The Brown New Deal, Part II

When, while speaking at the UN, Trump said: "If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail," he was, of course, lying. If "your country" is part of the EU, then there is no getting away from "this green scam": the money has already been misspent and the energy infrastructure has already been compromised. Russia has already given up on the European energy market and has reoriented its energy exports to the east. For the EU, rapid deindustrialization is now inevitable. Trump's statement can thus be shortened to "Your country is going to fail."

But that is not what Europe's leaders wanted to hear. Admitting that Trump is right would be tantamount to volunteering to resign from their positions and that is not what they had in mind. Instead of resigning (that would have been an honorable thing for them to do) they instead chose to greenlight a new, bigger and better scam, which I will call the Brown New Deal.

Unlike the color green, the color brown is rich in negative connotations. It is the default color of dead things: green leaves turn a multitude of beautiful colors as they wilt when the first frost hits, then waft gently down to the ground and, after some autumn rains, invariably turn brown. Brown was also the color of the shirts worn by the Brownshirts, the paramilitary wing (Sturmabteilung) of the German Nazi Party, whose violent and obnoxious behavior helped Hitler rise to power. Thus, brown is also the color of rotting nations. It is also the color of excrement, thanks to the pigmentation effect of bilirubin, which is a waste product of heme breakdown, from old red blood cells, which is produced in the liver and excreted. Bilirubin is what gives bile and feces their color. Lastly, it is the skin color of native human populations in tropical nations; here, it is racists who give it its negative connotation.

I do not intend to paint all things brown with a single brush; there are, after all, some things brown that are quite copacetic. There are, of course, chocolate and brown sugar, which require no promotion. There is the brown color of "strong" tannic water, favored by sailors of old. Taken from the estuaries, above the reach of the tides, of rivers that drain woodlands and swamps, and stored in barrels on the decks of sailing ships, "strong" water took much longer to turn "lively" (green, that is). In this case, counterintuitively, brown water was safe to drink (though bitter) while green water was sure to cause diarrhea. Finally, what would architects, interior decorators, fashion designers, Trump's makeup team and various other artists and craftsmen do without the various shades of beige, tan, sienna, umber, taupe and fawn?

Aside from such incidental exceptions, the more commonplace connotations of "brown" are rot, Nazis, "darkies" (if you happen to be a Nazi) and shit. This wealth of connotations makes brown a good choice as the color of the decomposing Green movement, now that its public stupification program known as "anthropogenic climate change," the refusal of pipelined hydrocarbon imports and the copious public subsidies for wind generators and solar panels have ushered in an era of financial, political and economic meltdowns throughout Europe. The new public stupification program is "Russian aggression," and the response to it requires copious public spending on various defense programs.

The level of comfort, health and security for urban populations (55% of the world's total) is directly proportional to the level of per capita energy consumption: a decrease in per capita energy availability directly decreases access to adequately heated and air conditioned dwellings and such luxuries as flush toilets and hot and cold running water, access to education and health care, security, law enforcement and to most of the other trappings of civilization. Urban populations depend on electricity and natural gas for the proper operation of most things that remain stationary and on diesel and gasoline for most things that move. Electricity can be used for public transportation and for rail freight but is out of the question for most road freight and all water freight. Electricity depends on nuclear energy and coal for base load and on natural gas to compensate for diurnal fluctuations in electricity demand. It is a cruel fact that high per capita energy consumption cannot be maintained by switching to wind and solar for electricity generation.

The result of the Green New Deal is steadily decreasing living standards throughout Europe stemming from the root cause of lower per capita energy affordability. In turn, it is superficially stable but steadily worsening living conditions, much more so than an outright crisis, that cause populations to rebel and to overthrow their ruling elites. The ruling elites of Europe know this, do not fancy being strung up on lampposts all over Europe, and seek to at least deflect the blame and, better yet, to engineer an outright crisis which they can then pretend to mitigate heroically.

Their manufactured crisis of choice is the entirely fictional yet imminent attack on the European Union by the Russian Federation. The risible lie used to support this argument is that should the Ukrainian army be routed and should the illegitimate and corrupt Kiev regime fall, Russian tanks will then roll across Europe... just like they did in 1945! The thorny question of why Russia would ever be interested in such an escapade is avoided through irrational anti-Russian bigotry: the very fact that the Russians happen to be Russian is taken as sufficient to guarantee their propensity for such insane and self-defeating behavior.

But we, not being irrational anti-Russian-bigots, will take the time to answer this question, which we will take up next.