Tom Shepstone
Natural Gas NOW
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Green corporatism is always in the background when it comes to fractivism and global warming hysteria, as government rent seekers try to mold a crisis mood.
Global warming hysteria seems to get worse by the moment. Fractivism is, in many respects, a sub-set of the disease. It’s a refusal to debate either facts or solutions. It’s a shrill demand we act immediately and act in but one way. There’s a wide swath of overlap between those who suppose global warming is a threat and those who suppose it’s not; an area occupied by natural gas, which is low-carbon and, when substituted for coal and fuel oil, has done more to reduce CO2 than anything else. Yet, our friends on the other side will, for the most part, have none of it. Why is this? The answer is green corporatism.
A Stockholm bicycle decorated during last year’s election with references to Thunberg: “The climate crisis must be treated as a crisis! The climate is the most important election issue!” One wonders what useful idiot to green corporatists rides it.
Green corporatism, simply explained, is the milking of government cows by business to secure ratepayer and taxpayer subsidies and turn them into private profits. Profits obtained from truly entrepreneurial enterprises are the mother’s milk of freedom, with prices serving as the votes of consumers as to what is most necessary or wanted. Subsidies extracted from ratepayers and taxpayers under the threat of prison if one doesn’t comply, though, are spoiled milk. They are a form of economic rent secured by manipulating government to serve private ends.
Whenever you remove the veil of green virtue it seems you find this green corporatism. A recent article in Standpoint serves to illustrate as it exposes the green corporatism behind Greta Thunberg, yet another child exploited by green special interests (emphasis added):
Greta Thunberg is just an ordinary 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl whose fiery visions have convinced the parliaments of Britain and Ireland to declare a “climate emergency.” Greta’s parents, actor Svante Thunberg and opera singer Malena Ernman, are just an ordinary pair of parent-managers who want to save the planet. Query their motives, and you risk being accused of “climate denial”, or of bullying a vulnerable child with Asperger’s. But the Greta phenomenon has also involved green lobbyists, PR hustlers, eco-academics, and a think-tank founded by a wealthy ex-minister in Sweden’s Social Democratic government with links to the country’s energy companies. These companies are preparing for the biggest bonanza of government contracts in history: the greening of the Western economies. Greta, whether she and her parents know it or not, is the face of their political strategy.
Read the whole story and see who is really behind Greta. It’s rather incredible, although hardly out of pattern for green corporatism. We’ve seen it in this country time and again with hedge fund investors in renewables (e.g., James and Nat Simons).
Meanwhile, AOC and like-minded children old enough to know better try to create the crisis atmosphere these hedge-fund green corporatists son ardently desire. They only focus on the U.S. and Europe, though. That’s because that’s where the government rent is available. China and India are the countries they’d really be focusing on if this were a real crisis, of course. But, they don’t because there’s no hope of securing rent from those governments. They are too poor and they have other priorities, as this Canadian “Chemist in Langley” notes:
We live in a world where 1.1 billion people live in energy poverty and each year 4.3 million people a year die from preventable indoor air pollution directly resulting from that energy poverty. Governments in developing nations are going to prioritize the health of today’s people over those of tomorrow.
Yes, the wolf cries of the rent-seeking green corporatist pigs are all directed toward us because we have the money, they suppose, to furnish their pigsties. They have captured much of academia and government with seed money funding for studies and political donations. They have used their private foundations to advance—tax-free, no less— their personal interests and reward their personal investments. They have created phony organizations to promote those interests. They have attempted down any speech to the contrary and, too often succeeded.
These green corporatists have also done “incalculable” damage to climate science and any hope of legitimate public debate on climate change, as Judith Curry notes. It seems there’s no end in sight to this manufactured hysteria. Forty or years of failed predictions have only led to ever more bizarre claims of global warming impacts and projections of ever fewer years left to act as one deadline after another passes without the doors being blown in. Failure spurs ever greater threats. Yet, that is their problem, isn’t it? The public isn’t buying the scam and that suggests the whole thing may well implode in the not too distant future. I certainly hope so. It’s time we tarred and feathered the green corporatists and discussed this stuff rationally.
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