In the long list of failures contained in this article, the Left saw each problem as one that could be simply solved with power. Can't catch a fish? Throw a stick of dynamite in the water. Need oil? Explode nuclear weapons underground to somehow force it up. Need a waste dump? Blow a hole in the ground with a nuclear bomb. The Left will do anything for power, then use it in stupid, heedless, sadistic ways. They seem to think the mere exercise of enough power will make anything work. Someday, Government Motors will announce their exciting, new, improved, high rpm, square wheel. In the past the square wheel failed because of a lack of horsepower.

The Left didn't join, then usurp the civil rights movement, women's rights, or the environmental movement because they were true believers. They saw these movements as leverage points for power, not to mention great disguises. After the true environmentalists were driven out of the movement by the parasitic Left, environmentalism was converted into a hot-air-powered generator of fear.The global warming/climate change scam is a transnational cause designed to instill irrational fear. Evil always rules by fear, and If the Left succeeds in converting enough fear into power, the environment will be soon forgotten. They will indulge themselves with the arbitrary exercise of raw power to destroy things and people, including the environment, with every depraved whim.

Small comfort then that the Left will inevitably fail. They are paving the way for the carrion eaters of Islam.

The left is entirely focused on outcomes. It sanctifies its ideology as ideal and is therefore uninterested in process.

The ends always justify the means leading to complete horrors.

Yes, and it's no coincidence that the Left and the Muslims both subscribe to the great anti-ethic, the ends justify the means, and it is no surprise that their anti-ethical operating principle is wrong. The ends can't justify the means because the ends are conditioned by the means. The ends cannot be isolated from the means. The ends have to be justified on their merits and so do the means. If one is evil, both are evil.This is yet more fundamental dishonesty and magical thinking on their parts.

"The ends justify the means" is a rationalization, not a truth. It all turns on the deceptive use of the word "justify," which implies the means are just. Ruthlessness by definition is unjust, so what this false principle amounts to is a rationalization for ruthlessness. If written honestly, it would read: "The means are rationalized to achieve the ends." That the Left, or Islam, would choose this rationalization as an operating principle is easy to explain. Rationalization is the mental process used to circumvent the moral conscience. Given that the targets of this get-out-of-morality-free card were, and still are, people raised with Judeo-Christian values, it functions as a false moral principle intended to supplant true morality and free the individual to commit horrible acts without guilt. It is the key to the gates of evil.

No. The Left is focused on opportunity, there is none for much of the US and for much of the world.

That's a nice theory. Competence matters. Sorry about that pesky fact. You haven't helped a damn thing. To the contrary...

That is the same rationale as a North Korean telling me that I am poor and miserable.

No, see, it was the capitalists that stole all of the wealth and once that wealth is liberated then there is no need for those silly mistakes. The self-powered green robots and the money trees will be equally distributed throughout the world. It all hinges on global revolution. Until that time you have to be patient with a little spilt milk (blood, toxic chemicals, and so forth).

The environmental devastation wrought by Soviet Industrialization became apparent with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Aral Sea is now more or less a dried up salt pan, there are several areas (Chernobyl is but one) that are contaminated with radiation, and there are countless places that have been contaminated with assorted chemicals.

Some of those areas are still populated, and people in those areas have been suffering a whole manner of ill health from the contamination.

When it came to management of the environment, the Soviets earned themselves the grade of "epic fail".

Therefore, it can be concluded that Socialists are even better when it comes to ruining the earth and making areas uninhabitable due to toxic chemical and radiation contamination...

It seems that capitalism, is always taking the blame for the failures of socialism. Why is that so?

Clearly the Socialists are FAR better at lying to the people than the prime movers, who are actually responsible for creating virtually all of the wealth being enjoyed by modern civilization, are about telling the truth.

When I first read Atlas Shrugged, in the early 1960's while in high school, I knew right away that Ayn Rand's moral and ethical principals were correct, however I never thought that I'd see her forecast of what was coming in the decades to follow, actually come true so soon.

It's time we took her advice a bit more seriously, and started to go on strike.

fs

The left controls the high ground of the narrative through academia, entertainment and journalism.

It writes the history books and reports the news

I agree! And it was planned years ago, 45 Communist steps to take over America, gain control of education, media, entertainment & a political party. Now what is being advanced is UN Sustainable Development Agenda 21, the plan to make the US part of a Communist one world gov. See agenda21news.com & democratsagainstunagenda21.com even the liberals hate this when they learn about it!

Academia, journalism and entertainment are right wing. History books are written by corporations, the news is controlled by corporations. Ayn Rand is a nut.

The opposite to what you say, you mentally ill freak.
History is history. It's either the truth or it isn't. Fake history, revisionist history has always been written by the Left, but you wouldn't know because you're a retarded fool.
Actual Socialist? Actual Moron!

Right. Because academia is still corrupted by private capital. Ipso facto bias against "pure" socialism.

I recollect a lavishly illustrated story -- I think it was in National Geographic, but I'm not sure -- about the building of the Three Gorges Dam in China, the story boasting of how many villages it had destroyed or flooded without a single squib about all the lost property and probably lives the project had claimed. There was another story -- definitely in National Geographic -- about the drying up of the Aral Sea, also lavishly illustrated with photographs.

Obama keeps wishing that he could have as much power as China's rulers

An excellent article. In my view the key statement is at the conclusion: "The left has long since proven that it is incapable of thinking about consequences in any terms other than those of its ideology." This drives the nail all the way home.

It is common practice in science and engineering to look well beyond the immediate design or approach to ascertain the consequences. Were it not so we would be in real trouble in every field and endeavor. The Left always wants immediate results and self-gratification with little or no concern for the long-term effect. It doesn't matter whether its social engineering or the real thing. A social program helps destroy the Black family; a solar farm kills thousands of birds.
Observing them and their screw-ups over the years I can only conclude that they are dangerous members of a Loopy Left Society that the world would be much better off without.

The left doesn't address reality. It functions in the twilight dream world of its ideology. It assumes that the outcome will take place according to its ideology and that the only difficulty is demolishing all opposition.

In spite of for example, to prove your point, just two of many hundreds: Detroit and the EU failures. Ideology to leftists astoundingly trumps evidence to the contrary. Blind delusion becomes denial and daily doses to we accepting reasonable stay hard to comprehend watching it go down in real time.

Ideological obsession becomes evil incarnate (the right becomes their difficulty duty to destroy) masked behind all the phony good intentions rationalized and justified by progressive enlightened exhilaration, which is really folly. We the opposition see the evidence all around; they don't see what they see.

Thank you Daniel for this. It is not a co-incidence that "Conservatives" are the leading conservationists of the environment. This is true by definition.

The real ambition of the warm-mongers to the destruction of the Western economy. While they promote questionable science, the world ecosystems are being destroyed and species are becoming extinct in record numbers.

Because of the warm-mongers, the real threats to the environment never make it to the front page. There is work to be done, and we are not even talking about it yet.

I've helped with quite a few clean up operations with the Boy Scouts, everything from fixing a park on state land to reclaiming jeep trails, usually suggested by and always approved by the Forest Service, and I have yet to see or hear about any 'environmentalist' become involved in those projects. Of course they hate the Boy Scouts, so all the conservation work done by boys in uniform who believe in things like being trustworthy, loyal and so forth doesn't actually count in their alternate universe.

If they actually dealt with the reasons for species extinctions, a lot of the blame would fall on Third World countries

And if they ever do focus on the reasons in the Third World, there will be a redistribution of our capital to fund "corrections".

"The Communist Party of the United States, whose logo still includes a sickle and gear, announced that it was now concentrating on nature."

The sickle, of "Hammer and Sickle" fame, represented the common farmer. That is, agriculture -- These days, agriculture and "the environment". The gear is just a modernization of the blacksmith's hammer.

Does anyone remember the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), from way back in 2009?

Do you remember the logo they came out with?

http://www.publicworksgroup...

So, ... you know, ... just sayin'.

Naw, green and red all over.

Red implying what?

Ignore him. He's just blithering.

Stalin always denied the claim that building the White Sea Canal caused wholesale deaths among the slave laborers who built it. He said they started out with 100,000 laborers and ended the project with 100,000 laborers, so what's the problem?

Nuclear bombs used to find coal? Wow, I haven't heard that before but I believe it. Imagine the smoke and particulates from burning that stuff, what it could do. Some of it probably fell to earth on farmland. Don't forget to eat your beets!

They built a northern railway in Siberia that stretched for hundreds of miles. When the permafrost froze and melted each year, the earth buckled and made the rails unusable and incapable of being repaired. So now there's a railroad right-of-way with twisted railroad track stretching for hundreds of miles across delicate tundra that isn't used. I don't know how many zeks died in that project.

They used pressure hoses along the waterways in Kolyma to mine the gold deposits there. I'd like to see some photos of what the environment looks like there.

After Chernobyl, the irradiated produce and milk was dispersed around the country, but not to Moscow where the bigwigs lived.

That's the kind of mind we're dealing with.

Well, of course; taking the long view, the bigwigs speak for the people and are insuring that they're on the right course for the Workers' Paradise. Moscow never makes mistakes. They have a historical dialectic to serve.

I am a bit late to this discussion, but I think you will appreciate this little reading list I have been compiling for a few years now.

Blacksmith Institute: The World’s Worst Polluted Places

Elwood Carlson and Mikhail S. Bernstam: Population and Resources Under the Socialist Economic System

Marshall Goldman: The Spoils of Progress: Environmental Pollution in the Soviet Union

Ivan Volgyes: Environmental Deterioration in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Philip Pryde: Environmental Resources and Constraints in the Former Soviet Republics

Paul Josephson: Environmental Justice and Sustainability in the Former Soviet Union

Walter Lacqueur: The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union

Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly: Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege

David Horowitz quotes Feshbach and Friendly thus:

“......In the name of progress, the Soviets devastated the environment to a degree unknown in other industrial states. More than 70% of the Soviet atmosphere was polluted with five times the permissible limit of toxic chemicals, and thousands of square miles of the Soviet land mass was poisoned by radiation. Thirty percent of all Soviet foods contained hazardous pesticides and six million acres of productive farmland were lost to erosion. More than 130 nuclear explosions had been detonated in European Russia for geophysical investigations to create underground pressure in oil and gas fields, or just to move earth for building dams. The Aral Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water, was dried up as the result of a misguided plan to irrigate a desert. Soviet industry operated under no controls and the accidental spillage of oil into the country’s eco-systems took place at the rate of nearly a million barrels a day…….”

