Well that didn’t take long. My article warning about the emergence of nannying controls on private money (any money that is not cash) is less than two weeks old, but the Telegraph is already reporting that NatWest has turned on a feature in its app that nags you about your CO2 emissions. Santander is all-in on this too, awarding the company behind these cyber bullies, CoGo, winner of its X Environment Challenge, Be Sustainable category. TSB gave it a whirl too but according to the Telegraph ditched it over the summer.
Not that any reader of the Daily Sceptic should care, but it doesn’t even calculate your CO2 emissions from your purchases, because it cannot. As I have pointed out previously, payment systems do not know what you have purchased, only whom you are purchasing from. That applies both to private money and to public money. So, apps like these fall back to making a guess based on the merchant, or just the merchant category. As the Telegraph article says: “The estimated footprint of purchases is calculated from the overall value of a transaction, as opposed to the individual contents of a shop.”
For these banks, facts and accuracy are just collateral damage in their ideological war.
Other than righteous indignance, what are we to make of this? Although these apps are touted as opt-in, the data they hold are not. From the Farage debanking scandal we know the likes of NatWest Group are not averse to using whatever data they can get their hands on to build a case against an enemy, or ‘customer’ as they sometimes call them. The same goes for other operators in the private money space such as PayPal, as the Free Speech Union discovered to its cost last year.
But complaining about these nag-apps is missing the bigger point. The problem is that banks necessarily deal with our data but cannot be trusted with them. I know what you are thinking, we have the Information Commissioner’s Office, doughty defender of our data. You can read its utterly supine response to the Farage scandal here. It amounts to the Information Commissioner, John Edwards, writing a letter to the banks to remind them of their responsibilities to the public, that they should not be using information in a way that is “unduly unexpected”. There is no action, no bite from the watchdog. We can surmise that the banks and PayPals will continue their woke trajectory. It is going to get worse before it gets better.
Judging from the comments on my previous article, many sceptics’ solution to all this is just to revert to using cash. Okay for now, for small one-off purchases, but forget moving house or buying a car. However, it is pure fantasy to think that any organisation or company of even modest size could close its bank accounts and survive entirely on cash. It might work for your window cleaner, but it won’t work for a telco, estate agent or import-export business, to pick three at random. Nor for that matter for any organisation, commentator or creator making an income off Substack, BuyMeACoffee or social media. And why should they be marginalised? Why can we all not have the convenience and economic advantages of modern fintech but without the woke wrapper if we choose?
The question then is why the market is not serving this need? Part of the problem is that the bar to entering the banking market, getting a banking licence, is very high. The funding requirements mean that you need to look good in the eyes of other banks or venture capitalists, most of whom have by now got a nasty dose of the woke mind virus. What we need to address is this double whammy of the woke narrative and the dysfunctional state of the market. We need a positive counternarrative and the conditions to act on it. I do not think that positive narrative has to be novel, just remembering the successes of free markets and enterprise. The conditions to act on it are more controversial.
In my view, private enterprise has shown that it alone cannot fix the money system. We have Bitcoin and its ilk, but its value varies wildly, it has fundamental problems with reversibility and identity (ask any ransomware victim) and it is not on a path to joining the mainstream anything like soon enough. We need a public good, serving the public interest both as a public money and as a public infrastructure. That thing is something like a CBDC.
As I have explained previously, CBDCs are by no means easy to get right. The design choices will need the wisdom of Solomon, and then there are the legislative, engineering and political hurdles. For a deeper dive on those problems I recommend the excellent report from the Institute for Money, Technology and Inclusion at University of California at Irvine. One of the motivations to persevere, get the designs right and to solve the other problems is that it allows for a much more diverse set of participants in the market. For example, proposals for the U.K. CBDC have so-called Payment Interface Providers (PIPs) with API access to the core ledger to provide wallet services, allowing retail users (the public and businesses) to make payments. PIPs do not have to be banks. That would allow something like the Free Speech Union to offer a wallet (put that on your To Do list Toby) which facilitates individuals and businesses interacting directly, completely cutting out the banks. Banks could still offer their services, covered in green gunge if you so wish, but the rest of us could have all the benefits of modern fintech without having to take the knee. Now that’s a narrative I can get behind.
