Chapter Sixteen, Part II: The Communism Behind Environmentalism (UPDATED)

Chapter Sixteen, Part II: The Communism Behind Environmentalism (UPDATED)
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The Epoch Times is serializing an adaptation from the Chinese of a new book, How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World, by the editorial team of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.

Table of Contents

2. Climate Change (continued)

c. Establishing Dogma in the Scientific Community d. Propaganda and Intimidation

3. Communist Environmentalism

a. Blaming Capitalism b. The Religionization of Environmentalism c. Political Infiltration: Building a World Government

4. Finding a True Solution to the Environmental Crisis
References
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2. Climate Change (continued)

c. Establishing Dogma in the Scientific Community

The hype generated by communist forces around climate change is intended not only to pave the way for a global government, but also to destroy research ethics in the scientific community.

Climatology is a young subject with only a few decades of history. Yet the hypotheses surrounding global warming have been prematurely taken as fact. The media has been keeping global warming in the headlines and covering up the inaccuracies in the underlying science. Governments pour funds into researching the global warming hypothesis while marginalizing other findings. The media and politicians label the prediction of catastrophic climate change as “scientifically proven” and spread it worldwide as unassailable doctrine. Thus, thinking on the matter has been largely unified among the general public, and this has planted convoluted notions of right and wrong in people’s minds.

If carried to its conclusion, the natural trajectory is the establishment of a global super-government — that is, communism — for the ostensible purpose of saving the earth and humankind from a fabricated or greatly exaggerated crisis. Destroying the old world by any means is a basic strategy of communism.

No matter the academic reputation of a scientist, once he or she publicly expresses doubts about the consensus dogma, he or she immediately faces tremendous pressure from peers and academic institutions. Some people have even argued that global warming skeptics should be prosecuted or criminalized. Those who have lived in a communist totalitarian society have had similar experiences when questioning communist party dogma.

The late David Bellamy, a well-known British botanist and president of The Wildlife Trusts who wrote dozens of books and papers during his career, publicly stated that he did not believe in the consensus dogma of global warming. The Wildlife Trusts responded with a statement expressing dissatisfaction and ousted him several months later when his term expired. [46] Environmentalists who previously showed him respect began to cast aspersions on his mental capacity. [47]

The late William Gray, a renowned professor, was a pioneer of American hurricane research. After he criticized the consensus dogma about human-induced global warming, his research proposals were repeatedly rejected. [48]

In Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know, co-author Patrick J. Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a climatologist at the University of Virginia, listed numerous examples of environmentalists suppressing scientific opinion in order to reach their alleged consensus. Because Michaels asserted that changes in the climate would not necessarily lead to disaster — and this stance was inconsistent with the consensus dogma — the governor of Virginia instructed him to stop speaking on global warming as a state climatologist. Michaels ultimately chose to resign. [49]

Washington state assistant climatologist Mark Albright was dismissed from his position following an incident involving misleading statements given by the mayor of Seattle, who had asserted that “the average snow pack in the [Cascade Mountains] has declined 50 percent since 1950.” Albright began sending his colleagues data that showed the snow pack in the Cascades had been growing, rather than declining, since the 1970s. The state climatologist at the time demanded that Albright begin submitting his emails for vetting before they were sent, and when Albright refused, he was stripped of his title. [50]

In communist countries, crude political interference in science is common. In Western countries, the politics of environmentalism is being used to interfere with academic freedom. Academic research that casts doubt about the consensus dogma is rarely seen in academic journals, a phenomenon that began in the 1990s. In the 1990 documentary The Greenhouse Conspiracy, Michaels recounted how he once asked an editor why one of his papers had been rejected for publication, and was told that his work was subject to a higher evaluation standard than that of others. [51] According to the 1990 IPCC report, the understanding at the time was that the extent of global warming was equivalent to natural changes in climate. Therefore, although Michaels’s point of view was different from that of many others, it could not be regarded as heretical. However, the goal of establishing a false consensus had already been set, and everyone had to get on board.

