Carbon-Obsessed Greens Unmask As True Authoritarians

The climate-obsessed worshippers at the Altar of Gaia the Great (but Extremely Fragile) have unmasked themselves. No, not that way; they’re all about people wearing masks, forever. Not because of the masks’ (largely mythical) COVID-fighting properties, but as badges of submission, as voluntarily donned muzzles.

Scott Shepard

Scott Shepard

The unmasking has rather been metaphorical, but no less stark for its ephemerality. The Greens have come out as liberty-loathing, people-hating authoritarians of an ilk not seen in the West for many years.

The environmental movement has long been primarily about control and about constraining the lives and narrowing the opportunities of the rest of humanity. (I say “the rest” because greens always excuse themselves from the draconian rules under which they seek to shackle the rest of us. Consider Al Gore using 34 times more energy in his home than the national average. Or Leo DiCaprio taking a carbon-spewing private jet 8,000 miles to collect an award for being such a green hero. Or Prince Charles banging on forever about what we need to do to save the environment while living in literal castles and owning a fleet of cars. Or all of the other self-appointed global elites – including our good friends Brian Moynihan (Bank of America) and Larry Fink (BlackRock) – going to Davos every year to plot ways to make themselves richer while shackling us as much as they can.)

In fact, there was a trope in the ‘90s about the watermelon people, who were red (communist-sympathizing control-freaks) on the inside but who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, had turned green (environmentalist) on the outside, without changing their philosophy or their goals a single jot.

And now they’ve shown us that we’ve been absolutely right all along.

A collection of left-wing agitation groups sent a letter on July 7 to Joe Biden and each member of the Congress urging them, in their own words, and in their own bold-face type,

to eschew the dominant antagonistic approach to U.S.-China relations and instead prioritize multilateralism, diplomacy, and cooperation with China to address the existential threat that is the climate crisis.

The signatories to this letter were largely the usual suspects: EarthWorks, Friends of the Earth, MoveOn, Code Pink and the Union of Concerned Scientists (which sounds like something out of the pages of Advise & Consent); but also some surprising ones, such as CatholicNetwork USA. (Either the network misunderstands the concept of “human dignity,” or I do.)

They’re not honest enough to identify in their letter just what such cooperation would mean, but their purpose is nevertheless clear. What we’re antagonistic about toward China (and, to its credit, even the Biden Administration has been making the right noises about opposing those things, though we’ll see if actions match assertions) these days are trifling things like holding at least a million Chinese Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps; violating a treaty with Britain to invade Hong Kong and pull it fully within the murderous communist grasp; and threatening Taiwan with similar treatment, along with other regional powers, like Japan, who intend to support that free, democratic and terrifically successful island nation.

In other words, these eco-warriors are calling on the United States government to abandon any efforts to oppose modern-day concentration camps and the crushing of democracies so that the U.S. and China will be able to work together on radically reducing carbon output. Of course, the sorts of carbon reduction that they envisage would require profound shifts of power from citizens to the government around the world, and deep constraints on our standards of living and our liberties generally. But clearly that isn’t a problem for them. In fact, it’s pretty clearly a bonus.

You can tell that these groups support the institution of authoritarian control here regardless of other outcomes – even environmental outcomes – just by a brief consideration of their request. They are selling the Chinese (and Hong Kongese, and Taiwanese, and potentially the Japanese) people down the river in exchange for… what, exactly?

Well, the mess of pottage that they seek is merely continued promises from China that it will cut carbon according to their schedules. But those, they already have. China has always been willing to promise future carbon reductions, while building three times more coal capacity every year than the rest of the world combined. And even the signers of that letter must be aware that a country that breaks its word at every turn and locks millions in concentration camps cannot be trusted to live up to its promises – and is already breaking them. Meanwhile, if the United States were to zero out its carbon production tomorrow (which, note, would mean the horrible death of most of our national population), the resulting change in world carbon output would have no material effect on world climate at all. None.

So there it is. They want us to abandon these people to horrific fates for nothing. And in doing so, they’ve telegraphed beyond all possibility of cavil that they’re just fine with totalitarian crackdowns and all of their attendant horrors, wherever they may occur. Conservatives joke grimly about being led off to camps for genuinely speaking truth to power. The signatories have put us on notice: those aren’t jokes.

This is evil, straight up. Dark, turgid, unregenerate evil. Left-wing corporate activists have howled that corporations must stop supporting any officials or groups who stand up for the Second Amendment or oppose election theft. Well, we need to campaign at least as vigorously to stop these corporations from giving a cent of shareholder or consumer cash to any of these horrific, ostensibly green organizations. For, in Churchill’s eternal words, “if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age, made more sinister – and perhaps more protracted – by the light of a perverted science.”

 

Scott Shepard is a fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research and Director of its Free Enterprise Project. This was first published at Townhall Finance.



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