China s Leninist Climate Pledge | RealClearPolitics
The Kremlin s most daring use of environmental active measures was the nuclear winter scare of the early 1980s. In a bid to split the Atlantic Alliance and win the Cold War, the Soviet Union deployed medium-range nuclear missiles. The West responded with a nuclear arms build-up of its own. In June 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciences published a paper predicting a nuclear winter across the northern hemisphere in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.
The paper was picked up by the Rockefeller Family Fund and amplified by Carl Sagan and many American scientists. An October 1982 nuclear-winter conference in Washington called for a nuclear arms freeze. Conference attendees represented a roll call of progressive groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund, Planned Parenthood, Common Cause, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, all of which would later stand at the forefront of the climate wars.
It was obvious, or should have been obvious, which side would benefit from an arms freeze. The conference even had a TV satellite link-up with the Kremlin, funded by Tides, another progressive group. Wittingly or not, the scientists, foundations, and NGOs were acting as mouthpieces of the Kremlin in its aim of defeating the West in the Cold War. In fact, the nuclear winter scare had been concocted by the KGB to cause terror in the West and promote the nuclear freeze. If the scientists, NGOs, and foundations behind the nuclear winter scare had succeeded in halting Ronald Reagan s arms build-up, the West could not have won the Cold War without a shot being fired.
Western politicians who denounce the Chinese Communist Party for its genocide of the Uighurs and its tearing up of international commitments on Hong Kong want us to believe that China is somehow an angel when it comes to climate change. The reason for this suspension of disbelief is simple. If the word of the Chinese Communist Party is not believed, the rationale for climate action evaporates.
Lenin s heirs in Beijing have a far better understanding of Western leaders than Western leaders have of them. China s expansionism will continue unchecked until the West has leaders with the moral clarity that it was blessed with in the 1980s, who called out the Soviet empire for what it was. For the time being, history is moving China s way.
I remember the hysteria over “nuclear winter.” Then the USSR fell, and down the memory hole they both went. That was probably the best way to solve the problem. Well, not the best. The Rockefeller Family Fund could have confessed error, but that was never going to happen.