At first sight, the A-Z dictionary format of James Delingpole’s latest effort, The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism, seems surprising. But there is a sound reason for its structure.
In his prior book, Watermelons, Delingpole cited George Orwell: "Who controls the language controls the culture. Who controls the culture wins the political argument. … [Orwell] explained that one of the most effective ways of suppressing heretical thought was to eliminate undesirable words or strip them of their meaning."
Eco-fascists have a talent for that sort of thing. As Delingpole notes in his entry on "Language," the "greenies" rely on "making seriously unpleasant things sound like desirable, cozy ones." For example, "Communistic wealth redistribution, hyper-regulation, and falling living standards: sustainability"; "Deliberately engineered economic stagnation: smart growth"; "Bird-slicing, bat-chomping death zone: wind park." Delingpole’s dictionary takes the environmental lexicon and turns it on its head—which is to say, right side up.
In short, he provides a highly engaging way to learn about the green movement. The pithy entries build on one another. Each provides a little more insight, while reinforcing what has come before. One learns, for instance, that the greens are totalitarian, fascistic, anti-capitalist control freaks from the entries "Eco-Fascism," "Democracy," "Politics," "Profit," and "Property Rights." But if you haven’t absorbed the lesson by the "P" section, you will once you reach the entry for "Soros, George."
The book is full of fun, little-known factoids. Like the time in 2010 when a 1,300-hectare forest fire in Israel’s Golan Heights was "triggered by a global warming activist at a Rainbow Festival trying to burn her used toilet paper in an attempt to be eco-friendly."
But there is a more important reason to read Delingpole. He’s from across the pond. And his homeland, as well as continental Europe, has borne the full brunt of environmental wackiness. A recent "Climate Change Performance Index" listed 10 European countries as tops in terms of renewable energy portfolios, energy efficiency, and policies aimed at climate change. Sadly, this is the same direction in which America is heading, so it’s helpful to listen to someone reporting from inside the green terror, so to speak. Delingpole resembles a sci-fi character come from the future to warn us of our fate.
Judging from Europe, that fate is dark, quite literally: Many of us won’t be able to afford electricity. Under "Germany," one learns that "thanks to its concerted drive for renewable energy … Germany has now successfully driven one fifth of its population into ‘fuel poverty.’" Portugal and Spain are also disaster areas.
Delingpole’s home country of Britain in some respects has gone further than any. It's not just the rampant fuel poverty. England, reports Delingpole, is "the only nation anywhere on Earth legally bound to commit economic suicide in the name of environmentalism. Thanks to the 2008 Climate Act, Britain is required to spend in excess of £18 billion per annum ‘decarbonizing’ the UK economy."
Unlike other countries, where drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are a goal, or target, England must, by law, reduce its CO2 emissions 80 percent by 2050. Incredibly, the 2008 Climate Act breezed through Parliament by an almost unanimous vote. There were only five nays out of 650 members in the House of Commons.
The writing is on the wall for America. President Barack Obama’s administration has been the most radically environmentalist yet, with its all-out war on coal, its restrictions and outright bans on oil and gas leases on federal lands, and its rebranding of CO2, otherwise known as plant food, as a pollutant.
We are moving toward a society that brooks no climate change dissent. A recent example came in the form of an announcement by the Los Angeles Times letters editor that he won’t publish material questioning anthropogenic global warming. In July of this year, the Secretary of the Department of Interior said climate "deniers" were unwelcome, and in September, green guru Al Gore said climate change "denial" should be made a social "taboo."
In education, too, there are worrying new developments as climate change is to be taught as hard and fast scientific truth. Twenty-six state governments have developed so-called Next Generation Science Standards (an additional 14 states are considering them) which require high-school and middle-school students to be taught as scientific fact that climate change is manmade and due to the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. Matt Lappe, director of education for the Alliance for Climate Education, says this is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" to "squash those denialist approaches to climate science teaching."
It must be especially lonely to be a "denier" in Europe, which is farther down this illiberal path. Perhaps Delingpole’s choice of satire is a form of therapy, or he may have concluded that biting humor is the most effective tool against global warming orthodoxy, which marches on despite the many exposes revealing the falsity of its apocalyptic claims. Nor have scandals like Climategate, which showed how scientists fudged the numbers, brought the monstrous green edifice to its knees.
Steve Gorham, another anti-green warrior, may have concluded the same thing. His first book Climatism! was a sober look at the evidence. His second, The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, uses "figures, cartoons and whimsical sidebars." Perhaps it was the whimsy that drove those two professors from the San Jose University Meteorology Department to pose in a picture attempting to burn the book.
Delingpole deserves our thanks for his fine effort. Moreover, he deserves our money. Anti-green authors like Delingpole are smeared with the canard that they’re in the pay of Big Oil. But reading his entry on "Big Green," one learns that is the greens rolling in dough. The Obama stimulus spent $76.8 billion on green projects. The top 50 U.S. environmental groups spent an annual $4.98 billion in 2005. The estimated corporate spending in the EU on "sustainable business" by 2014 will be $97.98 billion.
In 2010, Delingpole reports in Watermelons, he made $24,000.
Poor chap. He had been doing better. One time, he wrote on a host of topics. He traveled the world. Unfortunately for him, he became transfixed by the topic of global warming, in the same way other people can’t look away from a train wreck. It may not be to his benefit, but it is to ours. Delingpole possesses wisdom and wit, and The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism contains generous helpings of both. His book is the perfect gift that will entertain whoever reads it, aiding in the digestion of those generous amounts of turkey and roast beef—hopefully not organic!—consumed during the holiday season.
David Isaac is an editor at Newsmax.