Coronavirus is accomplishing in a matter of weeks what Democrats’ Green New Deal could only hope to do. Crushing capitalism, putting the oil and gas industry into panic, ending travel, and controlling population would all be deliberate consequences of the radical Green New Deal. So its supporters—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders, billionaire and former presidential candidate Tom Steyer, and myriad eco-leftists—should be mildly, if not outwardly, pleased.
Don’t come to their defense, with claims like, “The Green New Deal is meant to help the environment and battle climate change!” Listen, I don’t make value judgements on intentionality, Kant. So, don’t @ me with what the Green New Deal was “meant” to do. Let’s talk like grownups about what it would actually do.
The Green New Deal’s call “to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions” is a nicer way of saying “ban the combustion engine.” Sure, that’s your car and the family minivan, but it’s also the lawn mower and leaf blower. You have any recreational toys like jet skis? Gone. Boats? Gone. ATVs, RVs, all gone. Four golfers and their clubs can putt around 18-holes in an electric cart. Try hauling the family over the hills and through the woods to grandma’s house in one.
You know what industry is only economically viable because of the relatively inexpensive combustion engine? The travel industry. And the coronavirus is crushing it. CNN declared the coronavirus is doing the same thing to airlines as 9/11 did. Their stocks are down 30 percent since the panic began. The cruise industry is getting slammed even worse: bookings are down 50 percent, and Carnival Cruise, the largest in the industry, has seen its stock price fall from $51 to $23 in just six weeks.
Good news for the green community, right? Tourism was killing the planet! Climate change apostles have long scolded us for tourism, which “studies show” is responsible for 8 percent of carbon emissions. Even U.S. News and World report breathlessly tells us tourism’s carbon footprint has increased from 3.9 to 4.5 gigatons. Wow: 4.5 gigatons!
To inaccurately quote (like an MSNBC anchor) Marty McFly in “Back to the Future”: what the hell is a gigaton? Doesn’t matter, and the article doesn’t really explain. But you’ve increased it 0.6 amounts. I hope your trip to Mykonos was worth the environmental Armageddon.
If you believe tourism is killing the planet — and by logical deduction that ending tourism would save it — so deeply that you would introduce legislation to achieve this end, then coronavirus is a blessing.
Beyond tourism, I haven’t even touched on the hundreds of other commercial enterprises that run on combustion engines. Trains. Trucking. Trans-Atlantic cargo ships. That gadget you bought on Amazon yesterday: odds are it was manufactured overseas in a factory powered by coal, shipped to some west coast port or a tanker that runs on diesel, put on a train to a Bezos sweatsho—err, “fulfillment center” powered by coal or natural gas electricity, and will arrive tomorrow at your front door in a gas-powered UPS truck.
You think that gadget will still be affordable without fossil fuels? From your smartphone where you bought it to the synthetic sneakers of the man who stole it from your front door, every step of the Amazon life cycle is fossil-fuel dependent.
“Nonsense!” the greenies will scream. “Electric engines work fine!” Well, partly true, but when our electric grid is made, “green” electricity bills will double or triple under the fiscal boondoggle of renewables. Currently, fossil-fuel-rich Americans pay an average of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in an average household. The “green” Germans pay 33 cents. Wunderbar! That’s something to look forward to.
You think there won’t be negative social repercussions with electric bills three times as high? We need only look at our older brother, England, to see what will happen: old people die. Skyrocketing electricity costs in the United Kingdom brought about by its green mandates have left seniors quite literally in the cold. Caroline Abrahams, director of the charity Age UK, made the connection clearly: “because high heating costs are prohibitive for many, resulting in large numbers of older people finding it virtually impossible to stay adequately warm.”
Two winters ago, 46,000 British seniors died from the cold. In their homes. Which they could not afford to heat, because England went “green.” Forty. Six. Thousand. And it barely got a mention in the press.
That’s also not some third world, primitive country. That’s this earth, this realm, this England, which watched it happen.
What else has high numbers of old people dying? Winner, winner, chicken-flavored tofu dinner (meat is banned under the Green New Deal): coronavirus! From China to Italy to here at home, older people are at a greater risk of—well, let’s not say “death,” let’s say “reducing the population to save the planet.”
So once again coronavirus is accomplishing the same ends as the Green New Deal. And it didn’t even need a vote in Congress. It’s as powerful as Barack Obama’s pen.
Green activists want to be judged by their intentions. When they destroyed the coal industry with help from Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency and Mike Bloomberg’s $650 million tax-deductible donation, their intention was to combat climate change. In reality, their combined efforts gave coal miners opioid addictions, increased suicide rates, and rampant poverty. Those facts didn’t make it into Bloomberg’s ubiquitous campaign ads.
That is the future of energy workers if the Green New Deal were to become law: ghost towns where people once sunk their savings into a now worthless mortgage. Abandoned main streets. Institutional poverty. Despair.
But the green activists don’t fret these casualties. Grandma freezing to death is a necessary offering on the altar of climate change. These are the necessary means to accomplish the Greta ends. Sorry, GREAT ends. Don’t know why I wrote Greta…
Unless you think you will be immune, just watch the markets. Watch the economy. Watch the millions who work in hospitality, restaurants, airlines, and energy. Watch the coronavirus crisis intensify and a recession come. Watch entire industries collapse.
Sure, they will demand Trump be held responsible and maybe even call for congressional hearings to stem the unemployment crisis. Nothing makes congressmen feel more potent than sitting in high-backed chairs and feigning indignation reading a script prepared by an intern.
But deep down inside, in a warped sense of justice where math, economics, physics, and logic have no home, the greens will rejoice. Earth is more important than its inhabitants. And people are a disease.
Fewer gigatons of something are being released. Fewer engines are combusting. Fewer factories are manufacturing. Fewer people are working. And that is the goal of the Green New Deal, whatever they claim as their intention.
Coronavirus is a glimpse of the long-term pain a Green New Deal and environmental radicalism would inflict on America. And besides, grandma would die eventually anyway.
