The Climate and the Crisis

About a year ago the editorial board of on-line "Issues and Insights" wrote a piece entitled "How We Know The Climate Crisis Is Not About The Climate". In it, they pointed out that the impetus behind the crisis is "about choking capitalism, punishing wealthy societies, and establishing a socialist-collectivist governance model."

This line of thinking still predominates in the portion of society that rejects climate alarmism. It is, of course, wrong.

The climate crisis isn't about saving the planet, although some of its most vociferous advocates rave about it. Those most concerned with the arson of the earth are the remainders of dying capitalism, the new Whigs that are joined at the hip with government, media, academia and the legal profession to extract as much rent as possible from the population. You could call the entrepreneurs that build solar farms and wind turbine complexes capitalists but you would be wrong. These people don't operate in a free market economy. Their business activity wouldn't be possible without government constructs like subsidies, tax incentives and carbon trading schemes.

Americans in particular have offered up the lives of their sons and their personal wealth to become involved in obscure European spats over borders and ideologies, not realizing that none of this could occur without the say-so of the leaders of what now passes for a capitalist economy, who became world masters, and rich, after all the artillery fire ended.

US financial managers, the company that is taking over CK Hutchison's world port operations, for instance,  controlling trillions of dollars in assets, pass for capitalists in the current milieu. They're the unelected government that arranges such travesties as the Inflation Reduction Act, not the mini-Marxists that are hanging around university coffee houses.

It's beginning to look like the wave of climate anxiety is going to break on the shore of financial reality. The earth itself can't produce enough wealth to pay for a process of rejecting modernity. At least the bubble didn't include a lot of napalm and explosives but it's still early on that score.