People should be concerned about the Green New Deal because it includes the most radical policies that can transform the economy into a socialist one and allow the government to tighten control over society, according to Hayden Ludwig, Senior Investigative Researcher at the Capital Research Center.
“The Green New Deal, I would say, has nothing to do with climate change, it has nothing to do with global warming, the environment. Period. It’s everything to do with remaking the entire United States in the radical left’s own image,” Ludwig told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” program.
A second component of the package would propose benefits for workers, including free community college, universal pre-kindergarten, and paid family leave.
“They published a proposal that was a sprawling proposal that pretended to be a highway bill. But it was really just a multi-thousand-page cousin of the Green New Deal,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said about the proposed package.
“We’re hearing the next few months might bring a so-called ‘infrastructure’ proposal that may actually be a Trojan horse for massive tax hikes and other job-killing left-wing policies,” McConnell said.
“If you read the text of [the Green New Deal] from a few years ago you‘ll find references, fig leaves, to global warming that immediately jump into things they really want to talk about,” Ludwig said. “And that’s about ’combating rising income inequality,‘ and ’environmental justice', which really is a way to say ’reparations to black and brown communities because they’ve been systematically oppressed by white communities’ and this has nothing to do with the environment.”
Ludwig explained that “environmental justice” is the Marxist concept of oppressor and oppressed applied to global warming. “Rich polluters, right, those are people who own houses, people who own multiple cars, who are by the nature of their pollution, oppressing the oppressed people, and these are poor people who live in poor communities, who are ethnic minorities,” he said. This way “any sort of sweeping redistribution, reparations agenda [can be justified] by pointing out it’s all climate-related,” Ludwig added.
Environmentalism Leads to Population Control
Ludwig said that “true environmentalism leads to population control.” He said that he drew this conclusion after tracing “the origins of environmentalism back to the eugenics movement and the pro-abortion movement—in short, the population control movement of the 20th century.”
The Green New Deal allows the federal government to justify policies that will control how people travel, how they eat, and how many children they have, Ludwig said. “That’s why this is so dangerous. It’s an open-ended mandate for the most radical transformation we’ve ever seen proposed.”
“There’s a reason, I think, why the Democratic Party is pushing so much radical environmental policy right now, as opposed to anything else, like Medicare For All, and my theory is that they realize that this is the fastest way to get the amount of power that they want over people’s lives,” he added. ”If you can sell somebody on, ‘If you don’t pass this measure, you die, the whole world goes up in smoke,’ so to speak—if you can pass that, you can justify whatever you want.”
Traditional socialism, like in China, seeks power over everything people do and “environmentalism is the only ideology I know of that goes even more beyond that; it gives the government power of your very genes, over what you get to breathe out—I mean, cellular-level kind of control,” Ludwig said. “It’s the most extreme thing we’ve ever seen,”
Relying on Renewable Energy
Renewable energy sources such as wind turbines or solar panel arrays require an enormous amount of land, Ludwig said, adding that applying them on a large scale could lead to the total deforestation of the United States.
Wind turbines need foundations built of hundreds of tons of concrete embedded very deep into the earth, tons of steel, and tons of copper wiring, some of which need to be replaced after a decade and are not easily recycled, Ludwig said. “Things that are supposed to be saving the planet, in reality, they’re just polluting the planet with all sorts of excess materials, resources that could have been better used elsewhere.”
Renewable sources of energy such as wind power and solar power are notoriously unreliable because there are times when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow, Ludwig said. Therefore any electrical power grid which uses solar or wind power needs to include steady reliable forms of energy such as nuclear power, natural gas, oil, or coal.
There is no technology so far that will allow the storing on a mass scale of the energy produced from intermittent sources, Ludwig said.
The electrical grid does not work like a light bulb dimmer, which can accept less power and give less. “It’s much more like a computer or television. If you don’t provide exactly the minimum amount of electricity to the grid that’s required at all times it simply shuts off.”