Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t M; “… The Green Leap Forward has set humanity on a fast track to another man-made catastrophe. …” – a warning from a respected US civil rights activist who was born and raised in Communist China.
The West Mimics Mao, Takes a Green Leap Forward
By Helen RaleighSept. 21, 2022 1:33 pm ET
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Like Mao, today’s advocates for the green-energy revolution have become impatient with the slow progress made by renewable energy. Fossil fuels and nuclear power provide 80% of the energy the world needs. Despite years of subsidies, renewable energy is still unstable and unreliable, since the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Almost all renewable-energy power plants require either nuclear or fossil fuels as backups.
Rather than gradually phasing out fossil fuels while investing in renewable energy research and development, Western green-energy revolutionaries have launched their own version of the Great Leap Forward in Europe and the U.S. Today’s greens operate in a democratic system unlike Mao, but they have resorted to government coercion to replace fossil fuels (and nuclear power) with renewables on an aggressive deadline. The European Union is set to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, and the Biden administration promises to “achieve a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas pollution in 2030.”
One of the essential lessons from China’s Great Leap Forward is that catastrophic failures inevitably follow from politicians’ insistence on ignoring reason, logic, truth and economics. Europe’s current energy crisis, California’s continuing power outages and Sri Lanka’s food shortages are all warning signs. The Green Leap Forward has set humanity on a fast track to another man-made catastrophe.
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Helen Raleigh is a widely respected author and civil rights activist.
If there is one lesson we can learn from history, that lesson is prosperity is fragile. It is entirely possible for nations to tax themselves out of existence, by diverting too much effort towards a useless economic activity, or legislate themselves into ruin, by implementing damaging economic policies which wreck the fragile network which provides the abundance many of us take for granted.
We’ve all seen the warning signs – Sri Lanka running out of food, Europe, Texas, Australia and California suffering entirely predictable intermittent renewable driven electricity supply instability and price spikes.
Mao also ignored warnings. Just a few decades prior to the catastrophic famines of the Great Leap Forward, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had killed millions with a similar policy of forced industrialisation. The famines affected much of the Soviet Union, including regions which share a border with China. Mao or some of his advisors must have had some awareness of what had happened in the Soviet Union – but they were either too afraid to speak up, or were ignored or punished when they did.
Our politicians appear to be making similar mistakes to those Mao and Stalin made. They are impatient, in too much of a hurry to transform the national economy, just as Mao and Stalin were. They are ignoring the warning signs, the growing evidence of unresolved problems, and are plowing on regardless, with targets and mandates.
Today’s green policies are starting to put pressure on farmers, just as policies impacted farmers in Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia. Fertiliser shortages and fuel price pain are a direct consequence of the green energy policies pursued by President Biden and other western leaders – producing fertiliser is energy intensive, so the price of energy has a direct impact on availability and cost.
Our politicians are endangering us all with their ignorance and arrogance.
Horrible historical events, like Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Stalin’s Soviet Holodomor, or ongoing crisis like Sri Lanka’s food shortages, or the energy shortages in California and Europe, are in some ways like major wars. They seem to have a kind of social momentum of their own. They can progress very quickly from a few isolated problems to a national catastrophe. They only happen when large groups of people benefit from or strongly support the policies which created the catastrophe, and are prepared to act, to vigorously push back against efforts to change course, even after the policies start to create major problems.
Once set in motion these deadly events are difficult to stop. The culmination of many years of poor choices cannot be corrected overnight. We can only hope to push back early and hard, to try to avert the worst of the crisis.