In March 2008, scientists who doubted the consensus dogma on climate issues held a private academic event in New York. Many of these scientists said they had encountered various obstacles when trying to publish their research in academic journals. Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo, former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, said that some of his colleagues dared not attend the meeting out of fear it might affect their employment. He believed that there was “very likely a silent majority of scientists in climatology, meteorology, and allied sciences who do not endorse what is said to be the ‘consensus’ position.” [52]

Climatologist Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, testified in a 2015 US Senate hearing that she had once received an email from a scientist employed at NASA who said, “I was at a small meeting of NASA-affiliated scientists and was told by our top manager that he was told by his NASA boss that we should not try to publish papers contrary to the current global warming claims, because he (the NASA boss) would then have a headache countering the ‘undesirable’ publicity.”

Curry further said in her testimony:

A climate scientist making a statement about uncertainty or degree of doubt in the climate debate is categorized as a denier or a ’merchant of doubt,' whose motives are assumed to be ideological or motivated by funding from the fossil fuel industry. My own experience in publicly discussing concerns about how uncertainty is characterized by the IPCC has resulted in my being labeled as a ‘climate heretic’ that has turned against my colleagues. There is enormous pressure for climate scientists to conform to the so-called consensus. This pressure comes not only from politicians, but from federal funding agencies, universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves who are green activists and advocates. Reinforcing this consensus are strong monetary, reputational, and authority interests. [53]

In January 2017, Curry chose to retire early from her tenured position, writing that she “no longer [knew] what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science.” In a 2017 interview, Curry said: “Once you understand the scientific uncertainties, the present policy path that we’re on doesn’t make a lot of sense. ... We need to open up policy dialogue to a bigger solution space. So I’m just looking to open up the dialogue and to provoke people into thinking.” [54]

Roger Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado, said Curry’s experience shows that “having a tenured position isn’t a guarantee of academic freedom.” [55] Pielke was previously a fellow at his university’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences. Although he agreed with most of the IPCC “consensus” conclusions, he was subjected to similar pressures because he pointed out that the data do not support the idea that extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and droughts had increased due to greenhouse gas emissions. He eventually moved to the University of Colorado’s Sports Governance Center. [56]

It is no wonder that Joanne Simpson, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an award-winning NASA atmospheric scientist, did not voice her skepticism of the “consensus” until after retirement. “Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly,” she said. “As a scientist I remain skeptical. ... The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system.” [57]

d. Propaganda and Intimidation

In the book The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists, Roy Spencer, a climatologist and former NASA satellite expert, listed fifteen propaganda techniques used by environmentalists, including causing panic, appealing to authority, encouraging a herd mentality, resorting to personal attacks, stereotyping, sensationalizing, and falsifying records. [58]

In the 2016 article “A Climate of Censorship,” British journalist Brendan O’Neill wrote about the derisive rhetoric faced by people in many countries if they dared to doubt the prevailing theory of climate change. For example, a British diplomat said in a public speech that those who doubt climate change should be treated by the media no differently than terrorists, and they should not be given a platform to speak. The former executive director of a large environmental group warned that the media should think twice before broadcasting the views of climate-change skeptics because “allowing such misinformation to spread would cause harm.” [59]

Some have even tried to use legal force to suspend freedom of speech in order to extinguish the voices of opponents of the climate-warming hypothesis. At a summit attended by top policymakers in Australia, including the prime minister, a proposal was made to deprive violators of their citizenship. One idea was to re-examine Australian citizens and reissue citizenship only to those who have verified they are “environment-climate friendly.” [60] In 2015, twenty academics sent a letter to the US president and the attorney general requesting that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act be used to prosecute “corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change,” adding that these organizations’ “misdeeds“ must be ”stopped as soon as possible.” [61]

Those skeptical of the theory of climate change have been labeled “deniers.” This includes groups and individuals ranging from those who acknowledge climate warming but feel we are able to cope with it, to those who completely deny warming as a scientific phenomenon. The potency of the “denier” label is considerable. Charles Jones, a retired English professor at the University of Edinburgh, said that the term is designed to place skeptics on the same level of moral depravity as Holocaust deniers. According to O’Neill, some people even claim that skeptics of climate change theory are accomplices in a coming eco-Holocaust and may face Nuremberg-style trials in the future. He quoted a green columnist as saying: “I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine, and disease in decades ahead. I put [their climate-change denial] in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial — except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.”

