Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published on the author’s Substack Purpose and Desire on August 21, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission.
Jennifer Hernandez has a useful piece in a recent City Journal, about how the Green New Deal is actually harmful to the poor.
Well, yes. By mobilizing our entire society to transition to expensive and unreliable energy in pursuit of a phantasmagoria of unattainable CO2 emissions targets, climate activists are imposing a massively regressive tax on everyone. It’s wondrous to behold, really, especially in light of the obvious absurdity to anyone with eyes to see.
For example, we have a South African friend, who washed up in Syracuse after spending years in other countries as a political refugee. She’s self-reliant and hardworking, all the qualities one should value in an immigrant. She gets herself around from job to job in a used car. She just does it, doesn’t ask for handouts from anyone. So, how exactly is she supposed to benefit from $3.65 a gallon gasoline? From $10 a gallon gasoline, which is where the “Just stop oil” crowd wants to take us? Never mind, seems the attitude here in ultra-blue New York. It’s for her own good, you see.
Sanctimonious green paternalism is teeth-grinding enough. When it turns to green colonialism, teeth-grinding turns to teeth-gnashing. In the 19th-century “scramble for Africa,” colonialism was the “white man’s burden.” It was for their own good, you see. Today, climate action is the “white person’s equitable and inclusive burden.” We must tell other countries how to run their affairs because, obviously, they are incapable of deciding such things for themselves. It’s for their own good, you see.
As Jennifer Hernandez outlines, such green bossiness is cloaked in concern for the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. Climate change—sorry, the “climate catastrophe”—will afflict poorer people and countries harder, so better they make the sacrifice now so that all may live well. This is bollocks, illustrated no better than by the country where I spent quite a lot of time during my research career: Namibia.
A few years ago, I wrote something for City Journal about how green colonialism is hobbling the country’s development. I published it under a pseudonym, here.
That article was drawn from a longer manuscript which more fully explored the effects of green colonialism on a developing country with great promise whose future was being sabotaged by the northern hemisphere green agenda. What follows is that original manuscript.
Image by Manpeppe — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 296543911
And yet China can pollute to the extent that California flunks air quality standards.
Something’s wrong here…