“But countries such as Germany, which shut down much of its nuclear and coal generating capacity to clamp its national lips around the gas pipe from Russia, is now, as former U.S. President Donald Trump and many others warned, paying for its energy vassalage to the Kremlin.”
There is now a clearly discernible international movement away from the fiscal indulgence of the faddish left and the collective self-blame of the majority across much of the democratic world.
Following the overwhelming and almost bloodless victory of democratic free enterprise over international Marxism in the Cold War, there was a commendable absence of gloating in the West, but rather a gradually more absurd and complacent experimentation with an idealized political fantasy land.
This has now finally proved to be a policy divertissement that our western democracies cannot afford. The hysteria about climate change, which was heavily reinforced by the spontaneous adherence to that cause of the debunked international left assaulting capitalism in disguise from a new angle in the name of defending the planet, has clearly overtaxed the electorates of western countries.
Everybody is opposed to environmental pollution, but sane people are not prepared to endure severe reductions in their standards of living in order to finance a marginal reduction in carbon emissions, in pursuit of an environmental target whose utility remains a matter of considerable speculation, even if it were attainable.
For the rest of this column: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/conrad-black-the-changing-democratic-tide/ar-AA12teQo?li=AAggFp4