O'Neill, in his article, commented: “It is usually only in authoritarian states that thoughts or words are equated with crimes, where dictators talk about ’thought crimes’ and their threat to the fabric of society. ... It’s a short step from demonising a group of people, and describing their arguments as toxic and dangerous, to demanding more and harsher censorship.” [62] This judgment is correct. Restricting the right to think is one of the ways communism divorces people from a concept of good and evil that is based on universal values.

3. Communist Environmentalism

In recent decades, with communist forces in retreat and the political and economic catastrophes of communist regimes exposed, communism has latched onto environmentalism as a means of furthering its agenda.

a. Blaming Capitalism

Environmentalism treats capitalism as the enemy, so it shares a common foe with communism. When communism suffered setbacks in the workers’ movements in developed Western countries, it shifted gears and hijacked the environmental cause. Normal activism for environmental protection morphed into activism aimed at vanquishing capitalism.

Communist doctrine originally promoted a utopia, a “heaven on earth,” to incite revolt and overthrow the existing social system. Under the cover of environmentalism, communism adopted a similar approach, but the vision it described was the exact opposite: In place of the wonderful workers’ utopia, there was instead a frightening dystopia, a vision of a “hell on earth.” According to this scenario, in just decades, humanity’s very survival would be at risk due to global warming, landslides, tsunamis, droughts, floods, and heat waves. The target recruits of this movement were not the poor, but rather the wealthy.

By the original doctrines of communism, after acquiring power, the first step is to strip the affluent of their wealth with the supposed purpose of redistributing it to the poor. In reality, the poor remain poor while all the wealth ends up in the hands of the corrupt officialdom. The second step entails the establishment of a state-controlled economy and the abolition of private property. This destroys the national economy and brings everyone hardship.

The same equation plays out at the international level, or when radical environmentalist policies are allowed to take hold. Wealthy countries are expected to give aid to poorer countries — that is, to redistribute wealth on a global scale. In reality, poor countries remain poor, as the money that was intended for their development usually ends up in the hands of the corrupt officials of those countries. Meanwhile, the government’s responsibility is expanded and market mechanisms are replaced with command economics, using all sorts of heavy-handed environmental policies to obstruct the normal functioning of capitalism, forcing businesses to close or relocate overseas, thus crippling the country’s economy. Through these market-oriented methods, the environmental movement seeks to cripple capitalism. Environmental regulations have become important tools for undermining capitalist economies, and are becoming known for eliminating more jobs than they create.

The focus of modern environmentalism is to spread fear of future disasters and to hold the public and governments hostage to this fear. But among those who actively promote this doomsday panic, many live luxurious lifestyles, using plenty of energy and leaving a large carbon footprint. Clearly, they don’t think disaster is imminent.

To make use of a crisis mentality, especially using the “common enemy” of global warming to unite different forces to oppose capitalism, it has become imperative for environmentalists to emphasize and exaggerate the nature of the alleged crisis. The simplest way is to stoke mass fear around using the cheapest sources of energy, that is, fossil fuels — coal, oil, natural gas — and also nuclear energy. Environmentalists succeeded in making people fearful of nuclear energy decades ago, and now, they are trying to make people afraid of using fossil fuels by claiming that utilizing these energy sources leads to catastrophic global warming.

However, in reality, climate science hasn’t concluded that global warming is caused by human activity, or that global warming will definitely lead to disaster. If natural causes are behind climate change, then all these government policies only serve to impede economic development while often providing only marginal benefits.

