Banning plastic straws. Carbon taxes. Stopping people from eating meat. Stopping people from having babies.

Am I just seeing things? Or are all the “climate crisis solutions” proposed by the Democrats designed to cause maximum pain to ordinary people, and almost none to wealthy elites?

Progressives almost seem to take joy in inconveniencing the masses for no reason. Take the plastic straw ban, for example. Even National Geographic — hardly an anti-environmentalist publication — admits that plastic straws comprise just 0.025 percent of the plastic in the oceans.

Contrast the minimal impact of plastic straws with the extraordinary impact of China, and, by extension, global free trade. China, alone, produces around a third of the ocean’s plastic waste. China’s CO2 emissions are greater than the U.S. and Europe combined, and keep going up.

If Democrats really believe that climate change is an existential threat to humanity, why are they proposing draconian and pointless curbs on the behavior of ordinary Americans? Why aren’t they going after multinationals that continue to do business with the world’s biggest polluter, without demanding any environmental commitments from them (and hey, maybe some human rights commitments too?).

You’d think Bernie, at least, would get this. But his big idea is to make everyone have fewer babies. Instead of tackling China, he’s proposing a distinctly Chinese policy. Just because he didn’t say “one-child policy” doesn’t mean the similarity isn’t there.

The real reason Democrats won’t go after China is that they are now the party of global elites, and global elites are constantly salivating about the profits that can be made from China’s market of 1.4 billion people. They look to Europe and America and see a dwindling middle class with a declining population. There’s no money in that, not long-term anyway. Maybe the problem could be fixed with pro-natal policies like Hungary’s, but why bother? It’s far easier to simply go overseas, to a country that does have a booming population and rising middle class.

That’s the same reason, by the way, that global elites are so vociferously opposed to President Donald Trump and his agenda. Trade restrictions on China, to protect American jobs? An outrage! The elites can’t make money off American jobs, you see. They’re just so much more expensive than Chinese jobs!

Ask yourself, why is big tech so determined to work with China, despite the political pitfalls? Did Google, which once boasted the hipster motto “don’t be evil,” really think they’d suffer no blowback for developing a censored search engine designed to appease Chinese state censors? Or that working with the Chinese military but not the American one would somehow escape notice? Of course not — but for all its professed “values,” there’s no way a profit-seeking multinational like Google can resist the temptation of a 1.4 billion-person market.

As for the impact on the environment, the elites don’t really care, no matter how many times they jet to various climate change summits around the globe. It’s not that they don’t believe in a looming environmental catastrophe, they just believe they can escape it. “Doomsday capitalism” is how the left-wing magazine CounterPunch describes the trend of billionaires investing in post-apocalypse getaways.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about how conservatives see the climate. While they’re skeptical of man-made climate change, natural climate change is a different matter. And even if they don’t think climate change is a problem, that doesn’t mean that the massive amounts of pollution generated by the likes of China is Okay. Preserving the natural environment means preserving our heritage — a conservative goal.

But plastic straw bans, meat bans, and one-child policies won’t solve the problem. They simply cause unnecessary pain to ordinary people. Meanwhile, the Chinese dirty coal furnaces keep on burning.

Are you a corporate or Big Tech insider who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com. 

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.