Even in today’s ideologically and politically polarized landscape it’s very strange to read in Heatmap of “How China Saved the World From Trump’s Energy Crisis”. It takes us back, waaaay back, to another time when Western society was deeply polarized ideologically and politically, and there was this rock band called the “Beatles” (Google them, kids) who represented much of what was best in the counterculture including warning people, in the song “Revolution 1”, against going radically crazy by embracing totalitarianism and violence. Of which China during Mao’s bloody, brain-crushing Cultural Revolution was the worst example, worse even than Stalin had been 30 years earlier during a profoundly ideologically and politically polarized time when there was, for all practical purposes, no such thing as environmentalism. But while the specifics change, certain impulses including le trahison des clercs are surprisingly persistent.
The Heatmap piece is some kind of interview with a guy who thinks China must have been releasing secret oil onto the world market because we have no numbers or evidence due to the secretive nature of the regime. Read it if you want less clarity. Our point is that you don’t have to be fond of Donald Trump to prefer him to Xi Jinping and worse. Yet an astounding number of those who are not fond of Trump do not seem to manage this basic piece of good sense and decency.
The same was true in the 1960s. Not of everyone, of course. Probably not even of a majority of those in the “Counterculture” actually liked Mao. Just as even in the 1930s, the share of leftists in North America and even Europe who really embraced Stalin wasn’t above 50%. But the proportion who really denounced either of them wasn’t nearly as high as it should have been, and it left lasting scars including a radicalization on the right including of tone that may be understandable but is not helpful.
Including, and here we speak from memory, the strange ways in which the pre-climate environmental movement, on the whole a great force for good, was resolutely blind to the ecological devastation of the old Soviet Union. (As the old peace movement, not on the whole a force for good, was blind to its militarism.) There is no reason why someone who cared about clean water, clean air, cute animals and healthy ecosystems should have given a free pass to the slimy heirs of Stalin as they built Chernobyl, drained the Aral sea and committed a host of other ghastly follies. But they did, and it tended to make what should have been comparatively uncontroversial causes in the West both more partisan and more bitter than they should have been, inherently or in terms of their capacity to do good.
Now in the climate era, consider a new member of The Atlantic “Weekly Planet” team who introduces himself by saying summer is the time of misery and death:
“Summer has begun – which is to say, wildfires in the West are chasing residents from their homes, the snowpack has dwindled to near-record lows in several states, drought is spreading, and temperatures are regularly exploring new heights.”
Well, OK. It qualifies as a difference of opinion. As for instance with the columnist for the New York Times “The Morning” who wrote quaintly “There’s no better time than early summer to put away your phone and get some fresh air” whereas that Atlantic guy, Joshua Partlow, seems to regard such a step as tantamount to a suicide attempt.
Partlow is also bitter about the lack of bitterness:
“Yet America does not seem to be sweating climate change. You could call it ‘climate hushing,’ as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others do, or a ‘worry gap,’ as one study has. Whatever you call it, America’s interest in talking about climate change is at an ebb.”
Perhaps because it’s actually nice in summer, at least where it used to be. Parts of Nevada, not so much but then it never was. Not even in the 12th century. Or perhaps because someone has hushed debate in America and only journalists know. But then, after criticizing Democrats for various ways of backing off on things like banning gasoline cars, he writes:
“Many of the climate activists who came of age during Trump’s first term have since broadened their portfolio. The most famous one, Greta Thunberg, posts about Gaza and ICE raids alongside her critiques of the fossil-fuel industry…”
To describe Thunberg going full Hamas as having “broadened her portfolio” to include “posts about Gaza” is like saying that in the early 1930s Stalin broadened his portfolio to include posts about kulaks followed by critiques of his former comrades. And his anodyne “the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led group that championed the Green New Deal, has pivoted to defeating authoritarianism as a prerequisite for passing climate legislation” would never tip you off that after occupying the office of the Democratic then-Speaker of the House in 2018, leading to dozens of arrests and surely setting something of a precedent for other such Capitol Hill lawbreaking they then took to threatening politicians in their own homes in the early morning hours.
