By Daisy Luther

There’s a brand new way to save the planet, and a group of professors from Oxford University wants to force the issue by assessing enormous taxes on foods said to have higher “climate impact.”

To make a long story short, they want to force everyone who doesn’t have a high income to become vegan by taxing the living daylights out of animal products. If you think your grocery bill is out of control now, just you wait if these scientists get their way.

By taxing items like beef by 40%, dairy products and poultry by 20%, and certain vegetable oils, the planet will be saved.

Forty percent.

That means a pound of ground beef that now costs $6 would cost $8.40. A gallon of organic milk would also go up by $2-3, depending what you pay now. The financial impact would be massive. Average humans won’t be able to afford to eat much besides beans and rice.

In a study dated November 7th, 2016, the Oxford Martin School, part of Oxford University, suggested a system of taxation to discourage people from buying and eating certain foods. The scientists suggested that the foods which contribute the most to the anthropogenic global warming, the man-made-global-warming-turned-climate change that we hear so much about, will be taxed at a higher rate. The report states:

“Emissions pricing of foods would generate a much needed contribution of the food system to reducing the impacts of global climate change,” said Dr Marco Springmann of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, who led the study. “We hope that’s something policymakers gathering this week at the Marrakech climate conference will take note of.”

Much of the emissions reduction would stem from higher prices and lower consumption of animal products, as their emissions are particularly high. The researchers found that beef would have to be 40% more expensive globally to pay for the climate damage caused by its production. The price of milk and other meats would need to increase by up to 20%, and the price of vegetable oils would also increase significantly. The researchers estimate that such price increases would result in around 10% lower consumption of food items that are high in emissions. “If you’d have to pay 40% more for your steak, you might choose to have it once a week instead of twice,” said Dr Springmann.

The report also says that this will not unduly affect those on low incomes.

Wait.

How can a 40% hike in the price of beef, a 20% hike in the price of other meats and milk not affect the poor? Will we be showing proof of income and only the richest will be charged the taxed price?

They have it all figured out. The plan is to offset any difficulty by “sparing food groups known to be beneficial for health from taxation, selectively compensating for income losses associated with tax-related price increases, and using a portion of tax revenues for health promotion.”

So, they’ll tax the daylights out of the middle class, making it impossible for us to buy meat or dairy products, then they’ll subsidize produce for people with low incomes with the tax money.

Let’s hope these professors don’t watch the documentary Symphony of the Soil (which I highly recommend to anyone who grows food, by the way.) Because if they do, they’ll also discover the link between industrial farming methods (such as fertilizers and extensive tilling) and increased carbon dioxide. Then they’ll tax vegetables and grains by 20% too.

What about those children who become enforced vegetarians because their families can no longer afford to put even a cheap cut of meat on the table? What about the micronutrients they will be missing out on if meat and milk become luxuries? While I know that some families have raised perfectly healthy children on a vegan diet, there are nutritional benefits that come from animal products that are difficult to replace.

Professor Lindsay Allen of the University of California said that to deny growing children animal products during the critical first few years of life could cause permanent damage.

She said foods made from meat contain some nutrients not found anywhere else and are hard to replace in the diet of vulnerable groups.

“If you’re talking about feeding young children and pregnant women and lactating women I would go as far as to say it is unethical to withhold these foods during that period of life,” she said. “There’s a lot of empirical research that will show the very adverse effects on child development of doing that.” (source)

The authors of this misbegotten study disagree. They think the whole world will be a better place if everyone is vegan. According to them, they’ll save half a million lives by 2020 with their plan. Not only are they saving the planet, they feel they’d be improving global health by reducing “the likelihood of dying from diet-related chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and cancer.”

I guess we could all eat bugs if we don’t want to become vegan. Remember when the UN recommended maggots, grubs, and beetles as a healthy part of the human diet for food security?

A quick note about climate change.

I don’t litter. I’m not wasteful and rarely use plastic. I grow quite a bit of my own food, buy locally and in-season, and try to be responsible with the environment.

I also think that all of this climate change hysteria is overblown hooey.

The whole idea of runaway climate change is flawed. You may recall that it used to be called global warning, back when Al Gore was making movies that scared the hell out of kids and teen idols like Leonardo Di Caprio were pushing the cause.

“The cause” gained traction quickly. So fast that for many people, those who just accept what they are told, it became a part of their everyday lives in a relatively short space of time. We all know how easy it is to manipulate and program most people with oft-repeated talking points.

For almost 20 years the climate was stable. The world was not warming. You can’t call phenomenon global warming when, in fact, the globe is not warming. Scientists realized that the idea was flawed and swapped the name from global warming to climate change.

They continued to spew out statistics that were cherry picked to prove their cases, mainly because their massive grants depend on it. Parameters evolved over the years, as did the way that data was recorded, interpreted, and presented.

But at no point was it mentioned that global warming, global cooling, and cyclical climate change is normal and has been going on since the very beginning.

The earth is in a constant state of flux, and these regular cycles are part of even larger cycles that have been around since before mankind existed and will be around long after humans have vacated the planet. (Not because it is too hot, but because we are out of room and resources or as the result of some other type of extinction event.)

So, given all that you would think that the ever increasing number of scientists who have come forward to state, in public that man-made global warming is a myth would have made headway in re-educating the bulk of people to what is happening here. They cite proof positive from ice core studies, mud-core studies, solar cycle records and a variety of other means that the earth has been several degrees hotter than it is now on more than one occasion in the past. And all of those occasions were before industrialization, which according to those pushing the agenda to charge carbon taxes, is the cause of all the problems.

