The Delusional Premises Of Woke Greens

Authored by Edward Ring via American Greatness,

While the burgeoning democratic socialist movement is getting a lot of attention in advance of the 2026 midterm elections, a parallel dimension of wokeism quietly continues to advance. For now, the Trump administration has attenuated its most extreme threats, but its institutional support is unwavering, and its slow progress is unrelenting. The woke greens are pursuing their own long march.

The agenda of the woke greens is synergistic with democratic socialism. Its currency is fear and resentment. The Earth is dying; colonialist capitalism is to blame. Extraordinary measures are called for. Restrict growth, redistribute wealth. Sound familiar? Environmentalist extremism and socialism are two peas in a pod. But both are built on lies. Nothing has delivered more wealth and freedom to more people than authentic capitalism. Not crony, casino, or monopoly capitalism, but capitalism that rewards hard work, protects private property, and preserves the incentives that harness human nature and nurture human creativity.

In contrast to capitalism, socialism is a nightmare that turns out the lights in nation after nation. The historical evidence is overwhelming. Strive to improve the mechanics of capitalism, and reject socialist demagoguery.

But there’s a catch. The planet is burning up. Ecosystems are in collapse. Therefore, we have no choice; we must redistribute wealth so everyone can consume less. Without radical measures, our civilization is unsustainable. This argument sounds compelling. But it is also built on lies that must be challenged.

Here are some of the flawed, false premises for the woke greens.

We face a climate emergency.

To anyone who has studied both sides of the debate, this is a manipulative shibboleth. From a more balanced perspective, even if there is an emergency, the opportunistic profiteering of the climate industry is obvious, and “climate” is revealed all too often as just a marketing ploy to garner mandates and subsidies for projects that would otherwise never survive an honest cost-benefit analysis.

There are nearly infinite scientifically valid reasons that explain why the planet is not experiencing an actual climate crisis, and, thanks to the failure of the climate industry to completely silence the skeptics, it’s become easier than ever to study these reasons. A good place to start is with the 2021 book “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters” by Steven E. Koonin. Another continuously updated source of climate realism comes from the CO2 Coalition, a network of scientists committed to debunking the alarmist narrative. There’s much more. Read the classic “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” by economist Bjorn Lomborg, or the more recent “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” by Michael Shellenberger.

The inconvenient truth for woke greens is that the climate alarm narrative, which is the foundation of their entire subsequent agenda, is not true. But the truth has to contend with a multitrillion-dollar industry that relies on the useful fear and resentment that a “climate emergency” imparts to millions of people. It is used to silence debate over the efficacy of every one of the following destructive delusions. In no particular order, here are some of them.

Floating offshore wind provides sustainable electricity.

This is a preposterous lie. Floating offshore wind is the most expensive source of electricity on Earth. It has never been deployed successfully at scale. It is a resource hog, it wreaks environmental havoc, and installations are short-lived in the maritime environment. The heavily subsidized corporations that buy politicians and profit from this monstrous scam would not exist in a competitive market.

Biofuel is a carbon-neutral, sustainable fuel.

Another preposterous lie. There are nearly 450,000 square miles of biofuel plantations worldwide, and altogether they only supply five percent of total demand for liquid transportation fuel. These are pesticide-, herbicide-, and fertilizer-drenched monocultures that have replaced rainforests throughout the tropics. If you replaced all the arable farmland on Earth with these abominations, that would still only provide 60 percent of global demand for transportation fuel, which in turn represents only 30 percent of total demand for energy in the world. Is this sustainable?

Dams must be demolished.

While there is controversy over some dams—Turkey has new dams that can deny water to Iraq and Syria, and Ethiopia has built one that can cut off water to Egypt—in general, we need dams for flood control, navigation, irrigation, and hydroelectric power. There are ways to mitigate the impact of dams on migrating fish, and there are many instances of how dams can help the environments they impact. But no matter. According to the woke greens, they must all be demolished.

The only way to manage forests is to leave them completely alone.

This is nonsense. Forests that are managed responsibly with sustainable logging, mechanical thinning, controlled burns, and livestock grazing are far healthier. In prehistory, fires naturally and routinely thinned forests, which maintained their health by preventing an unhealthy density of trees and shrubs. Now that we put out forest fires, we must compensate by managing the resulting growth. All over the United States we are seeing superfires that are not the result of climate change but a consequence of environmentalists chasing out the loggers while not permitting any other method of thinning.

We must reintroduce wild animals wherever they once roamed.

A related premise of the woke greens is that we must not only save endangered species but also reintroduce them throughout their ancient range. Now we have mountain lions roaming the Los Angeles suburbs and wolf packs spreading slowly throughout the western United States, and there’s even talk of bringing the grizzly bear back to California. Because, to quote a woke green, “It’s their land.” No. It isn’t. It’s appropriate to take reasonable steps to preserve wildlife and wilderness areas, but allowing dangerous predator species that already have stable populations to expand their range is explicitly anti-human. We have to responsibly manage wildlife populations just as we have to responsibly manage forests. That means we have to set and enforce limits on their range.

People should live in densely populated cities.

The idea here is that someone living in a one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise in a neighborhood with 30,000 people per square mile is more “sustainable” than people living in detached homes with their own yards. The inhumanity of this is stunning, but it’s also just false. Urbanized areas on Earth (that’s cities and towns) today only total around 200,000 square miles, and yet 81 percent of the world population lives in them. We have 41 million square miles of habitable land on Earth. If 10 billion people lived in homes on quarter-acre lots, four per household, with an equal amount of land set aside for roads, parks, schools, and commercial and industrial areas, it would use up less than 2 million square miles of that land, less than five percent of habitable land.

There are too many people for the planet’s resources to sustain.

This is absolutely false. The crisis we face in the world is too few people. Birthrates are collapsing everywhere on the planet, with the exception of significant parts of the Islamic world and sub-Saharan Africa—which explains why migrants from those nations are swarming into any developed nations that will admit them. The challenge for humanity is to convince people who have attained the liberty and prosperity to live lives beyond bare subsistence to still decide to have children. The human population is projected, at most, to peak at 10 billion by around 2050. After that, unless dramatic cultural trends are reversed, it will decline precipitously.

Rationing energy, water, land, and other resources is necessary to save the planet.

The irony here is that the “renewables” touted by the woke greens as the sustainable solution to environmental challenges are the biggest resource hogs of all. But all historical evidence demonstrates that as long as people have freedom to innovate, for every dwindling resource, something new replaces it. Humanity has never before stood at the threshold of as many new technological breakthroughs as we have right now. The only thing that stops us from achieving per capita abundance at higher levels than ever is authoritarian corruption, and among the biggest enablers of that are the woke greens.

These false premises only scratch the surface of how woke greens and their favored mantra, the “climate emergency,” are transforming global politics, especially in Western nations, and not for the better. Accompanying the danger the continued dominance of these false premises poses to our freedom and prosperity is great irony. For those who have concluded these premises are false, there is less willingness to recognize new so-called green technologies that nonetheless make economic sense and merit further development. And for those who are fixated on the false premise of a climate emergency, there is less ability to recognize and address genuine threats to the environment, of which there are many.

Climate alarmism has taken on a momentum detached from reality. For tens of thousands of bureaucrats and politicians in the U.S., accepting it is simply the path of least resistance. But just as all elements of radical woke ideology must be challenged and overcome, so too must the woke green movement.