Wind turbines are viewed at a wind farm in Colorado City, Texas, on January 21, 2016. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Censorship & Socialism

By Ella Kietlinska and Joshua Philipp March 25, 2021 Updated: March 25, 2021 biggersmallerPrint

People should be concerned about the Green New Deal because it includes the most radical policies that can transform the economy into a socialist one and allow the government to tighten control over society, according to Hayden Ludwig, Senior Investigative Researcher at the Capital Research Center.

“The Green New Deal, I would say, has nothing to do with climate change, it has nothing to do with global warming, the environment. Period. It’s everything to do with remaking the entire United States in the radical left’s own image,” Ludwig told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” program.

Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), told The Washington Post in 2019, “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal … is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. … we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

A campaign organizer for Friends of the Earth stated at a United Nations conference, “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources,” according to Christopher Horner’s book “Red Hot Lies.”

The Democrats in the House of Representatives proposed an infrastructure package that would include roughly $1 trillion for roads, bridges, rail lines, electrical vehicle charging stations, and the cellular network, among other items. The stated goal is to facilitate the shift to cleaner energy while improving economic competitiveness.

A second component of the package would propose benefits for workers, including free community college, universal pre-kindergarten, and paid family leave.

“They published a proposal that was a sprawling proposal that pretended to be a highway bill. But it was really just a multi-thousand-page cousin of the Green New Deal,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said about the proposed package.

“We’re hearing the next few months might bring a so-called ‘infrastructure’ proposal that may actually be a Trojan horse for massive tax hikes and other job-killing left-wing policies,” McConnell said.

“If you read the text of [the Green New Deal] from a few years ago you’ll find references, fig leaves, to global warming that immediately jump into things they really want to talk about,” Ludwig said. “And that’s about ‘combating rising income inequality,’ and ‘environmental justice’, which really is a way to say ‘reparations to black and brown communities because they’ve been systematically oppressed by white communities’ and this has nothing to do with the environment.”

Ludwig explained that “environmental justice” is the Marxist concept of oppressor and oppressed applied to global warming. “Rich polluters, right, those are people who own houses, people who own multiple cars, who are by the nature of their pollution, oppressing the oppressed people, and these are poor people who live in poor communities, who are ethnic minorities,” he said. This way “any sort of sweeping redistribution, reparations agenda [can be justified] by pointing out it’s all climate-related,” Ludwig added.

Creating conflict between “the oppressor” and “the oppressed” is at the core of Marxist doctrine. “Marxists basically see the world in terms of one oppressor class oppressing an oppressed class and that used to be the capitalist class oppressing the proletariat, the labor class,” Ludwig said. “That didn’t really work out.”

The same dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed was applied to races like white people and black people or other non-white people, or men and women, Ludwig said.

Environmentalism Leads to Population Control

Ludwig said that “true environmentalism leads to population control.” He said that he drew this conclusion after tracing “the origins of environmentalism back to the eugenics movement and the pro-abortion movement—in short, the population control movement of the 20th century.”

The Green New Deal allows the federal government to justify policies that will control how people travel, how they eat, and how many children they have, Ludwig said. “That’s why this is so dangerous. It’s an open-ended mandate for the most radical transformation we’ve ever seen proposed.”

“There’s a reason, I think, why the Democratic Party is pushing so much radical environmental policy right now, as opposed to anything else, like Medicare For All, and my theory is that they realize that this is the fastest way to get the amount of power that they want over people’s lives,” he added. “If you can sell somebody on, ‘If you don’t pass this measure, you die, the whole world goes up in smoke,’ so to speak—if you can pass that, you can justify whatever you want.”

Traditional socialism, like in China, seeks power over everything people do and “environmentalism is the only ideology I know of that goes even more beyond that; it gives the government power of your very genes, over what you get to breathe out—I mean, cellular-level kind of control,” Ludwig said. “It’s the most extreme thing we’ve ever seen,”

Ludwig cited filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, who in his 2019 documentary “Planet of the Humans” pointed out that if one seriously considers saving the planet through stopping climate change, yet excludes carbon-free nuclear power as an option, as many environmentalists have, “then what you’re left with is minimizing the number of humans left on the planet,” Ludwig said. “There’s no other way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions short of massive population control schemes.”

“We have to be wary of these things because they will ultimately end in controlling how many children you can have,” Ludwig said, noting there are organizations that have been advocating these policies since the 1960s, such as Population Connection.

Population Connection was founded in 1968 under the name of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) with a mission to “raise public awareness of the link between population growth and environmental degradation and, in turn, encourage people to have smaller families” limited to two children, according to its website.

The organization changed its name in 2002, but its “mission never changed,” the website states. The name change allowed the organization to get access to Capitol Hill, public schools, and attract younger members and supporters.

Originally ZPG targeted the white middle class because “the white middle-class majority use up more than their share of resources and do more than their share of polluting,” Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies at Stanford University wrote in 1970 in the ZPG National Reporter. Later, the organization decided to extend its message to “the rich, the poor, and the middle class.”

In February, Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), with support from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I- Vt.), introduced The National Climate Emergency Act, which grants the president “enormous ability to respond to an emergency,” Ludwig wrote for Capital Research Center.

In January, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told MSNBC: “I think it might be a good idea for President Biden to declare a climate emergency. Then he can do many, many things under the emergency powers of the president that wouldn’t have to go through, that he could do without legislation.”

Relying on Renewable Energy

Renewable energy sources such as wind turbines or solar panel arrays require an enormous amount of land, Ludwig said, adding that applying them on a large scale could lead to the total deforestation of the United States.

Wind turbines need foundations built of hundreds of tons of concrete embedded very deep into the earth, tons of steel, and tons of copper wiring, some of which need to be replaced after a decade and are not easily recycled, Ludwig said. “Things that are supposed to be saving the planet, in reality, they’re just polluting the planet with all sorts of excess materials, resources that could have been better used elsewhere.”

Renewable sources of energy such as wind power and solar power are notoriously unreliable because there are times when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow, Ludwig said. Therefore any electrical power grid which uses solar or wind power needs to include steady reliable forms of energy such as nuclear power, natural gas, oil, or coal.

There is no technology so far that will allow the storing on a mass scale of the energy produced from intermittent sources, Ludwig said.

The electrical grid does not work like a light bulb dimmer, which can accept less power and give less. “It’s much more like a computer or television. If you don’t provide exactly the minimum amount of electricity to the grid that’s required at all times it simply shuts off.”

Isabel van Brugen contributed to this report.