New Jersey has a new 2019 Energy Master Plan. It
promises to “foster economic growth” while it “mandates 80 percent reductions
in carbon pollution below 2006 levels by 2050,” according to NJ SPOTLIGHT. That’s not enough for hardcore
environmentalists. In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, The
draft of N.J.'s energy plan isn’t meeting the challenge of combating our
climate emergency, John Reichman condemns
the plan because it does not “include a moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects until a
plan is in place to regulate GHGs.” I have to admit that the “until a plan is
in place to regulate GHGs” seems like a small opening for allowing some future
use of fossil fuels. But that shred of a hopeful sign goes up in smoke (or
GHGs) in light of the following. Regurgitating the hysterical claim that “we have 10 years to avoid climate
catastrophe,” Reichman asserts
The first common sense step the state must take to address the
climate crisis is to stop making the problem worse. The state’s existing goals
for reducing GHGs cannot possibly be met if New Jersey permits any of the
dozen, proposed fossil fuel projects to go forward.
My
emphasis. These are current projects in various degrees of development
which will not be there 10 years from now, when demand growth makes them vital.
Will GHGs be regulated in time to satisfy the likes of John Reichman? And if there really is a climate crisis pending within 10
years, and if human flourishing were Reichman’s basic consideration, you’d
think nuclear power would be prominent in Reichman’s withering critique of NJ’s
plan. You’d be wrong.
Reichman represents “BlueWaveNJ’s
Environmental Committee the Steering Committee of EmpowerNJ, a coalition
of more than 80 environmental and community organizations.” I posted these
comments, edited for clarity. The emphasis is mine:
The attack on natural gas,
coupled with the failure to embrace nuclear power—the only replacement capable
of producing the volume of reliable, large-scale electricity needed to power
our lives—is brutally inhumane. Environmentalism places pristine—i.e.,
unimproved by man—nature over human well-being, so they don’t care about the
human catastrophe of energy deprivation that would result from getting rid of
fossils and nuclear.
But when you see “we have 10
years to avoid climate catastrophe,” you’ve encountered a political tactic
geared to panic people into granting government the totalitarian utopian powers
needed to transition the entire economy to “Green”—precisely the kinds of wide,
transcendent powers statists need to impose socialism. The statists’ plan is,
We need to save the planet, and while we’re at, we can transition from
capitalist freedom to socialism. That’s why the U.N. report contains phrases
like “go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society .
. . and efforts to eradicate poverty.” That’s why AOC’s Green New Deal means to “use
the transition to 100 percent renewable energy as the vehicle to
establish economic, racial and social justice in America." “Climate
Emergency” is wrapped up in a socialist agenda.
When a child wakes up
screaming, the adult assures the child that there are no monsters in the
closet--it’s only a nightmare. As to the “climate emergency”, let me be the
adult: There is no climate crisis—no “10-years to avoid”—in the closet. The
real monster is the socialist agenda behind the climate crisis tactic. Given
the vital necessity of energy and freedom in our lives, we should fear those
who would impose “a moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects.” We owe our
children and grandchildren more prosperity and freedom, not poverty and
slavery.
To further make the case for climate
catastrophism, I conclude with an excerpt from a previous
post of mine:
In order to understand what this is really all about, we must take
a brief look back. As thinkers such as Ayn Rand (P. 270) and Stephen Hicks (Chpt. 5) have observed, socialists faced a crisis around the middle of
the 20th Century. Marxist predictions that capitalism would lead to the few
getting rich at the expense of impoverishing the many turned out to be 180º
wrong: The growth of industrial fortunes was accompanied by a rising general
standard of living, including the emergence of a vast prosperous middle class.
Meanwhile, socialist nations collapsed into widespread poverty, one after
another, accompanied by brutal repressions and often genocide. Rather than
acknowledge the obvious, the socialists switched gears. Under a “New Left,”
they aligned with the “ecology” movement, the precursor to modern
Environmentalism, opposing capitalism for creating too much prosperity for the
masses, thus ruining the Earth with pollution. When capitalist nations began
cleaning up the pollution--genuine pollution--while continuing the upward
trajectory of general prosperity, the socialists turned to a
quasi-religion--the Environmentalists’ “climate crisis”. Capitalism-hating
Naomi Klein captures the modern socialist strategy. Climate change “Changes
Everything,” she writes. As Reason’s Ronald Bailey summarizes:
"Our economic system and our planetary system are now at
war," she asserts. Climate science, Klein claims, has given progressives
"the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism" ever. If
the stresses of globalization and a massive financial crisis cannot mobilize
the masses, then the prospect of catastrophic climate change must.
Canonical Marxism predicted that capitalism would collapse under
the weight of its class "contradictions," in which the bourgeoisie
profit from the proletariat's labor until we reach a social breaking point. In
Klein's progressive update, capitalism will collapse because the pollution
produced by its heedless overconsumption will build to an ecological breaking
point.
[P]rogressive values and policies are "currently being
vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature." [emphasis added]
Socialism is totalitarian, by design and in practice. So where
does the Green New Deal come in?
Related Reading:
The
Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables--Michael Shellenberger
Related Audio:
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