If you find support for Donald Trump baffling, it’s worth asking whether winking at this kind of thing doesn’t help radicalize conservatives and whether you want it to. Speaking of which, we want to mention that in characteristic fashion Trump recently lashed out at oil companies for supposed “gouging”, posting on “Truth Social” (which is classic double-speak since the platform is not notable for either):
“The big Oil Companies are not dropping their price at the pump commensurate with the sharply lower prices they’re paying for Oil. Those prices are dropping like a rock! In other words customers are being ‘gouged.’ I have instructed the DOJ to immediately start looking into this. Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing! President DJT”
It’s an ugly combination of economic ignorance and political bullying. And a surprising number of people who’d sneer if Democrats said that kind of thing about oil companies cheer when Trump does. But as David Blackmon wrote on his Energy Additions Substack, and it’s the kind of thing we need more of from “the right” because the right is where, loosely, Trump is located, the post is nonsense:
“‘Big Oil’ doesn’t own the gas stations. The vast majority of those stations are owned by independent entrepreneurs who price their gasoline based on the cost of the latest tanker delivery they’ve received. It takes days - most often, more than a week - for movements in oil prices to filter all the way to the retail outlets. The president has correctly boasted in recent days about the big volumes of crude now coming through the Strait of Hormuz. But it will take weeks before those slow-moving oil tankers arrive in ports around the world with their lower-priced cargoes. ‘Big Oil’ does own the refineries, but refineries are price-takers on the market, not price-makers. They pay market prices for the cargoes delivered to them via oil tankers or pipelines. Right now, the tanker cargoes coming into their facilities were loaded two weeks ago, when the Brent crude price was $94/bbl, $19 higher than today. Due to dangerously low domestic inventories caused by the war, U.S. refiners are having to import a much higher percentage of crude right now on tankers because domestic pipeline supplies are constrained. Even with all this, U.S. average price for regular has dropped by 60 cents in a month according to AAA, and will keep dropping in the weeks to come as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains open.”
In short, Trump’s a fool. It shouldn’t be only leftists who say it. But Thunberg’s poisonous and it shouldn’t be only rightists who say it.
It’s what James Taranto long ago called political hygiene and it remains true, and important that if you want cleaner politics, you must get the sludge out of your own mouth before going after the halitosis in the other guy’s. Especially because of where things go if you don’t.
Eventually, or in Partlow’s case pretty quickly, you come to regard opponents with contempt and including in that category normal people who don’t agree with your opinion as soon as you state it instead of being curious about why they might see it differently. Thus he talked to some professor of climate communism who “has found, too, that in much of the country, people don’t worry enough about the real threats they face.”
Morons. Evidently the professor:
“told me that a majority of people do want their politicians to take action on climate change. ‘What’s changing is leadership,’ she said. ‘A lot of leaders are thinking, Oh, I’m going to get in trouble if I talk about it, or, It’s too polarizing. It’s turning into this vicious circle.”‘
Which frankly makes no sense. When do politicians refuse to pander? But alas, surrounded by fools and cowards one must turn to stronger methods. At any rate it has been a temptation through the years and an ugly one.
Now it is fair to say that John Lennon in particular was given to instability in his political views and backtracked on his repudiation of violence and Maoism before fronttracking again. But the words of that song remain wise:
“But if you want money for people with minds that hate,/ Well, all I can tell you is, brother, you have to wait”.
OK. Maybe some of the phrasing has aged like tie-dyed bell-bottoms. But consider also:
“You tell me it’s the institution/ Well, you know/ You better free your mind instead”
And then the classic:
“But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao/ You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow”
Which makes it especially odd that the Canadian government seems so keen to cozy up to Beijing and silence critics of, well, the heirs of Mao while actually lying about how much they’re helping them penetrate our economy as well as our security systems.
Why, oh why, are you carrying pictures of Chairman Mao?
