I am the last person on earth who feels any urge to defend the green industrial complex. If anything, they deserve our sharpest contempt. The whole contraption should be scrapped, burned, and buried without ceremony, preferably with no replacement waiting in the wings. A fair number of its evangelists should also enjoy a long period of quiet reflection behind bars for the fraud, misrepresentation, and moral extortion they so cheerfully peddled.
That said, using the green mob as a convenient fig leaf to cover up what certain governments have done to their own countries is a bridge too far. South Africa is a case in point. What happened there cannot be laid at the feet of climate policy tourists alone. The country had been methodically dismantling a once-functioning economy long before the green vultures arrived to peck at the remains.
South Africa is, without exaggeration, the worst affirmative-action state I have ever visited—and I have seen many. Under the banner of so-called racial justice, the country constructed a grotesquely byzantine system of entitlements: Black empowerment, women’s empowerment, and an ever-expanding catalogue of other empowerment schemes, all stacked on top of one another like bureaucratic Jenga blocks. Each group demands its pound of flesh from every conceivable project, from a lemonade stand to heavy industry. None of them are ever satisfied.
Worse still, they want their slice of the cake before the cake even exists. Before capital is committed. Before risk is taken. Before value is created. It is a system exquisitely designed to suffocate economic activity at birth. Nothing can breathe in it. Nothing can grow. Eventually, nothing remains.
South Africa will not survive as a coherent whole. It wasn’t undone by markets, foreigners, sanctions, or environmental activists. It was destroyed from the inside, by its own rulers, in the name of virtue and redistribution. The green mob merely showed up later, picking the bones clean and congratulating themselves for having found a moral cause among the ruins.
