Germany’s Once Powerful Green Party Faces Existential Crisis

For Germany’s long-successful Green Party the political situation is slowly becoming precarious. Meanwhile, their support in the polls is approaching the parliamentary five percent hurdle.

On Sunday, the opinion research institute Emnid presented its latest survey. According to the pollsters, the Greens are now on only six percent ‚Äì the worst support the Institute has measured for the party in 15 years.

It is not so long ago that the Greens debated whether they were already a big tent party. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011 the polls saw them on 25 percent while the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg elected a green as prime minister.  No one expected at the time that the party would fear not to get into the next German parliament by failing to jump the five percent hurdle. —S√ºddeutsche Zeitung, 24 April 2017

More than 330,000 German households had their electricity turned off last year. Germany’s green energy obsession is hurting the poor and vulnerable hardest. The DPA German press agency reported yesterday on the rapidly spreading energy poverty now engulfing the country. The main driver is Germany’s skyrocketing electricity prices ‚Äì primarily due to the legally mandatory feeding-in of wind and solar power. Currently regular household consumers are paying nearly 30 cents a kilowatt-hour ‚Äì almost three times the rate paid in the USA. Many households are no longer able to afford electricity and are seeing themselves catapulted back to the 19th century. —No Tricks Zone, 3 March 2017

While claiming to care deeply about the poorest among us, environmentalists ignore the harm their policies inflict: soaring electricity prices, fewer jobs, lower living standards in the West ‚Äì and perpetual poverty, disease, malnutrition and premature death in developing countries. We pay more and more each year for de minimis further improvements in environmental quality, combined with ever-expanding government and activist control of our lives, and steadfast opposition to reliable, affordable energy in the Third World. For the wealthy and increasingly powerful radical environmentalist movement, it is no longer about addressing real pollution problems, protecting the environment or improving human health. As UN climate officials have proudly proclaimed, it’s really about ending fossil fuel use and capitalism, redistributing the world’s wealth, and controlling people’s livelihoods, living standards and liberties. –Paul Driessen, GWPF Opinion, 24 April 2017

A new report ranking countries with “the most environmentally friendly people” shows the greenest nations are also some of the poorest in the world. A MoneySuperMarket report listed Mozambique, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as having “the most environmentally friendly people in the world,” while ranking Americans as being some of the least eco-friendly people on the planet. That may not be a bad thing, though, given the greenest countries also tend to be poor and run by authoritarian regimes. –Andrew Follett, Daily Caller, 22 April 2017

Now that coal has been toppled from its perch as America’s biggest source of power, environmentalists are ready to move on down the fossil fuel list and tackle what they perceive as another enemy of the planet: natural gas. U.S. environmentalists have vowed to go after gas-fired power plants with the same vengeance they’ve used to force the retirements of hundreds of coal facilities. Even coal miners are warning their fossil fuel kin to beware. Gas producers “will be next on the list of the industries to be destroyed,” says Robert Murray, chief executive officer of U.S. coal miner Murray Energy Corp. This is a farce, if for no other reason than because natural gas — not environmentalist lobbying or renewables — is responsible for dethroning Old King Coal. If there’s any silver lining to this sorry example of the folly of the modern environmental movement, it’s that greens have been proven to be as ineffective as they are misguided. —The American Interest, 23 April 2017

Student thuggery against non-leftist viewpoints is in the news again. Agitators at Claremont McKenna College, Middlebury College, and the University of California’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses have used threats, brute force and sometimes criminal violence over the past two months in efforts to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and me from speaking. This soft totalitarianism is routinely misdiagnosed as primarily a psychological disorder. Campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon but an ideological one. At its center is a worldview that sees Western culture as endemically racist and sexist. The overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people within the ever-growing list of official victim classifications to view themselves as existentially oppressed. One outcome of that teaching is the forceful silencing of contrarian speech. –Heather Mac Donald, The Wall Street Journal, 23 April 2017