What does a 16-year-old Swedish girl have in common with a popular 29-year-old U.S. Representative?
Environmentalism and socialism.
The young woman is Greta Thunberg, who spear-headed a “global movement of schoolchildren striking to demand climate change action.” The Representative is AOC, er, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who last month launched her “Green New Deal.”
Sixteen-year-old Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Rep. AOC hasn’t been nominated yet, but if Barack Obama could be awarded a Nobel merely for being elected. . . .
But back to that linkage: the Swedish youngster was nominated by three adult members of the Socialist Left Party; AOC calls herself a socialist.*
But what’s the deeper link?
The solution, apparently: socialists want to destroy capitalism, or at least commandeer it; and environmentalists obsessed about anthropogenic global warming believe it’s caused by burning fossil fuels and by bovine flatulence — both made worse by capitalism, which has allowed the masses (not just the elites) to harness petroleum for power as well as raise gigantic herds of cattle for eating and milk-production. The direct control that socialism entails serves, say its advocates, as the only way to curtail carbon emissions.
A more likely story? Socialism would make us so much poorer that it is inconceivable that most of us would be able to afford to drive cars or eat steaks or drink milk.
Regardless of their so-called “green” policy obsessions, Ms.Thunberg and Rep. AOC are green in a more profound sense, of lack of experience — the latter because she’s young, the former because she’s a miseducated ideologue.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* It is also worth noting that the much of AOC’s much-ballyhooed Green New Deal has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with typical leftist social engineering.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
