Hayward: Columnist Says U.S.-China war Could 'Fight Climate Change'

South China Morning Post (SCMP) North American bureau chief Robert Delaney published a bizarre editorial on Tuesday in which he suggested a war between America and China, sparked by Beijing making good on its threat of a military response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) visit to Taiwan, could be even better than the coronavirus pandemic for reducing the world’s carbon footprint.

Delaney’s long screed, which only got around to his give-war-a-chance grand finale in the final paragraphs, included hosannas for the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as the luckiest break for the climate change movement in generations, since it significantly reduced energy consumption and emissions.

Perhaps more importantly, the pandemic gave free nations a taste of the Chinese-style authoritarianism that would be needed to make Delaney’s climate dreams come true. 

A war between America and China that could quickly spiral into a global conflict would seem likely to release a great deal of carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere – and, in the worst-case scenario, some rather massive radioactive heat blooms – but Delaney argued it would be worthwhile in the long run, because it would make the West more accustomed to totalitarian control and reduce carbon footprints by impoverishing all of mankind:

Black swans like the [Chinese coronavirus] pandemic tend to make this happen against just about everyone’s will. Russia’s war against Ukraine may work towards this goal on the margins, given that many in Europe will need to curtail power generation until they figure out how to replace the Russian energy supply. But, with talk of fossil fuels filling the gap in the near term, we could see the opposite.

Which brings us back to Pelosi, who has the world guessing whether she will make Taipei part of her Asia-Pacific itinerary. Such a move carries the risk of a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait, which would have dire economic consequences as supply chains run through China and the rest of Asia.

If a conflict ends up severing trade between Asia and the US, billions of us will suddenly need to make do to an extent far greater than when [Chinese coronavirus] disrupted supply chains.

“All things considered, a Pelosi delegation to Taiwan might be just what the Earth’s natural ecosystems need,” Delaney mused.

If the op-ed was meant as satire, it is very well done. Delaney’s prayer for death and poverty on a planetary scale to knock a few degrees off global temperatures came after a lengthy run through every current left-wing neurosis: angry declarations that hot weather and fires prove his Angry Sky Gods are real, rage at ostensibly maverick Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) for waiting so long to see the truth, taunts that Florida will probably sink soon and take its Republican senators with it, knee-clutching sobs over the Dobbs decision and Florida’s “don’t say gay” law (yes, he happily repeats that entirely false propaganda line without batting an eye) and hapless moaning that President Joe Biden’s recession will weaken him politically before he can save the Earth.

Delaney railed against the short-sightedness of those who cannot understand that recessions are good for the Earth:

The Biden administration spent the past week explaining why negative economic growth doesn’t amount to a recession, dismissing the many economists who say the downturn is coming even if we’re not there yet. This only distracts us from a very inconvenient truth about climate change: so much of the economic activity that fuels growth is what drives the kind of devastation that we saw in Kentucky.

It’s a wonder that Joe Biden is frantically trying to redefine “recession,” hiding from its political consequences instead of taking a victory lap for masterfully creating economic collapse. From this perspective, Biden and his party should be helping Americans grow accustomed to their reduced climate-friendly lifestyles and preparing them for more virtuous poverty to come, instead of pretending the recession is not real or promising happier times lay ahead.

There is plenty more poverty to come if Delaney’s climate dreams come true, because he sneers at even harsh “green” measures like telling struggling Americans in a recessionary high-inflation economy that they should stop complaining about Biden’s high gas prices and drop $60,000 on a new electric car.

As Delaney noted, manufacturing and shipping electric vehicles – and other green fetishes intended to trick middle-class Westerners into thinking they can keep most of their middle-class lifestyle – actually generates “significant” carbon emissions, and that “contributes more to climate change than any of us acknowledge.”

In other words, the climate cult will eventually take away your electric car, too – right now they are just looting national treasuries to subsidize all these “sustainable” industries as a stopgap measure to keep the masses quiescent for a few years. Soon the last of the illusions can be dropped, and it will be time to introduce the rubes to their real sustainable lifestyle, which will have a distinctly pre-industrial character, except we will be eating more bugs than your average medieval peasant. 

Killing off a big chunk of the human race with a devastating war, or even deadlier pandemic, will make the real climate measures easier to implement. Critics of the climate cult like to point out that even its most delusional demands would not reduce emissions nearly enough to meet its targets, especially with countries like China and India happily burning mountains of coal and seas of oil. The harder sort of Green knows this criticism is valid. They are just not quite ready to openly discuss the sacrifices necessary to achieve their emissions targets, very much including human sacrifices.

It is no surprise that climate cultists are attempting to repurpose coronavirus authoritarianism to their cause. Since early in the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, they have dreamed of climate lockdowns, in a world where 2020 was not a monstrous aberration but the beginning of a new era. If Delaney’s op-ed was meant as satire, rest assured that he very accurately mocked what an alarming number of very serious people want to do to us.