For example, officials raise the bar of emission standards for cars with the justification that it reduces the carbon footprint. However, this naturally leads to higher manufacturing costs and less profit, followed by greater unemployment and outsourcing industry to developing countries where costs are lower. Moreover, increasing the fuel efficiency of all cars from 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016 models to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 would at most cut the magnitude of global warming by 0.02 degrees Celsius by 2100. [63] This would do virtually nothing to help reduce global warming. Various restrictions of dubious effectiveness have cost millions of workers their jobs and have dealt a heavy blow to manufacturing industries, research faculties, energy innovations, and international business competitiveness in Western countries.

Proponents of environmental protection enthusiastically promote green energy, especially the solar and wind power industries. Unfortunately, the pollution that comes with the generation of green energy is either underestimated or simply hidden. During solar panel production, the deadly poison silicon tetrachloride is created as a byproduct, causing its own environmental problem. A report by The Washington Post quotes Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei University of Technology, as saying: “The land where you dump or bury it [silicon tetrachloride] will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. ... It is like dynamite — it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it.” [64] The production of solar panels typically also consumes enormous amounts of conventional energy, including coal and petroleum.

According to the Paris climate agreement, by 2025, developed countries must collectively mobilize $100 billion each year to help developing countries reduce emissions and “adapt to climate change.” If the United States hadn’t withdrawn from the agreement, it would have been required to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 to between 26 and 28 percent below its 2005 levels. This would have meant that every year, the United States would cut 1.6 billion tons of emissions. As for China, the world’s biggest polluter, the accord allows it to continue to increase its carbon emissions until 2030. [65]

In a statement formally announcing the withdrawal from the accord, President Donald Trump said compliance would have cost 2.7 million American jobs by 2025, citing a study by the National Economic Research Associates.

The president said the study also predicted that compliance would cut production in the following US sectors by 2040: paper, which would be down by 12 percent; cement, by 23 percent; iron and steel, by 38 percent; coal, by 86 percent; and natural gas, by 31 percent.

“The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income and, in many cases, much worse than that,” Trump said. “In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from ... America’s expected reductions in the year 2030 — after we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories, and suffered much higher energy costs for our businesses and for our homes. [66]

With the rise of the environmental movement, communist countries caught a break in their struggle against the West. Unreasonable regulations and agreements choke industries, economies, and technological development in Western capitalist countries. This has hampered America in its role as the leading superpower and bastion of freedom against communism.

Protecting the environment is both a practical and moral necessity. However, the goal of environmental protection should be balanced with the needs of humankind. Environmental protection for its own sake is excessive and forsakes humanity while being co-opted by communism. Today’s environmentalism doesn’t care about balance and has become an extremist ideology. Doubtlessly, many environmentalists harbor good intentions. But in their quest to mobilize and concentrate the resources of the state for the sake of their cause, they are aligning themselves with communism.

b. The Religionization of Environmentalism

Michael Crichton, the author of Jurassic Park, once said that environmentalism is one of the most powerful religions in the Western world today. He said it possesses the typical characteristics of a religion: “There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature; there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge; and as a result of our actions, there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.”

Crichton believed that the tenets underlying environmentalism are based on blind faith over facts. “Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or [be] saved; whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom; whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.” [67]

This view has been recognized by a number of scholars. William Cronon, an influential environmental historian in the United States, believes that environmentalism is a religion because it proposes a complex set of moral requirements with which to judge human behavior. [68] Freeman Dyson, the renowned scientist and quantum mechanist, said in an article in the June 12, 2008, issue of The New York Review of Books that environmentalism is “a worldwide secular religion” that has “replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.” The religion of environmentalism holds that “despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.” The ethics of this new religion “are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.” [69]

Many environmentalists do not shy away from this subject. A former head of the IPCC who resigned following a sexual harassment scandal intimated in his resignation letter that environmentalism was his religion. [70]

As environmentalism has become more ideological and religious in nature, it also has become increasingly intolerant of different views. Former Czech Republic President Václav Klaus, an economist, believes that the environmental movement is now more driven by ideology than true science, becoming a quasi-religion aimed at destroying existing society. This new religion, like communism, describes a wonderful picture of utopia, one reached by using human wisdom to plan the natural environment and rescue the world. This “salvation” is based on opposition to the existing civilization.

