State Of Mankind - How Much Do You Know?

Excerpts from "How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World"

One important method communism uses to establish control is to use government to deprive people of their property and freedom and infinitely expand state power. It is very hard to put such a method into practice in the democratic Western world. Environmentalism, however, offers communism a magic weapon. People are deprived of their rights in the name of “environmental protection.”

First, environmentalist ideologies are used for redistribution of wealth. Traditionally, communist states reallocated wealth through revolution. Over the years, however, this approach became increasingly difficult. Therefore, environmentalists adopted indirect strategies, forcing people to quietly give up their freedom and property in the name of preventing environmental tragedy. The group Friends of the Earth states, “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.” Mayer Hillman, a leading green thinker, said that “rationing is the only way to prevent runaway climate change,” and “carbon rationing has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not,” because “democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it.”

In the “battle” against climate change, Great Britain was the first to float the concept of individual carbon-ration coupons. One British scientist regarded this as “the introduction of a second currency with everyone having the same allowance — wealth redistribution by having to buy carbon credits from someone less well off.”

Those who have lived in the Soviet Union or communist China can easily see this kind of carbon rationing as another method to construct a totalitarian system. In China, food coupons were once used for buying essentials such as cooking oil, grain, and cloth. Through food rationing, on the one hand, wealth was redistributed; on the other, the central government was given supreme control over wealth and freedom.

Environmentalist ideologies are also used to curtail individual freedom. In the countries of the West, which pride themselves on a tradition of personal liberty, it is extremely hard to have people automatically give up their rights and accept numerous limitations in private life. To force people to give up their freedom and rights, an imaginary environmental catastrophe became a convenient means. “Global warming’’ and “last days on Earth” became the best slogans for environmentalists. The Australia-based Carbon Sense Coalition offered the following compilation of proposals to force people to modify their behavior in the name of solving global warming:

Ban incandescent light bulbs
Ban bottled water
Ban private cars from some areas
Ban plasma TVs
Ban new airports
Ban extensions to existing airports
Ban standby mode on appliances
Ban coal-fired power generation
Ban electric hot water systems
Ban vacationing by car
Ban three-day weekends
Tax babies
Tax big cars
Tax supermarket parking areas
Tax rubbish
Tax second homes
Tax second cars
Tax holiday plane flights
Tax electricity to subsidize solar power
Tax showrooms for big cars
Eco-tax cars entering cities
Require permits to drive your car beyond your city limits
Limit choices in appliances
Issue carbon credits to every person
Dictate fuel efficiency standards
Investigate how to reduce production of methane by Norway’s moose
Remove white lines on roads to make motorists drive more carefully

Third, environmentalism can be used and is used to expand the size and authority of big government. Various Western countries not only have huge environmental protection agencies, but also use the environment as an excuse to establish new government agencies and expand the authority of existing agencies. All agencies have the bureaucratic tendency for self-preservation and expansion, and environmental agencies are no exception. They abuse the power in their hands to spread the narrative of environmental catastrophe to the general public in order to obtain more funding and to secure their positions within the government structure. Eventually it is taxpayers who foot the bill.

The city of San Francisco established a City Climate Chief position with an annual salary of $160,000. The poorest borough in London (Tower Hamlets) has fifty-eight official positions related to climate change. The logic is the same as universities and companies having mandatory “diversity” officers.

Environmentalism can be used to suggest that democracy is outdated and push for the establishment of multinational or even global totalitarian government. Environmentalists claim that democracy cannot handle the coming environmental crisis. Instead, to overcome the challenges ahead, we must adopt totalitarian or authoritarian forms of government, or at least some aspects thereof.

Author Janet Biehl accurately summarized this type of mentality by saying that “an ‘ecodictatorship’ is needed,” with the obvious reason being that no free society would do to itself what the green agenda requires.

Paul Ehrlich, one of the founders of environmentalism, wrote in the book How to Be a Survivor: A Plan to Save Spaceship Earth: “1. Population control must be introduced to both overdeveloped countries as well as underdeveloped countries; 2. The overdeveloped countries must be de-developed; 3. The underdeveloped countries must be semi-developed; 4. Procedures must be established to monitor and regulate the world system in a continuous effort to maintain an optimum balance between the population, resources, and the environment.”

In practice, except for a global totalitarian government, no government or organization could possibly accumulate this much authority. In effect, this amounts to using environmentalism to advocate a global totalitarian government.

Ultimately, the environmentalist program suggests that the communist system is superior and glorifies communist totalitarianism. Since population growth leads to more resource consumption, more carbon emissions, and more waste products, environmentalists advocate for population control or even population reduction. This has led many Western environmentalists to promote the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) population control.

Reuters estimated in one report that because of the one-child policy implemented in the 1980s, the CCP regime was able to cap its population at 1.3 billion; without the cap, the Chinese population would have reached 1.6 billion. The author of the report noted that the CCP’s policy had the side effect of contributing to a reduction of global carbon emissions. What it ignored was the erasure of the hundreds of millions of young lives and the great suffering visited upon the affected families.

One of the biggest issues affecting the environment is pollution, including that of the air and water. The CCP’s economic model consumes energy at a prodigious rate, making China the world’s biggest polluter, with the worst big-city air pollution and severe water pollution. The majority of rivers in China are no longer safe to drink. Dust storms from China blow across the sea to Korea and Japan, even crossing the Pacific Ocean to reach the American West Coast.

Logically, genuine environmentalists should make communist China the main target of their criticisms, but curiously, many environmentalists praise the CCP, even viewing it as the hope for environmental protection. The Communist Party USA news website, People’s World, has reported extensively on environmental news. The main theme of its reports is the claim that the Trump administration’s environmental policies will destroy the country and even the world, while the CCP is the force for its salvation.

Former president of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus, an economist, wrote in the book Blue Planet in Green Shackles: What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?: “Environmentalism is a movement that intends to radically change the world regardless of the consequences (at the cost of human lives and severe restrictions on individual freedom). It intends to change humankind, human behavior, the structure of society, the system of values — simply everything!”

Klaus believes the environmentalists’ attitude toward nature is analogous to the Marxist approach to economics: “The aim in both cases is to replace the free, spontaneous evolution of the world (and humankind) by the would-be optimal, central, or — using today’s fashionable adjective — global planning of world development. Much as in the case of communism, this approach is utopian and would lead to results completely different from the intended ones. Like other utopias, this one can never materialize, and efforts to make it materialize can only be carried out through restrictions of freedom, through the dictates of a small, elitist minority over the overwhelming majority.”

“This ideology preaches Earth and nature, and under the slogans of their protection — similarly to the old Marxists — wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning of the whole world.”

For these reasons, Klaus strongly opposes attempts to use the cause of environmental protection in order to build a national or a global government to subjugate the general public.

From Chapter 16: The Communism Behind Environmentalism