DOWN GO THE GREENS

DOWN GO THE GREENS

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CLIMATE, ENVIRONMENT, EUROPE, EUROPEAN UNION, LEFTISM

As Steve noted earlier, today’s elections to the European Parliament were a disaster for the Left and a triumph for the Right (the “far right” in European parlance). And as Steve said, the Greens were hardest hit. The consequences could be far-reaching.

This article in the Telegraph preceded but predicted the conservative victory. It focuses on the consequences for Europe’s climate policies: “Rise of the Right threatens EU net zero ambitions.”

Surging hard-Right parties are plotting to dismantle EU net zero laws after the European elections on Sunday, Green politicians have said.

Nationalist forces will overturn the bloc’s ambition to hit the 2050 zero carbon target in the same way they hardened European migration policy by dragging it to the Right, they said.

“For them, the next horizon, the next battle, is indeed to kill these green, woke policies,” said Philippe Lamberts, the co-president of the European Greens.

I certainly hope so.

Hard-Right leaders such as Geert Wilders want the Dutch to leave the Paris agreement on climate change, while Italy’s Giorgia Meloni described the EU as waging a “holy war” on green issues.

The two most important issues facing the EU are the war in Ukraine and immigration, according to voters in a Eurobarometer survey.

Fifth was climate change, behind the cost of living.

In Europe, as in America, concern about global warming is a mile wide and an inch deep, and I think there is a great deal of unexpressed skepticism.

The European People’s Party, whose leader Ursula von der Leyen is the current EU president, has seen the writing on the wall and was backing off on climate extremism even before today’s election:

As green issues became an election battleground, the EPP, fearful of losing ground to the hard-Right, successfully called for a weakening of strict EU protections for the wolf.

It narrowly failed to torpedo the bloc’s nature restoration biodiversity law last year but watered it down significantly.

The EPP has also vowed to reverse the EU ban on combustion-engine cars as soon as possible.
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After tractor protests hit Brussels in February, Mrs Von der Leyen caved in.

The commission ditched green proposals to halve pesticide use, cut agricultural emissions and a call for citizens to eat less meat.

Europe’s Greens will be in full retreat after today’s election, and as similar results continue in national elections. Here, as in a number of other areas, the Europeans are ahead of us. To have any kind of an economic future and to restore our freedoms, Americans need to reject the Democratic Party as resoundingly as Europe’s voters have turned out the Greens.