Pandemics and The Environment

                   Pandemics and The Environment


This is from a Williamson article on how the pandemic and the reaction in The West is exactly what would be created by The Green New Deal. While obvious enough, it is still true.

The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences for human life and human flourishing.

What is underway right now in response to the epidemic is in substance much like the Green New Deal and lesser versions of the same climate-change agenda: massive new government spending, political control of critical industries, emergency protocols modeled on wartime practice, etc.

Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possible severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?

A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.