We understand, from experience and in principle, that if people disagree with us on a big thing, for instance the existence of a man-made urgent climate crisis, they will disagree with us on many smaller things logically related to the big one. But we remain baffled at how predictable the disagreements are even on matters totally unrelated to climate. In an emailed Heatmap newsletter Jeva Lange professes herself “haunted” by a claim from “Daniel Farber, the director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley” that Donald Trump had shrunk the American federal bureaucracy and that “Even after we go back to a Democratic president, you can’t wave a wand and get all those people back.” Why would you want to? And why would an environmentalist in particular dream of doing so? What, we ask, is organic, natural, and reminiscent of the complex harmony of nature about the swollen, callous, unresponsive state of the early 21^st century, to the point that there seems little or no debate among greens about the need for much red?

Not all green parties are as crazily left-woke-communist as Canada’s, which under Leader for Life Elizabeth May just “sponsored a petition asking that Parliament declare an LGBTQ genocide in Canada”. But they do seem to have this weird attraction to big-government centralized mechanistic schemes that are the antithesis of gardens or meadows.

For instance Reuters Sustainable Switch also emailed that:

“It’s a big day for legal eagles in Thursday’s newsletter as a United States trade court blocked President Donald Trump’s tariffs, while a federal court stopped his attempts to prevent migrant workers seeking work permits under a temporary parole program.”

Which is true. But their palpable delight in it is difficult to explain in terms of their mission or focus; one’s view on tariffs is presumably essentially unrelated to one’s views on Greenland’s ice cap, as is one’s view on the judiciary seeking to paralyze the executive branch if the president is Republican, and normally environmentalists worry about the population carrying capacity of ecosystems. Yet it is predictable that they’d favour all three. (And if you’re looking for links to either newsletter, unlike CDN both Sustainable Switch and Heatmap do not manage to post theirs online.)

Heatmap did of course post Lange’s piece to which her email pointed, and it takes for granted that the more bureaucrats the better. She puts “efficiency” in scare quotes, and writes naively:

“In my effort to learn how long it would take the federal workforce to recover from just the four-plus months of Trump administration cuts so far, no one I spoke to seemed to believe a future president could reverse the damage in a single four-year term.”

We say never underestimate the capacity of a bureaucracy to expand. And add that of course she presents both sides of her own opinion with expert backing:

“Before Trump’s second term, an estimated 83% of ‘major federal departments and agencies’ struggled with staff shortages, while 63% reported ‘gaps in the knowledge and skills of their employees,’ according to research by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit supporting the civil service.”

So she believes the U.S. public service was already too small in 2024, a view unlikely to be popular outside the public service. And the claim about existing “gaps” in “knowledge and skills” sounds to us like a lot of the people they did have weren’t that good at their jobs, hardly an argument for retaining them and hiring more just like them.