies and to service people, most importantly focusing on poverty and inequality. This is very much what Earth4all indicates,” Dixson-Decleve said.
“Across our book what we are saying is that it’s the social tensions, it’s the tensions between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ that are going to be the most explosive. That will be our greatest demise and our greatest risk for the survival of humanity, even more than our planetary boundaries and the issues that we see around climate change.”
Francis affirmed the initiative’s vision during a private audience with Dixson-Decleve and other Earth4All supporters, telling them that our current state of affairs “requires a change of course, a decisive shift in the current model of consumption and production, all too often entrenched in a throwaway and indifferent culture, towards both the environment and people.”
Apart from the influence of secular groups, Dixson-Decleve and Per Espen Stoknes, the co-author of Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity, see Francis’ support as a great bolster to their movement, not only because of his sway with Catholics but because of his work with the leaders of other faith groups.
Dixson-Decleve pointed out that Francis “has tried to bring different religions together in order to underpin the key messages of our common home.”
Even heavily secular, mainstream media platforms have sought to leverage Francis’ exhortations, as expressed in Laudato Si, to work toward a more sustainable world as well as “global equality.” Just last year, YouTube released an original film titled “Pope Francis, the Environmental Crisis, and Frontline Leaders,” which framed care of the environment as an integral part of all religions, and pointed out the first major meeting between the faiths with “the major environmental groups” was in 1986 at Assisi.
Calls for global wealth redistribution and more “sustainable” standards of living are apparently being issued from a disturbingly influential cohort of international bodies, media and activist groups, and religious leaders, especially Francis. Citizens everywhere must respond with a firm “no” to global socialism before it’s too late.