All of these ivory tower ideas like having half a kid and forcing veganism on the world will only apply to the peons like us. The elite and powerful won’t be complying with these kinds of suggestions any time soon.

Follow the money trail, my friends. (Who even gets that money, anyway? Read this to learn more about it.) It leads straight to crony capitalism and control of resources, a la Agenda 21and Agenda 2030.

Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor. Her website, DaisyLuther.com, where this article first appeared, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca


(activistpost.com)

By Michael Snyder

Could you survive on just $2.50 a day? According to Compassion International, approximately half of the population of the entire planet currently lives on $2.50 a day or less. Meanwhile, those hoarding wealth at the very top of the global pyramid are rapidly becoming a lot wealthier. Don’t get me wrong – I am a very big believer in working hard and contributing something of value to society, and those who work the hardest and contribute the most should be able to reap the rewards. In this article I am in no way, shape or form criticizing true capitalism, because if true capitalism were actually being practiced all over the planet we would have far, far less poverty today. Instead, our planet is dominated by a heavily socialized debt-based central banking system that systematically transfers wealth from hard working ordinary citizens to the global elite. Those at the very top of the pyramid know that they are impoverishing everyone else, and they very much intend to keep it that way.

Let’s start with some of the hard numbers. According to Zero Hedge, Credit Suisse had just released their yearly report on global wealth, and it shows that 45.6 percent of all the wealth in the world is controlled by just 0.7 percent of the people…

As Credit Suisse tantalizingly shows year after year, the number of people who control just shy of a majority of global net worth, or 45.6% of the roughly $255 trillion in household wealth, is declining progressively relative to the total population of the world, and in 2016 the number of people who are worth more than $1 million was just 33 million, roughly 0.7% of the world’s population of adults. On the other end of the pyramid, some 3.5 billion adults had a net worth of less than $10,000, accounting for just about $6 trillion in household wealth.

And since this is a yearly report, we can go back and see how things have changed over time. When Zero Hedge did this, it was discovered that the wealth of those at the very top “has nearly doubled” over the past six years, and meanwhile the poor have gotten even poorer…

Incidentally, we tracked down the first Credit Suisse report we found in this series from 2010, where the total wealth of the top “layer” in the pyramid was a modest $69.2 trillion for the world’s millionaires. It has nearly doubled in the 6 years since then. Meanwhile, the world’s poorest have gotten, you got it, poorer, as those adults who were worth less than $10,000 in 2010 had a combined net worth of $8.2 trillion, a number which has since declined to $6.1 trillion in 2016 despite a half a billion increase in the sample size.

If these trends continue at this pace, it won’t be too long before the global elite have virtually all of the wealth and the rest of us have virtually nothing.

Perhaps you are fortunate enough to still have a good job, and you live in a large home and you will sleep in a warm bed tonight.

Well, you should consider yourself to be very blessed, because that is definitely not the case for most of the rest of the world. The following 11 facts about global poverty come from dosomething.com, and I want you to really let these numbers sink in for a moment…

So how did we get here?

Debt is the primary mechanism that takes wealth from ordinary people like you and me and puts it into the hands of the global elite.

In my recent article entitled “Why Donald Trump Must Shut Down The Federal Reserve And Start Issuing Debt-Free Money,” I discussed how the Federal Reserve was designed to entrap the U.S. government in an endless debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape. And that is precisely what has happened, as the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913.

In that very same year, the federal income tax was instituted, and that is a key part of the program for the global elite. You see, the income tax is how wealth is transferred from us to the government. And then a continuously growing national debt is how that wealth is transferred from the government to the elite.

It is a very complicated system, but at the end of the day it is all about taking money from us and getting it into their pockets.

And at this point more than 99.9 percent of the population of the world lives in a country with a central bank, and almost every nation on the planet has some form of income tax.

It is a global system that is designed to create as much debt as possible, and I recently shared with my readers that the total amount of debt in the world has hit a staggering all-time record high of 152 trillion dollars.

Interestingly, the Bible actually foretells of a time when rich men would hoard wealth in the last days. The following are the first five verses of the Book of James in the Modern English Version…

Come now, you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. ² Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. ³ Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have stored up treasures for the last days. ⁴ Indeed the wages that you kept back by fraud from the laborers who harvested your fields are crying, and the cries of those who harvested have entered into the ears of the Lord of Hosts. ⁵ You have lived in pleasure on the earth and have been wayward. You have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter.

So much of the time we focus on the other great sins that we see all around us, but the truth is that one of the greatest sins of all in our world today is the sin of greed.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the global elite have used various forms of debt to turn the rest of the planet into their debt slaves.

As debt levels race higher and higher all over the planet, the elite are using the magic of compound interest to grab a bigger and bigger share of the pie.

Given enough time, those at the very top would have virtually everything and the rest of us would have virtually nothing. The middle class is shrinking all over the globe, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor continues to grow at an astounding pace.

But the vast majority of people out there have no idea how money, debt, taxes and central banks really work, and so they have no idea that this is purposely being done to them.

So please share this article with as many people as you can. The truth is that we don’t have to have this much global poverty, and if we correctly identify the root causes of this poverty we can start working on some real solutions.

Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.

(activistpost.com)