For many years, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh have been warning us that the left’s goals with climate change have less to do with a warming planet than they do with destroying capitalism. Debating the details of global warming with the left, they say, is really a waste of time because this has never been about “saving the planet.” It’s never been about having a fair and honest debate about what we should do to protect the polar bears or prevent the next Sharknado (or whatever it is we’re supposed to be afraid of these days). It’s always been Marxism under a thin disguise.
Well, we’ve apparently reached the point where the mask is coming off.
In an opinion piece for The UK’s Guardian newspaper, writer Phil McDuff just came right out and said it: “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism.”
So there you go.
From The Guardian:
The Green New Deal (GND), a term presently most associated with 29-year-old US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the “pro free market” wing, who argue that it’s a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation.
The criticism feels ridiculous. Partly because the GND is far from truly radical and already represents a compromise solution, but mainly because the radical economics isn’t a hidden clause, but a headline feature. Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system.
[…]
We will simply have to throw the kitchen sink at this. Policy tweaks such as a carbon tax won’t do it. We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. The impact of a dramatic reconfiguration of the industrial economy require similarly large changes to the welfare state. Basic incomes, large-scale public works programmes, everything has to be on the table to ensure that the oncoming system shocks do not leave vast swathes of the global population starving and destitute. Perhaps even more fundamentally, we cannot continue to treat the welfare system as a tool for disciplining the supposedly idle underclasses. Our system must be reformed with a more humane view of worklessness, poverty and migration than we have now.
So much here to cover, but really – what’s the need? McDuff’s own writing is the best rebuttal you could ever hope for. It’s “unhinged” to criticize AOC’s Green New Deal as a Marxist Trojan horse…because that’s exactly what it is? Wow, that’s quite the argument! Climate change is the result of capitalism…but no mention of Communist China, which is one of the world’s leading carbon polluters? Cool story bro. Oh, and what’s this tidbit about welfare reform? We suppose that’s part of the “kitchen sink” we’re supposed to throw at climate change. No doubt letting transgenders use the wrong bathroom somehow fits into this whole thing as well.
The world needs to be saved, all right. It needs to be saved from people like Ocasio-Cortez and Phil McDuff, who want to throw us back to the Stone Age in an effort to dim the sun.
