“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.”

Obviously that must have been said by a critic the the Green New Deal, right?

Wrong. The speaker went on to say: “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

The speaker was Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s (D-NY) chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti. He made it official a couple of months ago when he met with Sam Ricketts, climate director for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), who has made combating climate change the center of his platform as he pursues the Democratic nomination for President in 2020.

Plenty of skeptics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) have pointed out plenty of times that there’s a lot more than science behind climate alarmism. There’s a good deal of political ideology—the ideology of socialism. And the skeptics aren’t the only ones who recognize this.

Socialist Christiana Figueres, former Secretary of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, under which the Paris climate treaty was negotiated, once said about the treaty:

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution” and “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

Globalist/socialist former French President Jacques Chirac called the Kyoto Protocol, which preceded the Paris treaty, “the first step toward global governance.”

So what’s needed to defeat the climate alarmists isn’t just the solid empirical science that says computer model predictions of rapid, dangerous warming from CO2 emissions are grossly exaggerated, and not just the solid economic analysis that says the harms of reducing CO2 emissions will far outweigh the benefits. It’s also the clear-sighted recognition that the climate-alarmist agenda is solidly an anti-liberty, anti-markets, anti-private-property agenda. And it’s also the ability to defend economic liberty, free markets, and private property against those arguments.

That’s one reason why we’re so glad that my book Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future was just republished. And until the end of this month, we’ll send a FREE copy to anyone who asks for it after making a 100% tax-deductible donation of any size and mentions Promo Code 1907. To claim your copy, just click here, make your donation, mention Promo Code 1907, and ask for Prospects for Growth.

Or, you can mail your check, with your request, to Cornwall Alliance, 3712 Ringgold Rd. #355, Chattanooga, TN 37412.

Featured photo courtesy of Ståle Grut /Flickr CC