By Wesley J. Smith
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Environmentalism is growing increasingly anti-capitalist
and anti-human. Rather than aimed primarily at preventing or cleaning up
pollution, these days, the louder voices within the movement seem less intent
on preserving ecosystems and protecting wild places than they are with invoking
global warming hysteria as the pretext to throttle capitalism, along with the
liberty and prosperity it enables.
Here’s a very clear example that doesn’t hide its true
intentions behind false promises of creating a vibrant new economy from the
renewable energy industries. Writing in the New Statesman, British journalist
Paul Mason argues that to stop global warming, we have to put the government in
complete, iron-fisted control of, well everything. From, “My
Manifesto for a Post-Carbon World:”
Few people are yet prepared to
accept that, to save the planet, we have to end capitalism – and on a timescale
that even an ardent Leninist might find optimistic . . .
Based on any scientific reading, we
are obliged to bracket that proposition within a deeper contradiction:
capitalism has run out of time. It took off by using the planet as a source of
free, carbon-based energy and as a wastepipe for gases that warm the
atmosphere. But that process has now reached its limits. It is, of course, easy
to imagine a non-carbon form of capitalism – as long as you admit that it’s like
imagining a non-racist form of Nazism: theoretically possible but unlikely,
given the historic patterns already set.
Never mind that the worst polluting countries are
Communist — have you ever tried to breathe in China? And never mind that the
cleanest economies that are not failed states like North Korea are based on
free-market principles.
In fact, North Korean-style hyper-control seems to be
Mason’s model:
Andreas Malm, a left-wing Swedish
climate writer, argues that, at a minimum, we should: stop building
carbon-burning power plants; shut the existing ones down; end the expansion of
air, sea and road travel and introduce a rationing system for transport; expand
mass transit systems; switch urgently to locally grown food; dismantle the meat
industry and switch to plant-based proteins; and pour money into carbon removal
technologies.
That would, says Malm, amount to
the equivalent of Marx’s ten-point reform programme in The Communist Manifesto.
Does Mason think that seven billion people could be fed under
such a system? Does he really think that local farms that couldn’t emit carbon
in the growing or transportation of their produce would have the capacity to
feed millions in cities? Or, does he simply not care?
Mason says we should borrow the tens of trillions needed
to accomplish his authoritarian goals. Printing money always works out so well!
Never mind, a “hegemonic” tyranny will make it all happen:
Let’s be honest: centralised
government action will be required to forcibly alter or shut down some key
business models in the private sector and to enforce behavioural change.
Energy-intensive industries such as steel will either have to be shut down or
receive large state subsidies. Meat farming will end. Major airports such as
Heathrow will probably end up being rewilded.
With advocacy such as Mason’s, the increasing popularity
of “nature rights” within environmentalism — that also seeks to impede
prosperity more than prevent pollution — and the extreme impositions envisioned
by the Green New Deal, we can see that the idealism of the environmental
movement has devolved into a convergence of human loathing and renewed advocacy
for hard-fisted Marxism that threatens calamity.
The only way these people can succeed is if too many of
us don’t take them sufficiently seriously to defeat them utterly and transform
their ranting into so much spitting into the wind.
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