To be sure, from a Democratic political point of view, it’s a counter-productive plan; it could cause Democrats to lose elections.  And yet from a progressive ideological point of view, it all makes sense; it’s in keeping with the long march of a certain kind of leftism, begun more than a century ago.

President Joe Biden speaks to the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate, from the East Room of the White House on April 23, 2021.

Without a doubt, the lefty greens who dominate the Biden administration are thinking big—and they’re in a hurry.  In a hurry, that is, to reach their long-sought end point on environmentalism. As they wrote in the Democratic Party’s 2020 campaign platform: .

It’s clear: This is what a certain tranche of elite Democrats—the kind that sit around, reading and writing position papers—truly believe:  As President Biden said on November 1, climate change is “an existential threat to human existence.”.

So yes, they still believe in the Green New Deal.  To be sure, the exact words “Green New Deal” are no longer used—they were laughed off the political stage in 2019—and yet the concept of deep eco-transformation is still central to progressive hearts.  Nowadays, though, it goes by other names, such as the Great Reset.

Guided by such existentially ambitious thinking, of course the Biden administration has sought to kibosh carbon-based fuels, starting with—on his first day in office—canceling the Keystone Pipeline. Now some might wonder: What about jobs?  To which the Great Resetters reply, in effect,  Jobs, schmobs—that was all just boob bait for Biden voters. What really matters is decarbonizing the planet. .

Biden’s top priority to be getting inflation under control and fixing supply chain issues, compared with 21 percent who thought the priority should be new spending on social services, health care and green energy.

Thus Biden climate chief John Kerry, who shrewdly married into billions—and who used his donor-class clout to muscle his way into the administration—said loftily on December 1, “We have to be phasing out coal plants five times faster.”  That’s not exactly the way to woo Sen

Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry delivers a speech at COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 2, 2021

Lind explains that progressive technocrats trace their lineage back a century or more, to the days President Woodrow Wilson.  That’s when “prog-techs” got the blessing to start reordering American society in ways that a Princeton University professor (which Wilson once was) would approve of.  As Lind writes: 

Here Lind pauses to make a key point: The progressive technocrats are not communists.  That is, they don’t sit around thinking of Bolshevizing the means of production, nor do they look forward to living in propertyless communes and wearing egalitarian Mao suits. 

Yet make no mistake: There’s an iron fist inside this liberal glove.  And that’s what we’re seeing with climate change, as the technocrats embrace this new issue as a rationale for doing what they’ve always wanted to do: bend the citizenry to do their bidding

Rising concern about global warming in the last three decades has given progressive technocrats an opportunity to move from the political sidelines to the center.  Because of the “climate emergency,” the various causes of twentieth-century progressive planners—high-density housing, replacement of automobiles by mass transit, renewable energy—are no longer matters of personal taste.  Now these generations-old top-down social engineering schemes are necessary to save the planet.  If these plans are not immediately adopted into a war-like mobilization, progressive technocrats claim, civilization will collapse, and hundreds of millions or billions of people—perhaps humanity as a whole—will die

In the meantime, this much is obvious: The whole progressive technocratic doomsday argument is somewhere between a false alarm and a hoax.  We may need to take action, but we don’t need John Kerry and the Green New Dealers Great Resetters to tell us what to do, or how to do it

Michael Lind is crisp and to the point: The green progressive-technocrats have a de facto ally in the People’s Republic of China.  And China is the big winner in the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, or whatever else it might be called. 

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We could mandate that the green technology we use must be Made in USA.  However, it would take a few years to stand up these new industries, and the green prog-techs say that we can’t wait, because of the urgency of the “climate crisis.” 

It is thus no coincidence that American supporters of the Green New Deal tend also to be dovish toward China in matters of trade, arguing that the coming climate crisis gives the United States no time to rebuild its own capacity to manufacture equipment needed for renewable energy installations

The green prog-techs say: Never mind China’s human rights abuses, or its threats to neighbors, or its ongoing theft of American intellectual property.  As Kerry has said, the chief concern must be climate change

To that end, just on December 2, The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration was lobbying against Congressional efforts to get tough on blood-stained Chinese exports.  In the cutting words of Sen