Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin write from Brownsville, Minnesota.

When it comes to social and cultural movements that are not immediately and obviously political, conservatives are so dense that they are willing victims of movements inimical to them, and nothing exemplifies the truth of that statement more than Greenism, a menace to us and to our country blandly ignored by the conservative press. So it was with some surprise and hope that we noted an article in the 10/14 issue of National Review, "Divestment Du Jour," by Stanley Kurtz, with the subtitle "Obama endorses a crusade against fossil fuels."

It is a fair exposition of the Green campaign for a return to pastoral "simplicity" via economic sabotage, namely the movement to persuade institutions like colleges to divest themselves of stock in fossil fuel companies, thinking that such a movement, if widespread - and they are busily working to that end - would make the companies moral pariahs, which would lead the government to impose a steep carbon tax bankrolling a shift to renewable energy sources and the eventual destruction of the fossil fuel industry.

Quoting a speech by President Obama at Georgetown,

Convince those in power to reduce our carbon pollution. Push your own communities to adopt smarter practices. Invest. Divest . . .

According to Mr. Kurtz, the word "divest" immediately aroused activists in the divestment movement that has been pushed on campuses across the country in the last year. Mr. Kurtz then devotes several paragraphs to the views of Bill McKibben that envisions, as our colleague Jigs Gardner explained in his article on Greenism in the December 2012 issue, the replacement of modern industrial society by the so-called simple life of pastoralism in a re-wilded America. "A post-growth society is McKibben's goal, and he's willing to risk some social and economic disruption to get there." Remember that quote, we'll come back to it.

McKibben has an ally in Naomi Klein, an anti-capitalist promoter of Occupy Wall Street who wants to nationalize oil companies to make "them pay for the transition to a post-fossil fuel economy." The article goes on to discuss the success of the divestment movement on campuses where dissenting opinions hardly exist or are easily suppressed. Mr. Kurtz cites instances at Vassar and Swathmore where contrary voices were so crudely countered that they inspired a contrary movement at Vassar to circulate a statement by the Center for Industrial Progress calling for open debate.

Mr. Kurtz quotes The New York Times to the effect that President Obama "needs a mass political movement pushing for stronger action against the fossil fuel industry," which would explain his Georgetown speech, and he thinks Republicans should attack President Obama's covert support of the divestment movement:

Would the public be on board with a government-imposed shutdown of America's conventional-energy industry, leaving 80 percent of America's fuel reserves in the ground, well before wind or solar becomes an economically viable substitute?

Mr. Kurtz's political advice to advocate resistance to the divestment movement is sound, but it's clear that he does not understand the ideology of Greenism, how far it has gone in corrupting our thinking, how utterly perverse really is its vision of how society interacts with the environment, and how destructive its goals, which can only be achieved in a totalitarian manner. We called attention earlier to that quote about McKibben's goal: "willing to risk some social and economic disruption to get there." "Some"? To dismantle industrial society and return to a supposedly simple pastoral life in clearings in a "re-wilded" America - the stated goal of many Green leaders, not just McKibben - risks "some disruption"? And the last quote - "well before wind or solar becomes an economically viable substitute" shows that Mr. Kurtz knows nothing about wind or solar, which can never be viable in any economic or practical sense. Otherwise, Greens would not advocate them.Greens are against energy because they know it is the key to development, which they adamantly oppose. *