Green Tyranny

his book is about freedom. It is about its loss as a result of policies designed to slow down what is presumed to be man-made global warming. Avoiding planetary catastrophe gives a president and the executive branch a higher dispensation than that granted by the Constitution. Obamacare was implemented under the Affordable Care Act. Implementation of the Clean Power Plan was by administrative fiat and the Senate bypassed when the United States ratified the 2015 Paris Agreement: America’s eighteenth-century Constitution is not going to be allowed to impede a project in which society is to be radically transformed through the agency of the state. As the embodiment of an ideal of freedom, the Constitution is incompatible with a project that is alien to the tradition of liberty owing from America’s founding, though not to the ideologies, originating in Europe, from which the project first sprang. The two cannot coexist. One or other will prevail and define America for decades to come.

The vast gap between American hard power and that of the rest of the world sometimes blinds Americans—especially American conservatives—to America’s vulnerability to other countries’ soft power. America invented Earth Day in 1970 and gave birth to postwar environmentalism with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Yet even these seemingly all-American products drew on ideas from across the Atlantic and from across the chasm of the Second World War; the cancer chapter in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, for instance, incorporated the Nazi belief that industrialization was causing a cancer epidemic.

If there was a purely American strand of environmentalism, the demands it made on America were fairly limited. The costs of banning DDT—the principal policy consequence of Silent Spring—were mainly inflicted on Africans exposed to the risk of malaria. Thanks to the availability of cheap substitutes, phasing out CFCs a decade and a half later to preserve the ozone layer hardly required Americans to change their lifestyles. Preserving habitats and wildernesses did not necessitate transforming American society and culture.

There is a strand of American apocalyptic thinking that was first initiated by scientists after 1945 in reaction to the atomic bomb. But this scarcely amounted to an ideological challenge to the basis of American capitalism. That came when it was mixed with the post- Marxist environmentalism developed by German exiles and subsequently weaponized by the progressive left in America. They were the prophets who prepared the way. Their student followers in Germany would come to form the leadership of the Greens in the early 1980s. Nazi ecological politics were rehabilitated by the Greens and would come to form part of mainstream German and then European politics. What united them was a deep hostility to capitalism and the free market. Against them stands the Jeremiah of capitalism. Far from wishing to see capitalism fail, Joseph Schumpeter foresaw its death coming from its own hand; although writing in the 1940s, he could not have foreseen that the instrument of its self-destruction would be environmentalism.

This, then, is the ideological landscape across which the action unfolds. At the end of the 1960s, while American environmentalists were focusing their efforts on banning DDT, Sweden was putting coal—the most ubiquitous source of electrical energy—in the cross- hairs when it made acid rain the world’s top environmental problem. By making energy the focus of international action, it gave environmentalism control of the dial to transform the basis of industrial civilization.

In the past, waves of spontaneous innovation transformed the fabric of American society, vastly improving Americans’ quality of life. None was as transformational as cheap, ubiquitous electrical power. It bade farewell to the age of steam, gaslight, and paraffin. Grid-supplied electricity separated the twentieth century from the nineteenth and triggered a social revolution. Electrical appliances replaced domes- tic servants, and the liberation of women from household drudgery began.

This one is different—a planned societal and cultural transformation directed by the administrative state. Within a year of Barack Obama’s election to the White House, such a transformation was being discussed by European climate change radicals and senior Democrats at a conference in Germany. Where Europe led, America would follow.

This book tells the story of two countries and three environmental scares. Two originated in Sweden (acid rain and global warming) and one (the nuclear winter) was transmitted from Moscow via Stockholm.