https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019
Don’t be fooled, the urgent need to combat climate change, as cited by the Green New Deal, is nothing more nor less than a trojan horse, inside of which lurks Comrade Marx. A utopian paradise for all is its promise — utopian as in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba and Chávez’s Venezuela.
ROOSEVELT‘s New Deal managed to delay America’s recovery from the Great Depression for years after the UK, Europe and Australia had recovered. This is a mere blip on the course of history compared with the dystopian future offered by the Green New Deal.
Backdropped by older white men of privilege, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) announced her Green New Deal (the Deal) in Washington; in the form of a proposed fourteen-page House of Reps resolution. Presumably the men were props calculated to give the impression that the madness had a kernel of sanity. After all, could middle- and older-aged white men sign up to flights of fancy? Well, yes, they can. Think of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.
Before I cover some of the elements of the Deal a note of caution is warranted. I heard some conservatives and a few level-headed Democrats say that it was pie-in-the-sky. It isn’t. Pie-in-the-sky is an empty promise of unattainable benefits; writ large, it is a utopian promise of nirvana right here on planet Earth.
The Deal is not a pie-in-the-sky promise but a concrete threat of a future hellhole. And, as we know, unlike nirvanas, hellholes have been regularly brought about. This particular one, as for so many, would be a product of socialism. Don’t be fooled, climate change in the Deal is simply a trojan horse. Inside lurks comrade Karl Marx.
Certainty of climate catastrophe of biblical proportions sets the scene: mass migrant flight, enormous economic losses, wildfires such as we haven’t seen, ninety-nine percent of coral reefs gone, more than 350 million people “exposed to deadly heat stress.” And on top of all of this, rising sea levels, severe storms, and droughts, etc., etc.
If this were not enough on the climate front; on the socio-economic front, inequality and discrimination bear down on swathes of the populace. Suffering are “indigenous people, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialised communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.” Who’s left, you might ask? Obviously, those left are privileged white men – hence I suppose those aforementioned privileged white men hovering behind AOC lest they be among those for the guillotine come the witching hour.
