Those 'Unlikely' Green Norks

“North Korea: an unlikely champion in the fight against climate change,” claims a headline yesterday at the UK Guardian. A publication that isn’t quite as far to the left as North Korea itself, though not for lack of trying.

But such as scenario isn’t quite as unlikely as the Guardian posits. As Virginia Postrel told Brian Lamb of C-Span 15 years ago:

The Khmer Rouge sought to start over at year zero, and to sort of create the kind of society that very civilized, humane greens write about as though it were an ideal. I mean, people who would never consider genocide. But I argue that if you want to know what that would take, look at Cambodia–to empty the cities and turn everyone into peasants again. Even in a less developed country, let alone in someplace like the United States, that these sort of static utopian fantasies are just that.

At the start of the Obama administration, Jim Gilmore wrote in Human Events an outline of “Obama’s ‘New Socialism,'” as quoted in Kevin D. Williamson’s 2010 book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism:

Their “New Socialism” doesn’t need to capture property. It is content to control the economy through taxation and regulation and the attitudes of our citizens by the establishment of a culture through the power institutions of our society: the media, the education establishment, and powerful business interests. Moreover, the “New Socialism” seeks to create a conventional wisdom that discredits all alternative thought.

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The liberal focus on “green energy” and “green jobs” are another means of taking control, for there is no free market involved, only government controlled “green energy” and government-created “green jobs.” And “cap and trade” programs are put forward to control our economy in a way never before seen.

Since radical environmentalism is essentially a euphemism for socialism, then North Korea is the radical environmentalist end state, just as collapsed, festering downtown Detroit is the end game of crony socialism.

Unexpectedly.

Related: At Power Line, John Hinderaker writes, “You likely have already seen it, but in case you haven’t, this is a photo from space, taken at night, in which you can see South Korea, brightly lit, and to the north, China. That dark area in between? It’s North Korea. All we have to do to satisfy the climate fanatics is ban electricity.”

Don’t give ’em any ideas, John!