Duggan Flanakin
cfact.org
Duggan Flanakin is the director of policy research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. A former senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas. A brief history of his multifaceted career appears in his book, Infinite Galaxies: Poems from the Dugout.
Out in Nancy Pelosi’s California, the ice cream queen’s protégé announces an end to gasoline-powered vehicles a day before he also discourages charging electric vehicles (EVs). Meanwhile, French president Emmanuel Macron (a true son of Marie Antoinette) announces the end of abundance.
Macron, who not that long ago announced the forthcoming closure of a quarter of France’s nuclear power plants (and its last four coal-fired power plants), explained the abject failure of his energy policies with this cryptic statement:
“What we are currently living through is a kind of major tipping point or a great upheaval … we are living the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance … the end of the abundance of products of technologies that seemed always available … the end of the abundance of land and materials including water.”
The more likely truth is that Macron, like his peers across Europe and America, is unwilling to admit that the super-green policies they have espoused and forced upon their citizens have failed miserably – made no sense in the first place – and pardon us while we backtrack to try to avoid the electoral guillotine.
In the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war, Macron recently called for a “nuclear renaissance” as the proper pathway for ending reliance on coal, oil and natural gas. Similarly, Germany’s previously smug leaders, who just this February bragged the nation would rely 100 per cent on “renewable energy” by 2035, has recommitted to nuclear power and even coal. The haughty European Union has reclassified natural gas and nuclear energy as “green”.
What is tacitly being admitted here is that these leaders had already taken the world too far down the primrose path to perdition and that it may be difficult to pretend to continue down that path and at the same time revert to loudly condemned energy sources. The “faithful” are already angry and confused, and the “deniers” cannot be acknowledged as having been right all along.
But this “end of abundance” was dependent on Europeans – and Americans – continuing the green new deal/net zero policies that are designed to deprive the hoi polloi the luxuries that today’s power elites enjoy – and which had been increasingly enjoyed by ordinary working people. Most critical of all is that the existing power elites MUST NOT be overthrown by “populist” politicians whose sentiments are more with the people than with the elites.
There is already a growing revolt against the draconian future that Macron and his ilk want to impose on the planet, and which they have sold as the “only way” to prevent planetary collapse. Even those in “developing” nations no longer accept the mantra that they cannot use the tools that made the West prosperous and healthy to improve their own lives.
This is not good. Maybe this “democratic” experiment is more difficult to control than the Masters of the Universe have believed. But what to do? How dare the “deplorables” revolt against this Panem-style future?
Over in America, Joe Biden tells us that anyone who dares speak up against these diabolical plans to limit people’s access to the elite’s resources is at best a “semi-fascist”. Jet setters like John Kerry, Al Gore and George Soros (and the entire political class) are exempt from deprivation.
These same “leaders” have championed lockdowns, muzzles, social distancing, freeing criminals, enabling drug and human trafficking, sexualizing of children and other divisive and/or disruptive policies to distract from the massive transfers of public dollars into unmonitored slush funds that they can then use to pay-off loyal subjects and enrich themselves.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold may have let the cat – the secret strategy – out of the bag. In an interview with the leftist tome, The Guardian, Griswold claimed that a Republican victory this November could result in stripping Americans of the right to vote. That set the stage for Biden’s pronouncement that a GOP victory threatens “democracy” itself.
How big a step is it from a politicized FBI suppressing news unfavorable to their preferred candidate to seizing and making public attorney-client privileged documents to declaring that the 2022 elections are compromised and their results cannot be accepted? How long before the elites proclaim that we can no longer depend on a compliant electorate and that only a Plato’s Republic of the Elites can “save the planet” even if it means destroying the lives of its people?
Of course, this sounds far-fetched, but is it?
China, California, other states and other nations have already proclaimed that the billion-plus gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles will no longer be allowed on our highways. This can be accomplished in part by limiting the availability of these fuels, raising taxes and fees, and other indirect means that have the effect of a near-total ban.
Banks can be pressured to disallow loans for gasoline-engine vehicles. Automakers have already been pressured to stop manufacturing the vehicles that move the world today. Other screws are being used to force a transition for which there is not enough electric power capacity, raw materials, or money to enable people to make the switch from the gas pump to the charging station.
And that, of course, is the genesis of the Macron pronouncement – the abundant life is not for the masses. There are just too many of them.
But what is weird is that despite the geometric growth in world population over the past century, there has also been geometric growth in the average standard of living for the world’s people.
The “founder” of the belief, espoused in the Declaration of Independence that each human has “inalienable rights” to life, liberty and “the pursuit of happiness”, is quoted as saying, “I have come that they may have life and that they may have it more abundantly.”
Today’s power elites are now saying, “You may not have an abundant life.” Hmmmm.
