The Seeds Of The Global Warming Police State

by Robert Tracinski - June 29th, 2007 - Real Clear Politics

We have seen in recent decades the largest peacetime outpouring of government propaganda, all devoted to convincing us that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing a global warming catastrophe. The German government, for example, has begun paying authors to inundate Wikipedia with articles boosting "renewable resources." So much for the Internet as the ultimate free marketplace for ideas: now one cartel will be supported by government subsidies.

Along with the campaign to subsidize government-approved speech, there always comes an attempt to suppress speech that challenges the official line. The designation of those who challenge the global warming scare stories as global warming "deniers"--smearing them as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers--has introduced the hard edge of dogmatism and character assassination to the public debate. The implications of this phrase were made clear by another Australian. (Apparently Australia, like Britain, is a few steps ahead of America in how seriously it takes its global warming dogma.) Referring to a British historian who was jailed for denying the existence of the Holocaust, leftist Australian journalist Margo Kingston growled: "David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial. Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offense--it is a crime against humanity after all." (This quote appears at Kingston's former blog; see item #8.)

Kingston is a leftist provocateur and has gone beyond what the mainstream of the left has so far contemplated--but only a little beyond. Back in the United States, the left is still gingerly working to prepare the ground for green censorship, with Al Gore branding right-wing dissent an "assault on reason" that has "broken" the marketplace of ideas--which requires government intervention to fix. The fix is now being prepared in the form of a regulatory assault on right-leaning talk radio, among other initiatives.

This is another in the many articles starting to appear which are accepting the premise that environmentalism is becoming the darling of the socialists on the left. They are embracing it with a fervor that makes no sense until you understand that they don't really care about environmentalism nearly so much as they care about government control. To them, global warming is caused by the evil capitalists and their desire for materialsim. Only the good socialists have a plan to reverse this and return society to a pure and decent state of equality and morality enforced by government bureaucrats.

To those of us who have read Frederick Hayek's, The Road to Serfdom, the result is frightening. Socialism has failed every time it has been tried. It will fail again. In the process though, many people's lives will be ruined.