The Church of Global Warming hearts communism

By: John Hayward 
Quick show of hands: who’s surprised to learn the global warming fanatics think communism is super-awesome?
Oh, I know what you’re thinking, People Who Have Your Hands Down.  You’ve seen what communist countries look like.  They’re absolute environmental disasters, horrifying wastelands of garbage and toxic pollution.  You’re wondering how anyone could possibly review the history of communism and come to the conclusion that it’s a political philosophy that leads to wise stewardship of the planet.
You need to switch off your critical thinking skills, People Who Have Your Hands Down, and master the crucial global warming skill of ignoring evidence that contradicts your ideology.  That’s what this scam has been all about since the beginning.  Ignore 70 percent of the data, declare what remains “science,” and treat anyone who disagrees as the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier.  If you don’t actually look at communist China, whose capital is currently enveloped in a choking cloud of pollution that’s literally driving people off the streets, you can come to the ideologically motivated conclusion that they’re the best little global warming fighters on the whole planet.

That’s what the United Nations’ climate poobah just did, as related by Bloomberg News:

China, the top emitter of greenhouse gases, is also the country that’s “doing it right” when it comes to addressing global warming, the United Nations’ chief climate official said.
The nation has some of the toughest energy-efficiency standards for buildings and transportation and its support for photovoltaic technology helped reduce solar-panel costs by 80 percent since 2008, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said yesterday in an interview at Bloomberg News headquarters in New York.
The country is facing growing public pressure from citizens to reduce air pollution, due in large part to burning coal. Its efforts to promote energy efficiency and renewable power stem from the realization that doing so will pay off in the long term, Figueres said.
“They actually want to breathe air that they don’t have to look at,” she said. “They’re not doing this because they want to save the planet. They’re doing it because it’s in their national interest.”
China is also able to implement policies because its political system avoids some of the legislative hurdles seen in countries including the U.S., Figueres said.

Here’s a photo of conditions on the streets of Beijing, courtesy of a Monday article in the UK Guardian: 
 

CNN has a whole photo gallery of conditions as of today.  It’s not looking any better.  But if you squint through the clouds of poison gas, you can see those glittering solar panels, so Captain Planet gives China a big thumbs-up!
The key sentence in the dopey pronouncement of that U.N. official is the part where she praises their political system for “avoiding some of the legislative hurdles seen in countries including the U.S.”  That’s what matters to the Church of Global Warming: raw power.  The hard Left is dizzy in love with authoritarianism, which they of course plan to implement with benevolent wisdom and scientific precision.  Global warming theology is the perfect excuse for seizing power.  It can’t be disproved, it’s considered morally wrong to resist its demands, and it has a delightful aura of intellectual snobbery about it.

Every authoritarian dreams of the day people submit to his will because they no longer believe they can be trusted to manage their own lives.  The climate change fanatics have made great strides in that direction.  Even now, with oceans of data surging against their beliefs… and their little propaganda stunts getting stuck in literal frozen oceans… it’s hard to imagine what it would take to get their hands out of our wallets, and off our throats.  We’re standing at 16 years without any global warming now; every single climate model from the past three decades lies in ruins.  When we hit 20 years, do you imagine we’ll have yet freed ourselves from hugely expensive regulations written in the name of fighting a non-existent threat?
The love affair between global warming activists and totalitarian systems is nothing new.   It’s not difficult to find a plethora of books arguing that global warming demonstrates the failure of democracy and capitalism.  In 2010, environmentalist James Lovelock made headlines by saying, “Even the best democracies argue that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being.  I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war.  It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

That’s music to authoritarian ears.  Collectivists love the manufacture of a crisis atmosphere, to stampede people into relinquishing power over their lives.  If they can move the authority to implement climate-change policy to the United Nations, it will become permanently beyond the reach of voters in any individual nation.  You don’t remember casting any votes to elect Christiana Figueres as Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, do you?
With global warming theology, the severity of the phony warnings is more important than actual real-world conditions.  Sure, the climate models they used to soak a trillion dollars out of productive economies were all wrong – but check out the latest predictions that guarantee New York will vanish under a wave of melted ice and waterlogged polar bears, turning Wisconsin into Atlantic beachfront property, if we don’t impose another trillion dollars of regulations immediately!  How can you sit there and quibble about data, the scientific method, or worst of all democracy when the stakes are so high?

When will environmentalists learn that clean technology is a luxury only prosperous and free capitalist societies can afford?  The so-called “developing world” has little interest in halting its development to address even the most reasonable ecological concerns, never mind the apocalyptic fantasies of the climate change cult.  China might be willing to make the kind of symbolic gestures that turn the heads of executive secretaries of U.N. frameworks of this or that, but they’re not going to seriously scale back their industrial plans.  Once total power is secured, collectivists have no further need of annoying environmentalists and their demands.
Greens have been kicked to the curb by collectivism often enough to learn that lesson… but they never do, because totalitarian political control is so attractive to them.  They’re in love with the romantic notion of the Smart People running the world, crushing all dissent from greedy corporate types and knuckle-dragging rubes.  Many of them matriculated at universities where it’s an article of religious faith, on par with the sacred tenets of global warming, that the only problem with communism is that the Right People haven’t been given a chance to implement it properly yet.  To this way of thinking, the problem with the dungeon states of the Twentieth Century wasn’t authoritarian rule, but rather a poor grade of authoritarian rulers.

You know who else would probably do a bang-up job of forcing their captive populations to obey sacred edicts from the Church of Global Warming?  Fascists.  When a fascist government tells industry to jump, they ask how high, then jump a little higher to demonstrate their loyalty to the Party.  And they love the kind of slogans, chants, and street theater environmentalists go in for.  They sure don’t let squalid democracy get in the way of their agendas.  So why doesn’t the U.N. put in a good word for the fascists, too?  I’ll tell you why: because the Left never allowed communism to get buried in the same dung heap of history that fascism was consigned to.  They kept communism respectable.  They spent decades insisting communist theories still looked great on paper, while all those gulags, enforced famines, and bloody wars of conquest were aberrations, sacrilege committed against the ideals of the system by misguided dictators.
After decades of bristling with umbrage when anyone accused them of communist sympathies, Western leftists are increasingly frank in their admiration for communist China, to the point where they’ll say the most patently absurd things to praise it.  And global warming theology is far too politically useful for them to give up on, no matter how many of its graphs fall flat, or how many eco-tourist ships get trapped in ice that wasn’t supposed to be there.  There is a deal in place between ambitious collectivists and radical environmentalists, and it remains mutually profitable.