Klaus, who wrote the 2008 book Blue Planet in Green Shackles, said in a speech, “If we take the reasoning of the environmentalists seriously, we find that theirs is an anti-human ideology.” He agreed with biologist Ivan Brezina that environmentalism is not a rational, scientific answer to ecological crises, but rather boils down to an overall denial of civilization. [71]

In addition to hijacking environmentalism as a political movement, communist influences have given environmentalism characteristics of an anti-humanity cult.

Canadian political critic Mark Steyn says that according to the environmentalists, “we are the pollution, and sterilization is the solution.“ In their view, ”the best way to bequeath a more sustainable environment to our children is not to have any.” He gave the example of a British woman who had an abortion and underwent sterilization because she believed having children was bad for the environment. [72]

This thinking places the natural environment as the supreme priority, far beyond the sacred position of human beings, by means of even controlling human fertility and depriving people of their very right to exist. This view, which is, in essence, an anti-humanist ideology, is no different from that of communism. It also goes hand in hand with the Left’s attack on the family and traditional gender roles.

Population control has become a method of choice for dealing with environmental degradation, with environmentalist activists and other socialists promoting abortion and anti-natalist policies, and even praising the brutal one-child policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Religious fervor, enforced dogma, anti-capitalist action, and debasing humanity before the environment will not lead to a healthier natural environment, much less a fairer or more just human society. One need only look at the disasters of communist rule over the past century to predict the end result should radical environmentalism succeed in its aims.

c. Political Infiltration: Building a World Government

It is difficult to politically impose communism in the democratic Western world, which values individual rights, private ownership, rule of law, and free markets. The radical environmental movement requires the power of the government to compel people to part with their assets and their lives of comfort and convenience.

From the perspective of radical environmentalists, one nation’s government is nowhere near enough to tackle the myriad environmental crises facing the planet. Using the justification of an alleged consensus on issues like man-made climate change, they call for an empowered United Nations or the establishment of some other global authority.

If the movement is unable to take off, the vision of an imminent ecological crisis can be played up further, whipping up the panic and fear necessary to influence the public and governments to accept the forceful implementation of environmental policies, and in so doing, achieve the goal of dismantling capitalism and imposing communism.

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.

A campaign organizer for the group Friends of the Earth stated at a UN conference, “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.” [73] A leading green thinker at the University of Westminster told a reporter that carbon rationing “has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not” and that “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, the United Kingdom 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 being used as another method for constructing a totalitarian system. In China, food coupons were once used for buying essentials such as cooking oil, grain, and fabric. Through food rationing, wealth was redistributed, while the central government was given supreme control over people’s assets and freedom.

Environmentalists also use their ideology to curtail individual freedom. In Western countries, creating visions of an impending environmental catastrophe became a convenient means of persuading people to give up their rights. The Australia-based Carbon Sense Coalition proposed a list of new laws that would force people to modify their behavior in the name of solving global warming:
  •  Ban open fires and pot bellied stoves
  •  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 subsidise 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 ... [74]

Environmentalism is also used to expand the size and authority of governments. 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 ones. 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. Of course, it is taxpayers who foot the bill.

The city of San Francisco established a position for a climate chief with an annual salary of $160,000. One of the poorest boroughs in London, Tower Hamlets, at one point had fifty-eight official positions related to climate change. [75] The logic is the same as that used by universities and companies for hiring “diversity” officers.

Environmentalism is even used to suggest that democracy is outdated and to push for the establishment of a multinational or even a global totalitarian government. Environmentalists claim that democracies 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. [76]

Author Janet Biehl summarized this mindset as “the ecological crisis is resolvable only through totalitarian means” and “an ‘ecodictatorship’ is needed.” [77] It asserts that no free society would do what the green agenda requires.

