“We do it only for the children,” they assure us with the practiced sincerity of men reading from a script, “and for their children after them.” Very noble. Yet the poor, in their coarse way, show little gratitude for these lofty aims. They care nothing for solar arrays that cost a fortune and fail when the sky is overcast; they have small patience with sermons on diversity, inclusion, or the finer points of sexual metamorphosis. Their minds are occupied with more immediate trifles—rent that must be paid, children who must not starve, clothes that must somehow be found, streets that must not become places of casual murder, winters that must not kill.
Cheap and plentiful energy—coal, oil, the black blood of the earth—has a proven talent for dragging men out of destitution. With it, the ex-poor might one day find time to sweep their lanes, mend their fences, keep their neighborhoods from turning into rubbish heaps. Survival would no longer be the whole of life. One might almost think such a prospect desirable. Yet observe the actions of the truly powerful, those afflicted with what can only be called a malignant self-regard. Do they clamor for more oil wells, more mines, more of the cheap abundance that would lift millions? They do not. Instead they lecture us on windmills, on solar panels, on the urgent necessity of breaking “Big Oil.” They speak of global warming with a fanaticism that would be comic were it not so ruinous—a passion so intense and so mindless that it resembles the cries of a man who has glimpsed his own reflection and cannot bear the sight.
No, what they desire is fewer people. Fewer cars on the road to spoil the view from their estates. Fewer faces in the streets to remind them of the consequences of their policies. The unreliability of wind and sun, the grotesque expense—these are trifles to men who can afford to insulate themselves from any rise in the price of heat or food. In Europe the farmers are already being driven from their fields so that the sacred turbines may rise; soon the land will grow nothing but metal and glass. Who will then provide bread? “No difficulty,” reply the enlightened ones. “We shall purchase what we require, however dear it becomes.” As for the remainder of mankind—well, the planet has long been overcrowded. A little thinning of the herd would be no great tragedy; indeed, it might almost be counted a mercy.
In the end, the gospel of green is less about saving the earth than about arranging it more conveniently for those who already own most of it. The rest of us are merely scenery—and scenery, as every aristocrat knows, is improved by being kept sparse.
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