For a decade I’ve been saying that the theory of man-made global warming is like a watermelon: green on the outside, red on the inside. Superficially it is about environmentalism, but at deeper level it is about central command of the economy—socialism.
Because if you can convince people that carbon dioxide will super-heat the planet and has to be carefully regulated, you can control every aspect of human existence, right down to breathing, because we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. You can control all aspects of power generation, commercial and residential construction, all aspects of transportation and the manufacture of vehicles, how warm or cool people can keep their houses, how far people may commute to work, all aspects of business and leisure travel, etc. The purported need to police carbon dioxide is the golden key that unlocks the door to centralized state control of every aspect of economic life.
The timing was a tip off, too. When did you first hear about the menace of man-made global warming? Wasn’t it in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and after “communist” China had begun turning to privately owned businesses to manufacture its exports? It was within a few years after socialism—common ownership of the means of production—was thoroughly discredited as a theory for organizing economies, and generally abandoned (except in Cuba and North Korea), that we began to hear about man-made global warming. The whole world having just witnessed the total debunking of socialism as an economic theory, the utopian totalitarians, which, like the poor, ye apparently have always with ye, needed a new excuse to control the economy and micro-manage everyone’s life.
Well, now you don’t have to accept this theory from me. It is out in the open. The proponents of the notion that your SUV is cooking the planet are not even pretending anymore. They’re just coming right out and admitting that the whole thing is about socialism.
At the Guardian, Phil McDuff’s column’s is headed, “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?” Climate change, McDuff informs us, the fault of private ownership of business:
“Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. [Green New Deal]-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below ‘absolutely catastrophic’ is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.”
So according to McDuff of the Guardian, if you want the planet to survive, you have to abandon capitalism, a method of economic organization that works well and has raised living standards throughout the world, and stratospherically in the West, and embrace socialism, which has failed utterly and miserably everywhere it has been tried, absolutely without exception.
Another recent article in the Guardian, by Jeff Sparrow asks, “Is socialism the Answer to the Climate Catastrophe?” and answers, yes, “there’s every reason to expect various versions of socialism to play an increasingly important role in discussions about the climate catastrophe.”
In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Kevin Baker spends a long article rhapsodizing about the Tennessee Valley Authority, and all the hydro-electric dams it built in the 1930s, as a preface for promoting the “Green New Deal.” Baker notes that even the New York Times is skeptical about the Green New Deal, writing:
“Is the Green New Deal aimed at addressing the climate crisis? Or is addressing the climate crisis merely cover for a wish-list of progressive policies and a not-so-subtle effort to move the Democratic Party to the Left? . . . Read literally, the resolution wants not only to achive a carbon-neutral energy system but also to transform the economy itself.”
“The answers to these questions,” writes Baker, “are yes and yes. We must address climate change, and we must transform the way our political and economic systems work in this country . . .” He concludes that the brilliance of the Green New Deal is in acknowledging that “we cannot go on as we have, not only in degrading the earth but also in degrading each other, through the existing economic system we have allowed to overrun us.”
Only someone who never lived in a socialist command economy, like Kevin Baker, could imagine that a free-market economy is more “degrading” than a centrally planned, socialist economy.
Those who lived through socialism are easily able to spot the Global Warming Hoax for what it is: an excuse for socialism. The former president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, stated in a 2011 speech in Australia:
"They want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. Therefore, what is in danger is freedom, not the climate."
Klaus, who spent much of his early life fighting the communist government of Czechoslovakia, admitted he is very sensitive to this issue. But "I am afraid that some of the people who spend their lives in a free society don't appreciate sufficiently all the issues connected with freedom. So my oversensitivity is like an alarm clock warning about the potential development, which I am really afraid of."
"I feel threatened now, not by global warming — I don't see any — (but) by the global-warming doctrine, which I consider a new dangerous attempt to control and mastermind my life and our lives, in the name of controlling the climate or temperature."
Klaus notes the great irony in this: that the socialists governments of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe were the worst polluters of all:
"They don't care about resources or poverty or pollution. They hate us, the humans. They consider us dangerous and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world called communism. And I know it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced."
If the socialist loons are no longer pretending, I don’t see any need to pretend any longer, either. The great Man-Made Gobal Warming Hoax is nonsense. The pope supports it because he seeks to leverage climate hysteria into an international Sunday law. But the rest of us should decry it for what it is and always has been—a socialist stratagem.