Andrew Bolt: Devastated Sri Lanka exposes nightmare reality of Greens’ dream

Sri Lanka’s president has just proved that living by the green dreaming we’re seeing in our unreal election campaign can come at a catastrophic cost.

Before you vote for the Greens – or even a so-called climate independent – please think about a total idiot called Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Oh, haven’t heard of him? Or seen the crying human disaster he’s just caused?

I must introduce him, because he’s just proved the green dreaming we’re seeing in our unreal election campaign can come at a catastrophic cost.

Not that most Greens care about cost. Has Greens leader Adam Bandt ever told you the cost of his global warming policies? As if.

Adam Bandt falsely claims we face a ‘climate emergency’. Picture: Andrew Taylor

That was exactly the problem with Rajapaksa, and see how that’s just turned out.

Rajapaksa – unlike Bandt, thank God – actually runs a country already. He’s Sri Lanka’s president.

But he can match Bandt, idiocy by idiocy, in preaching global warming slogans. And did, until the horror of actually living by them became tragically obvious.

For instance, Bandt falsely claims we face a “climate emergency” that demands we get rid of fossil fuels like coal and gas, and for good measure insists we “minimise or eliminate the use of harmful pesticides and fertilisers” as we “apply ecological concepts to the management of agriculture – often called agro-ecology”.

That’s the kind of stuff Rajapaksa preached last year, too, announcing that “climate change is one of the most serious issues humanity faces”, and he wanted to “transition away from fossil fuel”.

And, boy, has Sri Lanka just learned what that “transition” looks like, faster than Rajapaksa ever imagined, because this clown of a president also last year echoed another part of Bandt’s insane agenda.

Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa banned pesticides and artificial fertilisers. Picture: AFP

“Ensuring food security through agro-ecological adaptation is an essential part of (fighting global warming) if we are to preserve the health of our planet and ensure human sustainability,” he declared.

And in April last year, he banned pesticides and artificial fertilisers, made from lots of gas. Sri Lanka’s farmers were going to be organic!

What a green success. Result: the biggest government-made disaster to ever hit Sri Lanka.

Without synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, rice production fell 20 per cent in just six months. Sri Lanka went from exporting rice to having to import nearly $500m of it just to feed its people.

Production of tea, Sri Lanka’s biggest export, also dropped like a stone, costing another $500m.

Add the virus pandemic, which smashed tourism, plus corruption, mismanagement and crippling loans to China, and Sri Lanka’s economy is now devastated.

Desperate Sri Lankans, especially the poor, are protesting in the streets. Picture: AFP

There are shortages of food and medicines. Almost all the country’s foreign reserves are gone, leaving the government struggling to find the cash to pay for vital imports, especially gas and petrol.

The country’s new prime minister on Tuesday said Sri Lanka has just one day’s supply of petrol left, and little gas. But he made this sudden “transition” from fossil fuels sound like a disaster and not a Bandt-style heaven.

No wonder. Desperate Sri Lankans, especially the poor, are protesting in the streets, angrily waving empty gas bottles and demanding the gas they need for cooking. Soldiers have been called out to control the mobs. People have been killed.

This is what the Greens’ dream looks like in a country mad enough to try to make it real.

Poor people short of food, and even the fuel to cook it. Prices soaring, the government broke, an economy on its knees.

And there’s China now, hovering like a vulture. It’s already owed 10 per cent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt and Is now discussing if and how to help keep this near bankrupt country going.

Speaking of China, there’s another similarity between Rajapaksa and Bandt.

Sri Lanka has been ruined by green politics. Picture: AFP

Bandt’s peace spokesman last month declared: “I don’t see China as a military threat to Australia.” The Greens have as a consequence promised to cut our military spending by a third and dismantle our alliance with the US.

Rajapaksa’s brother Mahinda, when he had his own turn as president, also thought China was no threat.

He borrowed big from China, as well as accepting “donations”, and left the country so in hock to the dictatorship that China was given Sri Lanka’s second-biggest port, Hambantota, along with 60sq km of land around it. It’s now potentially a Chinese naval base.

What might China gain next, now that Sri Lanka has been ruined by green politics?

And there’s one more warning for us, isn’t there?

We’re also deliberately making ourselves poorer in the name of global warming, and the Greens would just supercharge our relative decline.

What might China’s dictatorship then gain over us, too?

Can you really risk the Greens?