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There seems to be a trend going on and it starts to make the situation a decade ago look like the outlier.
In the article, it says, “…but the Greenland ice sheet may have made a net gain in size in the year to August 2022.”, but in the source quoted, the opening paragraph states,
“The end of the northern-hemisphere summer brings to a close the Greenland ice sheet melt season and with it confirmation that 2022 was the 26th year in a row where Greenland lost ice overall.”
Surely net and overall mean the same thing?
Can someone please tell me what I failed to see…
Greenland gains mass every year. The melt season is just over 2 months long, while the ‘mass gain’ season is 10 months long. The graph from the DMI always ends higher than at the start and then the graph starts again each year. So there is a constant flow of ice off Greenland because there is a near constant dumping of snow. In 1942 a P38 Lightning crash landed on the Greenland Ice sheet and in 1992 she was brought to the surface having been buried under 268 feet of ice. Incidentally, research into the age of the ice cannot find much ice dating from before the last inter glacial, the Eemian, which was 120,000 years ago and hotter than the Holocene.
In addition. The assertion that Greenland is losing mass has been derived from models – need I say (write) more?
Thanks for replying; but I still don’t understand why the above article says the opposite to the article quoted.
When you say that “the assertion that Greenland …derived from models“, do you mean that they use models when talking about the last 26 years?
It says “the Greenland ice sheet lost 84Gt of ice over the 12 months from September 2021 to August 2022.” Surely the 84Gt figure is not derived from a model.
I’m not an espert, and only recently became a sceptic: I’m just trying to understand.
I don’t know how they come to that conclusion because according to polarportal.dk Greenland gained 600 Gt from Sept 21 and up to June, and then lost 150 Gt between June and Sept 2022 – Overall a gain of 450 Gt.
Please see Tony Heller on Youtube such as the following “Extreme Melt In Greenland” – “Scientists Cherry Picking In Greenland”
Thanks for taking the time to reply
SILENCE———There is a “Climate Emergency” and that is all there is to it. The BBC says so. The Daily Climate Show on SKY NEWS says so and that should be good enough for everyone so go and enjoy your Netflix and Coronation Street because there is a “Climate Crisis” and everything you do needs to stop to avert it. Soon you won’t have any notes in your wallet, and your spending will be monitored to make sure you have not exceeded your carbon footprint limits. ——Wakey Wakey people. You are being played. ————–“Climate Emergency” is political speak masquerading as science.
It’s children that are the most vocal about the ‘Climate Emergency’ and ‘Climate Crimes’.
“I’m not young enough to know everything” – J. M Barrie
“Every fourth euro spent within the EU budget will go towards action to mitigate climate change… I am glad to see that young people are taking to the streets in Europe to raise visibility of the issue of climate change.” – Jean-Claude Juncker
And children who are most susceptible to propaganda.
Yes, and the tyrants know this:
“And to anyone who still disagrees with me, I say that you no longer matter. We are now educating your children.” – A. H.
Ooh, Germany’s reopening an opencast coalmine (Nigel Farage, GB News).
Taking the Chinese and the Ukrainian route are they? Meanwhile, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland bans fracking. Hmm…
Germany has a choice: start behaving sensibly or watch their manufacturing sector disappear.
They’ve chosen sense.
Much as its good news to hear that the planet does actually know best, the so called climate emergency is just a ruse to sweep away our society and replace it with communism. If the ice sheets were 50 metres thicker, it wouldn’t matter one jot…
The Vikings gave Greenland it’s name for a good reason; it was Green, and warm enough to grow crops. Climate crisis is a globalist scam.
Many thanks Chris. Keep it up.
No, no this cannot be true. St David of Attenborough hasn’t made mention of this!!
Another great article, Chris. If only we could get you on the MSM to show the masses they’re being duped.
If you’ve got about 38 billion pounds…