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By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

 

When opinion makers talk about Vladimir Putin’s Western fanbase, they’re usually talking about the nationalist right. To be fair, the phenomenon is a curiosity because the right’s affection for the autocrat in the Kremlin doesn’t make a lot of sense.

 

Putin is an unapologetic champion of Christianity who stripped the Orthodox church of its autonomy and transformed it into an instrument of the state. He’s a strongman who commands a military that bombs hospitals when it’s not being humiliated by Ukrainians. He’s the epitome of masculinity whose relationship with his paramour is so public that she became the target of U.S. sanctions. He’s a guy who still mourns the death of the Soviet Union—the preeminent left-wing enterprise of the 20th century—and whose armed forces proudly fly the Hammer and Sickle into battle, where they are promptly killed. It’s weird.

 

Weirder still has been the muted reaction to Putin’s war of conquest from the “tankie” or certainly tank-curious left. Left-leaning institutions like Jacobin, Democracy Now!, and others have issued rote denunciations of NATO for supposedly compelling Russia to engage in a terroristic campaign of ethnic cleansing against its neighbor, but it’s mechanical and passionless. It turns out, these outlets just had the angle all wrong. Where the reconstitution of the Soviet empire fails to thrill, misanthropic environmentalism may have succeeded.

 

On Wednesday, Politico Europe published its annual ranking of the top 28 players advancing the Continent’s “green agenda.” Coming in at number one: Vladimir Putin himself.

 

“It took a war criminal to speed up Europe’s green revolution,” this hideous exhibition begins. Europe faced a stark choice after Russian forces invaded Ukraine: continue to subsidize the war through the purchase of Russian energy, or gradually reduce commercial ties. Europe chose the latter. But it’s not at all clear that the immediate effect of Putin’s war on Europe has been to deepen Europeans’ commitment to green energy. So far, the opposite has been the case. Politico has also prematurely assumed that Putin “mistimed his energy war” against his Western adversaries. Let’s see how the first full winter of this terrible war goes.

 

Politico’s faint praise is a useful exercise, though, insofar as it illustrates a tendency among environmental activists to occasionally expose their distaste for humanity and its methods of social organization. Politico is so sure that the Russian autocrat miscalculated on the energy front because the unbearable hardships he intends to inflict upon average Europeans will fortify the Continent’s will to engage in greener practices, implement green solutions, and support green politicians. What’s a little suffering when compared with this happy outcome?

 

This is a slightly more restrained example of the logic that leads more honest climate-change catastrophists to conclude that misery and death are the prices we must pay to restore balance to an ecosystem threatened by our very existence. Some more self-parodic examples of this trait include research journals speculating on the environmental benefits of a “small nuclear war,” or how Genghis Khan’s genocidal blitz across the Eurasian landmass contributed to reforestation.

 

These people are making what they believe are serious arguments. But audiences who are not steeped in the eschatology of climate change are going to have a hard time endorsing a cull of the human species in the name of environmental remediation.

 

Environmentalist zeal can give way to a hatred of mankind that manifests primarily as an online phenomenon. Our problem is that so many of our elites, influencers, and political leaders are products of that very online phenomenon. That became utterly apparent at the height of the pandemic. The global coronavirus outbreak spurred an almost unprecedented crisis of mental health and a spike in self-reported bouts of depression. You’d have to be a masochist to see any bright side to it, which explains why so many environmentalist misanthropes did just that.

 

In the absence of water traffic, for example, we were told that the whales could hear one another communicate once more, and urban bays once again became home to long-absent aquatic life. “You could see the Himalaya from Delhi,” University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Ned Bair said of India’s suddenly smog-free capital territory. “That’s pretty rare.” The global “anthropause” allowed many ecosystems to repair themselves, and the artificial cessation of global economic activity put downward pressure on worldwide carbon dioxide emissions. “These stories suggest that the coronavirus has had a healing effect on Earth’s nonhuman affairs,” wrote New York Times reporter Amanda Hess, “and humans are loving this idea.”

 

But they weren’t celebrating any lasting environmental accomplishment. They were just jazzed by the disappearance of people. As a study in the journal Environmental Sustainability found, the pandemic resulted in increased demand for delivery services and packaging materials. It produced waste in the form of single-use medical equipment, and obsessive hand washing increased soap pollution in water systems. But even if it were true that the environment benefited from our absence, that wouldn’t remotely offset the suboptimal reality of mankind’s retreat.

 

The pandemic was a terrible period defined by pestilence, death, and profound despair. Russia’s use of terror tactics in its effort to subjugate its neighbor is a crime against civilization. Nuclear war has no upsides, and Genghis Khan murdered tens of millions. Only the maladjusted and nihilistic could see a silver lining in any of these dark, occasionally mushroom-shaped clouds. Those who do will not benefit from ranking  today’s most innovative practitioners of mass murder. They need help.