Andrew Bolt: West’s green culture has world on brink of war

An anti-capitalist, anti-development culture has weakened the West so much a Russian invasion of Ukraine can’t be resisted.

Russia now looks certain to invade Ukraine. Blame our new green culture for helping to bring the world to the edge of war.

What did we think would happen, with this culture – anti-capitalist, anti-development and often anti-Western – making the West so weak and the Russia-China axis of evil so strong?

Not only is China now threatening to invade Taiwan, its Russian ally has 130,000 troops poised to storm into its neighbour at any moment, sending our diplomats fleeing from Ukraine’s capital.

No way should that be possible. Russia’s economy is in US dollar terms not massively bigger than Australia’s, and all Europe and the United States is telling it to leave Ukraine alone … or else.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin has a not-so-secret weapon: the green movement that has infested the West’s politics, media and universities. It has played us into his hands.

Putin wants to stop Ukraine joining NATO, the western defence alliance, and bringing NATO missiles and troops potentially right up to the Russian border, and our green culture has helped to make much of Europe too weak to resist.

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to stop Ukraine from joining NATO and our green culture has helped to make much of Europe too weak to resist. Picture: AFP

Take Germany, Europe’s biggest power. Germany has a long tradition of almost mystic nature worship, and in 2001 its government surrendered to anti-nuclear crusaders and agreed to scrap Germany’s 17 nuclear power stations by the end of this year. It has just three left, even though nuclear power elsewhere provides 10 per cent of the world’s electricity, safely and with zero emissions.

But Germany went even crazier. It also fell for the global warming cult and decided to phase out coal-fired power stations, too.

Small problem. Renewables can’t keep the lights on. So Germany needed more gas – and now gets one third of its supplies from Russia. But Russia keeps its foot on the pipeline to make sure Germany knows what would happen if the tap was turned off.

That’s why new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz last week refused to say he’d join the United States in punishing Russia if it invaded Ukraine, by banning Russia’s new Nord Stream pipeline to bring more gas to Germany. He’d be cutting his own throat.

It’s not just Germany. Europe needs Russia to supply 35 per cent of its gas. Or take Britain, where even Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson now frolics as a global warming crusader.

Russia has 130,000 troops poised to storm into its neighbour at any moment, sending our diplomats fleeing from Ukraine’s capital. Picture: AFP

New-green Britain phased out its coal-fired power stations, and ran down gas and oil operations in the North Sea. It also fell for the dishonest green scare against fracking – breaking up rock deep underground to release gas – and killed the industry, even though the Bowland Field in Lancashire alone has enough gas to make Britain self-sufficient for more than 50 years.

Britain instead backed unreliable wind farms – so when a “wind drought” hit last year, it was left critically short of power. Electricity bills will now rise in April by a staggering 54 per cent, a huge hit to the poor and the economy.

Even that’s not all. Europe was so eager to pretend to fight global warming that it shut factories with high emissions.

It was a fraud. Factories making the same stuff opened instead in China, which is still free to increase emissions, and exported from there. As a European Environment Agency report admitted: “Emission of industrial pollutants as a result of industrial activities decreased between 1995 and 2011 in Europe, while embodied emissions in imports increased.” Europe’s switcheroo simply outsourced some emissions to China. Worse, this made Europe poorer and helped the Chinese dictatorship get much richer.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping hosted Putin as his guest of honour at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Picture: AFP

Indeed, China’s economy is now the world’s biggest – measured by purchasing power. That’s bought China an army so well equipped that US war games show it would beat the US in any war over Taiwan.

That’s why China now dares to threaten to invade Taiwan, which it claims is just a renegade province, not an independent island democracy.

Let me round out this picture.

Many of our green believers are now also tearing us apart with identity politics.

Meanwhile, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping hosted Putin as his guest of honour at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Hours earlier, they released a joint statement declaring the balance of power had switched away from the US, and they now represented a new world order that rejected democracy revolutions. They also backed each other’s grievances: Russia’s against Ukraine; China’s against Taiwan.

And our green culture has helped make us too weak and divided to resist. Green dreams have come at a catastrophic price.