Add this to the mountain of evidence that radical environmentalism is just confiscatory socialism by a different name.
In line with Bill Moyers’s practice of using his tax-payer funded show as a platform for lefty activists, climate change extremist Naomi Klein appeared on Moyers & Company [1] on Nov. 15. Klein is the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” According to Klein, the free market approach to economics will bring about “Armageddon” if it’s not stopped. Deregulated capitalism is a “crisis creation machine.”
“We can’t leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don’t regulate corporations and allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer,” said Klein. Apparently, global warming is “the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.”
Klein is currently launching a “Do the Math” tour, with fellow climate activist Bill McKibben [2] (who, as a side note, argued once upon a time that society would be better served if people didn’t spend money on Christmas presents) to kick off a “divestment” movement, urging people to take their money out of corporations and universities with ties to the oil industry. The campaign is meant to go “after those companies where it hurts, which is their portfolios, which is their stock price.”
Klein advocated “disinvesting” in universities until they stop accepting funding from corporations with ties to the oil industry, although she admits that this action would affect “almost every university.”
Moyers, of course, was sympathetic to Klein’s cause, comparing it to the fight against apartheid in South Africa. He agreed with Klein that such “rogue corporations” like “Chevron and Exxon-Mobil and BP and all of those huge capitalists and institutions” are recklessly endangering the planet.
“We absolutely know that the future is going to be filled with many more such super storms and many more such costly, multibillion-dollar disasters.” Klein argued that a large part of the problem stemmed from the close-mindedness of conservatives. “[W]hat you find is that people who have very strong conservative political beliefs cannot deal with this science, because it threatens everything else they believe.”
In fact, climate change “science” is debatable at best. To prove her point, Klein repeatedly cites NASA’s James Hansen, a climate change prophet of doom whose apocalyptical predictions have failed to come true time and time again. Yet, here Klein referred to him as “our foremost climate scientist.”
In 1988, Hansen predicted that global temperatures would rise by 0.45 degrees Celsius. It didn’t happen [3]. However, Hansen began an opinion piece earlier this year by saying that his predictions that year were too optimistic. In a speech before Congress in 2008, Hansen called for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity [4],” according to the U.K. Guardian [5].
Klein, at Moyers’s prompting, specifically targets three “right-wing think tanks”: the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, claiming that “often their wish list of policies actually dig us deeper into crisis” – in other words, “free market solutions.” Instead, she says that what needs to be changed is the “state of capitalism,” and that there needs to be a “transforming of the American economic system.”
“There are things that the government can do to incentivize the free market to do a better job, yes. But is that a replacement for getting in the way, actively, of the fossil fuel industry and preventing them from destroying our chances of a future on a livable planet? It’s not a replacement.”