Paul R. 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. [78]

In practice, except for a global totalitarian government, no government or organization could possibly accumulate this much authority. Ultimately, the programs proposed by environmentalists glorify communist totalitarianism and suggest that the communist system is superior.

Reuters estimated in a 2007 report that the CCP had been able to cap China’s population at 1.3 billion — 300 million less than the projected 1.6 billion — because of the one-child policy implemented in the 1980s. The author of the report noted that the CCP’s policy had the side effect of contributing to a reduction of global carbon emissions, completely ignoring the brutality with which the totalitarian policy was enforced — including forced abortions and sterilizations, and economic persecution — as well as the trauma and suffering it brought to the millions of Chinese women and their families whose fundamental rights and privacy were trampled underfoot. [79]

One of the biggest issues affecting the environment is pollution. Despite erasing hundreds of millions of people from China’s future generations, the CCP’s growth-intensive economic model consumes energy at a prodigious rate, making the People’s Republic of China the world’s biggest polluter, with the worst big-city air pollution and severe water pollution. Water from the vast majority of rivers in mainland China is no longer safe to drink; contaminated air from China blows 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 praise the CCP and even view 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. [80]

Klaus wrote in his book: “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!” [81]

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.” [82]

4. Finding a True Solution to the Environmental Crisis

Humanity and the earth were created by the divine. It is an environment in which human beings can live, prosper, and multiply. People have a right to use the resources of nature and, at the same time, have an obligation to cherish and care for the environment given to them. For thousands of years, human beings have heeded the warnings left by the divine in ancient times and have lived in harmony with nature.

The emergence of environmental problems is ultimately the result of human moral corruption. In modern times, this moral decay has been further amplified by the power of science and technology. The polluted natural environment is but an external manifestation of humanity’s inner moral pollution. To purify the environment, one must start by purifying the heart.

The rise of environmental awareness stems from the human instinct of self-preservation. While this is natural and understandable, it has also become a loophole exploited by the communist specter. Communism has latched on to environmentalism to create large-scale panic, advocate a warped set of values, deprive people of their freedom, attempt to expand government, and even impose a world government. Embracing this alternative form of communism in a bid to save the environment may lead to the enslavement of humanity.

A compulsory political program is not the answer to the environmental problems we face, nor is reliance on modern technology a way out. To resolve the crisis, we must gain a deeper understanding of the universe and nature, as well as the relationship between humans and nature, while maintaining an upright moral state. Humanity must restore its traditions, improve morality, and find its way back to the path set by the divine. In doing so, people will naturally receive divine wisdom and blessings, and the beautiful natural world will be restored, full of life.

Updated March 25, 2021.
Read the series here: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World

References

46. Jonathan Leake, “Wildlife Groups Axe Bellamy as Global Warming ‘Heretic,’” Sunday Times Online, May 15, 2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20080906161240/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article522744.ece.
47. Christopher C. Horner, Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2008), 78–79.

48. Ibid., 73–74.

49. Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling Jr., Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2009), x–xiii.
50. James Taylor, “Associate State Climatologist Fired for Exposing Warming Myths,” The Heartland Institute, June 1, 2007, https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/associate-state-climatologist-fired-for-exposing-warming-myths.
51. Hilary Lawson, dir., The Greenhouse Conspiracy (UK: Channel 4 Television, 1990), posted on YouTube by ZilogBob on February 16, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvpwAwvDxUU.
52. Marc Morano, “Climate Skeptics Reveal ‘Horror Stories’ of Scientific Suppression,” US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, March 6, 2008, https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases-all?ID=865dbe39-802a-23ad-4949-ee9098538277.
53. US Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate Over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Climate Change,” 114th Cong., 2nd sess., December 8, 2015, https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/curry-senate-testimony-2015.pdf.
54. Scott Waldman, “Judith Curry Retires, Citing ‘Craziness’ of Climate Science,” E&E News, January 4, 2017, https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060047798.

