High-rise buildings and skyscrapers are seen vaguely in heavy smog in Beijing, China, 26 June 2018. China will crack down further on diesel consumption and support using rail for freight deliveries in its ongoing fight against pollution, citing the environment ministry. Diesel trucks accounted for just 7.8 percent of China's total vehicles, but contributed as much as 57.3 percent of the country's total nitrogen oxide emissions and more than three quarters of airborne particulate matter, according to data from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE). The crackdown will strengthen scrutiny on fuel and engine quality and restrict car freight, the China Daily said, quoting ministry officials. (Imaginechina via AP Images)
Meteorologist Eric Holthaus wrote on Twitter this morning that "The world's top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet." He said that as en endorsement of the latest UN climate report, which Grist claims "shows civilization is at stake" if we don't... bring Western Civilization to an end.
Funny how the Left's goals always seem to come to that, isn't it?
Never have any doubt what their end-game is, fully revealed again today: The sacrifice of human liberty, wherever it can be found, on the altar of "scientific statism."
But let's hold them to their own ecological standards, shall we? With that in mind, I'd like to compare this country's ecological record to that of any state-directed economy.
The Soviet Union poisoned Lake Baikal, home to something like one-sixth of the Earth's potable water. They did far worse to the Aral Sea, which is virtually gone now. And those are just two of many, many examples of Soviet "ecological crimes," since that's what the self-proclaimed nature-worshippers call them. In fact, the Soviet Union produced something unique in Western Civilization: Shrinking adult lifespans. And that was due almost entirely to two factors: Alcoholic despair and ecological ruin. Conditions are no better under Putin's centralized kleptocracy.
The air in Chinese cities can be virtually unbreathable, thanks to the Communists' reliance on cheap brown coal. If China is to ever clean up its spoiled air and rivers, it will be because their partial embrace of capitalism has produced enough wealth for them to do so. But given China's current political trajectory under Xi Jinping, I wouldn't bet my lungs on it.
Communist East Germany damn near destroyed their own forests with acid rain for the reliance on brown coal. It's been joked that Communism was so bad, it made Germans build bad cars -- but Germany's love of its forests is no less profound, and the DDR's near-destruction of them no less cruelly ironic.
India's economy isn't just a state-directed web of corruption, but they've soiled their mighty rivers with filth. The plastic waste bobbing around our oceans comes almost 100% from a few mostly state-directed economies in East Asia.
Islam's state-religion-economic fusion turned Biblical paradise into a desert wasteland, and deforested much of Spain in the few centuries Muslims ruled there.
Setting aside the fact that the EPA has overstepped its mandate in far too many ways, this country has in the last fifty years cleaned up remarkably. I think we could do more to protect and preserve our gorgeous environment, and at less expense, with more market-oriented approaches -- but that's a discussion for another day.
So instead of going on and on, I'll leave you with my main point: Anyone truly interested in protecting the environment had better get on board with Western-style laissez-faire capitalism, and fast.
Everyone else, like Eric Holthaus above, is just a statist poseur with murder in their hearts.
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