The Democratic Party and environmentalist movement have merged with the Green Party and adopted its program. “The Democrats Stole the Green Party’s Best Idea. The Green New Deal used to be the eco-socialist party’s signature proposal,” a columnist for The New Republic writes. But those with a longer memory than The New Republic‘s columnist note that
This ‘Green New Deal’ looks awfully familiar…. This hodgepodge of wishful socialist thinking, climate non-science, social justice mandates, population control advocacy, and progressivism laced with technocracy is not new or original. Even before Jill Stein, failed Green Party 2016 presidential candidate, there was the Club of Rome, founded in 1968.
They [the Club of Rome] have also issued their plan for climate control, and with much the same goals and mechanisms for the world to conform to their view. Is it possible that the…Green New Deal spokesperson had the Club of Rome publication in mind when she published her Draft Text?The Club of Rome Climate Emergency Plan [presented last December to the European Parliament] calls for 10 priority actions:
1. Halt fossil fuel expansion and fossil fuel subsidies by 2020 …
2. Triple annual investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency and low carbon technologies for high emitting sectors before 2025 …
3. Put a price on carbon to reflect the true cost of fossil fuel use and embedded carbon by 2020 …
4. Replace GDP growth as the main objective for societal progress …
…
9. Ensure that population growth is kept under control …
The Club of Rome’s most notorious previous publication was its 1972 The Limits to Growth, which repeated resource and population pessimism dating back to Parson Thomas Malthus. He predicted in 1798 that population growth would inevitably outpace the expansion of agricultural land under cultivation, creating periodic starvation and population collapse.
According to The Limits to Growth, picking up from where Malthus left off, the earth’s resources were limited, hence growth should be throttled to conserve them. Zero economic growth was to be preferred, despite the fact that this would keep much of the world in poverty and prevent investment in new technologies. Since resources were finite and growth to be halted, population growth must also be halted, lest there be famine.
Maoist China implemented this program in the form of a mandatory one-child per family policy, enforced by state-compelled abortions and infanticide.
GIGO
The Limits to Growth was made to appear scientific by being based on a computer model. Its critics noted the model’s flaw: “Garbage in, garbage out” — the famous GIGO.
In imitation of the debunked computer-model methodology employed by The Limits to Growth, the United Nations climate reports are also based on computer models. And just as The Limits to Growth‘s models were designed to “prove” that resources and population would crash unless governments intervened as Maoist China did, so the UN climate models have been programmed to “prove” that global warming is caused by CO2 from fossil fuels burned by consumers and industry. The data fed into the models is first massaged (“garbage in”) and if the results produced (the “garbage out”) don’t match what actually happened in the real world, the algorithms are tweaked and the models re-run to produce a better fit between the output and reality. This has as much to do with real science as the 18th century Mechanical Turk had to do with automation. Real science is based on carefully articulated theories whose deductions and predictions are capable of being falsified by real-world observations, not repeatedly massaged with after-the-fact parameter changes as the UN climate models are.
Forcing an economy to eliminate fossil fuels on a crash basis — as the Green New Deal does — will limit economic and population growth as the Club of Rome urged. Indeed, it will collapse both.
Marx enters the picture by his arguments that state control of the economy — socialism or communism — is necessary in order to curb the consumer and producer energies unleashed by free markets. Only state control of medicine, population, and energy, led by the wise leadership of the Democratic Party, will be able to enforce the limits to growth and energy that, in conjunction with the Green New Deal, will be able to save planet Earth.
As though to underline her Malthusian, Club of Rome, and Limits to Growth discipleship, Green New Deal author Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) recently wondered, in the face of climate change, “Is it okay to still have children? “
Some remaining rifts
Rather than present a coherent program, the expanded Green New Deal (GND) movement has produced rifts in the Democratic Party and is a tangle of contradictory demands.
Some environmentalists favor nuclear power as the only reliable source of clean power; others proscribe it as dangerous and polluting.
Some GNDers favor a massive expansion of hydroelectric dams as a source of stored energy to complement unreliable wind and solar. They also praise dams for their destruction of downstream wetlands. Wetlands, they argue, produce methane gas, a more potent global-warming gas than CO2.
But other GNDers denounce hydroelectric dams as causing widespread ecological damage, including to the extraordinarily productive wetlands that other GNDers chastise as methane producing.
And not just wetlands. According to a study by a scientist at the University of Hong Kong, “Although considered ‘green’ energy, hydropower produces substantial amounts of greenhouse gases and has destroyed some of the most pristine habitats around the planet – especially in tropical rainforests.”
And GNDers prefer not to talk about all the birds torn to shreds by windmills, including endangered species.
Enter AOC
A newly elected Democratic party congresswoman from New York produced a draft GND program that occasioned so much ridicule from Republicans that she quickly removed it from her website. But all the declared Democratic presidential candidates have declared fealty to the deleted program. A recently announced presidential candidate, Washington state’s governor, Jay Inslee, says that the Green program of fighting climate change will be at the very center of his presidential campaign.
Delighted at the spectacle of the Democrats bending knees to a barely defensible program, Senate majority leader McConnell is calling for a vote on the Democratic program. In a rare display of bipartisan unity, Washington Post columnist Katrina vanden Heuvel agrees:
Bring it on, Mitch. Let’s have a vote — preferably in both houses — that reveals the Republicans frozen in denial about climate change and unwilling to do anything serious to address it. Let’s see who on the Democratic side is prepared to stand up and who is not.
Republican-Presidential unity
Most of the Republican Party in Congress has denounced the Green New Deal. President Trump led the charge in June 2017 by announcing US intention to exit the Paris Agreement, much to the dismay of European elites and the Chinese. The Chinese had welcomed the self-injury that anti-fossil-fuel environmentalism was causing Western economies while at the same time strengthening Chinese exports of solar panels and windmills.
More recently, President Trump nominated and the Republican senate just confirmed a climate realist, Andrew Wheeler, to the hitherto Green-dominated Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). One other agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, could also benefit from some adult supervision.
It would be helpful, however, for the President to use his powerful bully pulpit to explain to the public the scientific reasons why the claim of forthcoming climate disaster from human-caused global warming is not settled science, is bad economics, and is an attempted power grab by the “government party,” the Democrats, just as they have tried to do with health care.
Let’s not have a debate
But a debate is just what the Democrats don’t want to have. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic presidential candidate from Minnesota, doesn’t really want to be asked, on the Senate floor, if she realizes that if it hadn’t been for fossil fuels thousands of her constituents would have frozen to death a few weeks ago in the subzero weather.
More visibly, when the Trump administration recently moved to set up an advisory panel, including scientists who might challenge the reigning Progressive orthodoxy on climate change, the Left press protested and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said that his party would try to block the panel by defunding it.
And the science?
We and others have written before on some of the important determinants of climate change, both on a long-term geological scale and shorter time spans of a few decades or centuries. Recently, global warming alarmists have been claiming that their concerns have now reached five sigma levels of reliability, the alleged gold standard in science. But the scientific paper underlying these claims has since been debunked by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph and a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute, a libertarian think tank in Canada.
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