Green Is Doomed

I tend to focus my musings more on domestic matters here at The Roots of Liberty, but every so often a foreign-shores event (or two) offers a worthwhile reality check.

In case you missed it, a popular revolt collapsed the government of Sri Lanka. As Michael Schellenberger explains at Common Sense, the widespread unrest can be traced to the nation's elites imposing a green agenda on the masses. That agenda led to bankruptcy, famine, and widespread poverty.

Less earth-shaking but still notable is the farmers' unrest in The Netherlands. Again, we see a green agenda impacting "the masses" to the point of physical protest.

The common denominator is found in Thomas Sowell's sage caution:

The people writing these green agendas are wealthy and secure, making them relatively immune to the high costs they impose on the body politic. They're less apt to feel real pain from higher food and gasoline prices and their living standards aren't much dented by inflation or economic downturn, so all those consequences of their policies are more academic than real.

Until they get voted (or chased) out of office, that is.

The shocker is that they're surprised by such reactions.

Perhaps not that much of a shocker, though - history shows us example after example of the Best-and-Brightest (BnB) being surprised by people changing their behaviors in response to changed rules. Newton and most of our parents taught us about actions and reactions, decisions and consequences, but the BnB either forgot those lessons or, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, ignored them in their hubris.

Therein lies the true doom of the green agenda. People are not going to stand up for having privation imposed upon them by the BnB, especially when the BnB don't share their misery.

Boris Johnson was just run out of office. Not for poor performance (though Kevin D. Williamson notes that BoJo lost interest in his job after he effectuated Brexit and got the UK's response to Russia's invasion right), but because he Marie Antoinetted the masses, partying while everyone else was on COVID lockdown.

Angela Merkel’s green delusions ran into the concrete wall of reality, and now, after she’s nestled in comfortable retirement, Germany has to restart its coal plants (though the stupidity of shutting down its nuclear plants persists), because Putin. Which any high schooler could have foreseen.

Biden's green agenda, carried out via executive order rather than with Congressional concurrence, is bearing similar fruit. His policies are a major component of high gas prices, high energy prices, and inflation rates we haven't seen in over 40 years. His party, unsurprisingly, is predicted to get shellacked in the mid-terms, and if he and they don't course-correct afterward, will lose the White House (possibly even to the Untethered Orange Id they so loathe).

Polls have shown that Americans support environmental causes... as long as they don't cost them anything. Greens and their Orwellian sheep avowed and continue to insist that their agenda will actually save* us money and produce jobs, growth, and economic robustness. That's all fine and dandy, on paper, where voters don't have their own lying eyes as a reference. But, now that the piper has come home to roost*, those green votes are disappearing like bookies' flash paper during a raid.

No green agenda will stand up to voters' wrath. Politicians and their parties may manage to cram some big legislation down our maws from time to time, but such will cost them at the ballot box. Obama lost his Senate supermajority because of ObamaCare. He lost the House because of his tax scheming. He lost the Senate because of his recalcitrance. And he lost his legacy because of his hubris. Biden's about to walk the same path, and rest assured the GOP is not about to suddenly "go Green."

The same tale is already happening around the world. Green excess is producing popular pushback around the globe, and that pushback will only increase as the impact of imposed austerity becomes more obvious and more felt. Since the only BnB-approved remedy to global warming is this imposed austerity, count on it to fail. People aren't going to tolerate it, and they're not going to tolerate governments that persist with it.

Want to address global warming? Embrace solutions that don't impose hardship on the masses. As I've blogged ad nauseam, that starts with nuclear power and geo-engineering research.

That these don't hurt the masses is a big problem to the BnB.

Diehard environmentalist ideologues... have feared that it would work.

The smarter BnB have figured out that the only means of achieving their green dreams is via coercion, and they've abandoned traditional liberalism (and the rules and structures of our society) in favor of force. They're recruited a mob of arrogant fools to brownshirt on their behalf, and have suckered the not-so-Brightest in the media into parroting their deceptions and delusions.

It's not working, and it's not going to work. People are not going to vote themselves into continued misery and privation to satisfy an agenda they don't really believe in.

This is a good thing, but there will be pain along the way. The BnB won't give up their delusions or their power easily - but Green in its current form is doomed. How much damage is done before that doom is realized remains to be seen.

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*My first malaphor. Not my last. You’ve been warned.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.