Also a very significant work:

Mikhail S. BERNSTAM: “Comparative Trends In Resource Use and Pollution In Market and Socialist Economies”

Included in “The State Of Humanity”, ed. Julian SIMON

Worth buying or borrowing the book, to get it. Someone needs to scan it and put it online.

Interesting how you bring up the Siberian Railway. From what it sounds like, I'll bet many zeks who worked on that line would have eagerly traded places with the Chinese laborers who worked on the Canadian Pacific Rail line that extends across Canada and is still in use to this day.

While how the Chinese laborers were treated both during and after the construction of the CPR was an injustice (See also: Head Tax, Exclusion Act), it had nothing on the Soviet treatment of their convict and political prisoner labor...

Yes, the freedom to leave when you're being mistreated seems to make a big difference in one's job choices. Also actually getting paid for your labor helps.

"Socialist governments in the United States and California have already created a man-made drought."

It was announced on the radio yesterday that water rationing will begin in Santa Cruz, Irvine and Santa Monica. If homeowners use more than what is allowed they will be extorted, I mean, billed. Legalized extortion is what this is. What a coincidence that all the above are pretty affluent areas.

F.Y.I, The "Environmentalists" ARE The Socialists!

A minor point in regards to the Aral Sea, at one time the fourth largest lake in the world. In that case, it was not neglect or incompetence that caused it to shrivel up to the relative puddle that exists today. It was deliberate and intentional.

Why? Because the someone in the Soviet Union decided that they should become a large-scale producer of cotton. Unlike the American South, which is like the perfect place to grow cotton, the semi-arid regions of what is now Kazakstan and Uzbekistan don't have a reliable amount of rainfall necessary.

So, the plan was to divert the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea for irrigation purposes. Since these rivers were the only things that kept the water level up, the landlocked sea was expected to eventually evaporate away. As said, this was known and expected. What about the inhabitants of the area? Probably the Soviet apparatchik who oversaw the plan didn't think they mattered or it was someone else's problem. Not like people ever really mattered in the Socialist Paradise.

Like mutated cockroaches in Chernobyl, its red-shirted acolytes converged in the People’s Climate March chanting that the only solution for the environment was to replace capitalism with Socialism.

The only thing more ludicrous than believing in Global Warming is also believing that a bunch of Marxist totalitarian leftists could somehow actually save us from it. Now that is hilarious!

"Environmental disasters created in the name of the environment are a
reality as the same inflexible collectivist bureaucracies that wrecked
the environment for industrial Socialism are wrecking it all over again
for eco-Socialism."
Yup.

It's about time someone actually said this, and I am glad it was Daniel Greenfield. Nobody else could have said it better.

Great article. I had no idea.

Maybe we have to define the distinction between the environment and nature. For lefties the environment includes themselves, their Harvard Law School graduated friends and for fun few of Hollywood celebraties - to summirize - elite. That is what they try to protect. Nature, on another hand, is us and we, the humans, are the top of nature's creations. By loving and protecting nature, we defend ourselves. No wonder, the socialists in USSR, China and California demonstrate such a contempt to people, because they hate nature. They try to control nature in a same way they try to control people and their sucsessful control means destruction

Thanks for the link to your blog, ApolloSpeaks. I put it on my Reading List and look forward to reading more of your articles.

For an understanding of anything remotely progressive, like the word itself as connotated by the left, The opposite is where the truth lies. That is exactly what the rulers of Babylon did to humanity at the fall of the tower; "Lest nothing be impossible unto us."

People keep making the mistake of assuming that "environmentalism" is about preserving the environment.
Environmentalism is about protecting the environment the same way gun control is about reducing crime. The stated goals have nothing to do with the actual goals, which is undermine and destroy the opponents of socialism.

You people have also failed demonstrably that whatever you call it, Socialism or Communism, it still never works!
Environmental protection has always suffered far worse under Leftism and no greater a teacher than history herself has proven that - (Aral Sea, Chernobyl, etc) but still, goldfish like yourself can never learn that lesson, because you are destined to forever repeat the same mistakes, and what's more you lie about it.
Save your diatribe for people who are stupid enough to believe you.
You sir, are just another puffed up imbecile, clueless about reality, clueless about history and clueless about just about everything.

Oh sure. Capitalists caused Chernobyl, a place that has a live core of congealed uranium and plutonium still simmering away and bathing the area in gamma rays and other harmful ionizing radiation, where no one can live due to said radiation, and where even the soldiers assigned to guard the cordon don't dare set foot inside...