Climate Change Socialism on the Attack
Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator.
Over five years ago, I reported on the socialist agenda of the climate change alarmists and the essentially socialistic character of what was then called “the Green New Deal.” The GND presented an elaborate, ultra-expensive mega-agenda to radically transform society by retooling the national economy in accord with a central plan concocted by a self-anointed elite.
While the phrase “green new deal” has receded into the background, the current administration if rushing full-speed ahead to implement its top-down central plan to transform our society, using the false scare of climate change as its pretext. Trillions of federal dollars are being channeled into replacing our existing system of generating and transmitting electricity. Federal regulations are being promulgated to force Americans to replace everything from stoves to refrigerators to water heaters to dishwashers to heating and cooling units, etc. Other regulatory decrees are designed to replace vehicles powered by internal combustion engines with battery-powered electric vehicles.
The leftwing character of this socialistic agenda keeps resurfacing in multifarious anecdotes. One of the more extreme examples: It has recently come to light that some of the trillion-plus dollars appropriated for the climate agenda under the so-called Inflation Reduction Act has been given to a group called “Climate Justice Alliance.” In the name of “climate justice” (a dangerously open-ended buzzword phrase if there ever was one) this group believes that Palestine is a climate justice issue. It fulminates against familiar leftwing bogeymen such as “colonialism” and “imperialism” as well as some newer buzzwords like “extractivism” (you know — the process of taking things out of the Earth that people can use, like food and energy). One of their slogans makes their ties with orthodox socialist ideology super clear: “Only Socialist Revolution Can Stop World War III.” Huh? What does that have to do with climate change?
In doing some research, I came across an article from three years ago that typifies the socialist bias of the climate change movement. The author engaged in an ad hominem attack against Mark Mills. Mills is a physicist who has contributed greatly to our understanding of the practical problems of actually implementing the GND. He has tabulated the dauntingly vast quantities of various minerals that will have to be extracted (sorry, you anti-“extractivists”) in order to produce wind and solar energy on the scale dreamed of by their advocates. Mills’ work is based on numbers, not ideology, so what is his critic’s problem with him? He advises his readers not to pay heed to Mills’ writings because “Mills is associated with the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank.” Not only that, Mills once gave a talk sponsored by the Heartland Institute. Ah, guilt by association.
Earlier this year, an organization named Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) expressed alarm about a growing number of videos on YouTube that counter climate alarmism. CCDH wants to censor such videos. They want Americans to stay alarmed and to support the radical transformation of society that climate change alarmists advocate.
Of particular concern to CCDH and others in the alarmist camp are three categories of what they call “new denial.” As reported by Bloomberg, these three anti-alarmist categories are “(1) The impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless. (2) Climate solutions won’t work. (3) Climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.”
Apart from the weirdness (and danger) of classifying opinions that don’t conform to climate alarmism as a form of “digital hate,” anyone who has been following the issue closely can see that the growing doubts and concerns about the alarmist agenda are all eminently reasonable. For the CCDH to suggest that the massive greening of the planet in recent decades due to CO2 enrichment is anything other than beneficial is ridiculous. To denounce the modest global warming of the last 150 years that has lengthened agricultural growing seasons and boosted food production sufficient to sustain eight billion human lives seems cruelly misanthropic. To point out the inefficiencies, relative unreliability, and enormous negative environmental impacts of mass producing intermittent energy sources (primarily solar and wind) is not only not hateful disinformation, but highly responsible. To assert that climate “science” and the political movement that it spawned — so heavily politicized that its cost/benefit analyses omit benefits — is unreliable is actually an understatement.
The Bloomberg article cited above is representative of the mainstream press’s pro-alarmist bias. Such articles are more effective because the bias is more subtle — no trumpeting socialist revolution or implying that people who favor free markets are troglodytes. The Bloomberg headline states: “Attacks on Renewable Energy Are Proliferating on YouTube,” and the first paragraph warns against videos “attacking” alleged climate change solutions like wind and solar.
Question: Are there no “attacks” against fossil fuels? Of course there are! “Attack” is an emotive word. The alarmists believe that they are advocating right policies, which entitles them to argue in the most forceful terms why we, the people, should stop using fossil fuels. In other words, they are “attacking” the use of fossil fuels, but they claim they are simply presenting facts. Then they turn around and whine when knowledgeable skeptics challenge their conclusions, labeling such arguments as “attacks,” as if they are somehow nefarious.
The word “attack” implies that the person advancing that point of view is an aggressor, an evil actor. But on the issue of climate change, it is the alarmists who are the aggressors. They are attacking American’s lifestyles. They favor elitist central planning over the consumer sovereignty that free people benefit from.
What we have playing out in the climate change arena is yet another would-be leftist revolution. The alarmists are pushing an elitist, centrally planned, top-down scheme for transforming our entire society. We skeptics are the counter-revolutionaries, striving to preserve our rights, our freedoms, and our prosperity. It makes me think of the Nicaraguan struggle in the 1980s between the Marxist revolutionaries and the contras (the counter-revolutionaries — the freedom fighters — that President Reagan supported).
If the Gipper were here today, he would be leading the American contras in our resistance to the socialist tyranny that the left is striving to impose upon us. It’s time to join the fight against the heavy, oppressive hand of Big Government, folks. Join the fight for freedom. If you aren’t one already, become a climate contra.