55. Roger Pielke Jr., as quoted in Waldman, “Judith Curry Retires.”

56. Rich Lowry, “A Shameful Climate Witch Hunt,” National Review, February 27, 2015, https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/02/shameful-climate-witch-hunt-rich-lowry/.
57. US Congress, Senate, Committee on Environment and Public Works, US Senate Minority Report: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims. Scientists Continue to Debunk ‘Consensus’ in 2008, S. Rep., December 11, 2008, https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/8/3/83947f5d-d84a-4a84-ad5d-6e2d71db52d9/01AFD79733D77F24A71FEF9DAFCCB056.senateminorityreport2.pdf.
58. Roy Spencer, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists (New York: Encounter Books, 2010), 31.
59. Brendan O’Neill, “A Climate of Censorship,” The Guardian, November 22, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/nov/22/aclimateofcensorship.

60. Horner, Red Hot Lies, 107.

61. Hans von Spakovsky and Nicolas Loris, “The Climate Change Inquisition: An Abuse of Power That Offends the First Amendment and Threatens Informed Debate,” The Heritage Foundation, October 24, 2016, https://www.heritage.org/report/the-climate-change-inquisition-abuse-power-offends-the-first-amendment-and-threatens.

62. O’Neill, “A Climate of Censorship.”

63. John Fund, “Rollback Obama’s CAFE Power Grab, Give Car Consumers Freedom,” National Review, May 23, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fuel-standards-cafe-epa-rolls-back.
64. Ren Bingyan, as quoted in Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China,” The Washington Post, March 9, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html?referrer=emailarticle&noredirect=on.
65. “The Paris Agreement on Climate Change,” Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), December 2015, issue brief: 15-11-Y, https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/paris-climate-agreement-IB.pdf.
66. US President Donald J. Trump, “Statement by President Trump on the Paris Climate Accord,” The White House, June 1, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-trump-paris-climate-accord.
67. Michael Crichton, “Environmentalism Is a Religion: Remarks to the Commonwealth Club,” Hawaii Free Press, September 15, 2003, http://www.hawaiifreepress.com/ArticlesMain/tabid/56/ID/2818/Crichton-Environmentalism-is-a-religion.aspx.
68. Robert H. Nelson, “New Religion of Environmentalism,” Independent Institute, April 22, 2010, http://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=5081.
69. Freeman Dyson, “The Question of Global Warming,” The New York Review of Books, June 2008, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/06/12/the-question-of-global-warming.
70. Damian Carrington, “IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri Resigns,” The Guardian, February 24, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/24/ipcc-chair-rajendra-pachauri-resigns.
71. Václav Klaus, “An Anti-Human Ideology,” Financial Post, October 20, 2010, https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/vaclav-klaus-an-anti-human-ideology.
72. Mark Steyn, “Children? Not If You Love the Planet,” The Orange County Register, December 14, 2007, https://www.ocregister.com/2007/12/14/mark-steyn-children-not-if-you-love-the-planet.
73. Emma Brindal, as quoted in Horner, Red Hot Lies, 214.

74. Ibid., 211–215.

75. Ibid., 227.

76. David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).
77. Janet Biehl, as quoted in Horner, Red Hot Lies, 219–220.
78. Paul Ehrlich, as quoted in Václav Klaus, Blue Planet in Green Shackles: What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? (Washington, DC: Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2008), 14.
79. Alister Doyle, “China Says One-Child Policy Helps Protect Climate,” Reuters, August 30, 2007, https://www.reuters.com/article/environment-climate-population-dc-idUSKUA07724020070831.
80. John Bachtell, “China Builds an ‘Ecological Civilization’ While the World Burns,” People’s World, August 21, 2018, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/china-builds-an-ecological-civilization-while-the-world-burns.
81. Klaus, Blue Planet, 4.

82. Ibid., 7–8.