Green mendacity

Martin Durkin examines the Green claims:

In a recent popular green book called Do Good Lives Have to Cost The Earth, a host of green authors stick the boot into free markets and call for more State powers.  Tom Hodgkinson rails against the ‘sick and bloated private sector’, Caroline Lucas attacks privatization and deregulation, Andrew Sims and Joe Smith tell us, ‘This is a call for the politicians to get their hands on the big levers again.’  In his book Heat, the radical green George Monbiot says bluntly, ‘It is a campaign not for more freedom, but for less.’

But hold on a minute.  How does the environment in the despised free capitalist West (air quality, water quality, etc) compare with that of the heavily planned, State-controlled Soviet Union, or Cuba or Communist China?  To take just one example, the economist Julian Simon quotes a Soviet official who said that ’50 million people in 192 cities [in the Soviet Union] are exposed to air pollutants that exceed national standards tenfold.’  The term the Russian official used was ‘catastrophic pollution’.  In Magnitogorsk, a coroner complained in 1991, ‘Every day there is some new disaster … a worker in his thirties dead from collapsed lungs, a little girl dead from asthma or a weakened heart.’  Shockingly, the coroner said that ‘over 90 percent of the children born here suffer from some pollution-related illness.’ 

Why are the Greens so rabidly keen on more State control?  No doubt they would argue that all their green concerns lead naturally to demands for more regulations and public spending and government restrictions. 

Or is the other way round?  Is there a class of bureaucratically-minded folk who favour more State control, for whom green concerns provide what they regard as a justification?  In other words, are the Greens looking after the dolphins, or are the dolphins looking after the Greens?

There is, I believe, a solid, self-interested, class basis for environmentalism.  Green is the natural world view of what sociologists call the ‘New Class’.