Save The Uyghurs

For John, BLUF:  While some are calling for saving the environment, others are trying to save ethnic minorities, caught up in larger social movements.  Some ethnic minorities are not making the progressive cut.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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'Climate Change' vs. the Uyghurs

From The Pipeline, by Mr Tom Finnerty, 08 July 2021.

Here is the lede plus one:

Pretty shocking -- Politico reports on growing tensions within the Democratic coalition, with the environmental activist faction of the party objecting to even the mildest attempts by the Biden administration to confront China over its human rights violations and international aggression.

As a new Cold War takes shape between the U.S. and China, progressives fear the result will be a dramatically warming planet.  Over 40 progressive groups sent a letter to President Joe Biden and lawmakers on Wednesday urging them to prioritize cooperation with China on climate change and curb its confrontational approach over issues like Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong and forced detention of Uyghur Muslims.

The problem for the Biden administration is that American public opinion has shifted significantly against China in recent years, such that according to a recent Pew survey, 89 percent of Americans "consider China a competitor or enemy, rather than a partner."  This move began with Donald Trump calling out China's predatory trade policy and intellectual property violations before he was even president and continued through then-President Trump and Chairman Xi's trade war.  It was cemented, however, by the CCP's handling of the Covid-19 outbreak last year, which, if the no-longer-a-conspiracy-theory lab leak hypothesis turns out to be true, would mean that China is responsible for the most significant man-made disaster in human history.

The pronunciation of the ethnic group, the Uyghurs, is WEE-goorz.

The Uyghurs are an Islamic ethnic group, which has resisted assimilation into the larger Han population.  They have been sent to re-education camps, their reproductive freedom restricted, their women violated and their organs harvested.  Bad as all this is, there is little we can do about it, ecept scold and impose economic sanctions.  The Author notes that the Progressive Environmentalists want us to do nothing, for the sake of their ideology.

But for the environmentalists, none of this really matters.  They've convinced themselves that climate is the preeminent political issue, and no other consideration comes close.  Many of them would even argue that American capitalism and climate change are inseparable -- even indistinguishable -- political problems, never mind the fact that, while the U.S. has led the world in total carbon emissions decline since 2000, China's new coal-fired energy capacity alone outstripped the rest of the world by 300 percent in 2020.

When you think it is the end of the world in just a few years then your survival instincts kick in and all else falls away, including moral clarity.  Avoiding the Apocolypse becomes the focus.  I can understand it, and yet still I believe these are misguided thoughts.  We are not facing an existential climate disaster.  Is action required to secure our future?  Yes.  However, it should be doable within the larger context of our society.  We can think and engineer our way out of climate change issues, and in doing so guard against the consequences of the iron law:  "Every solution contains the seeds of a new problem."

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff