I have just started J Randers "2052": a futurist forecast of the next forty (now thirty-nine years) from one of the academics associated with the Club of Rome. After an odd paean to nature and old-growth forests out of place in an academic work, we come to an analysis based solidly on the work of the IPCC and climate change. The future is hellish and hot, sometime after 2075.
Yet, the book jarred when I read of China's "benevolent authoritarianism". This was a powerful entry into the world of green policymaking. Randers criticises liberal democracy for its slow processes in making decisions and its need to use debate and compromise to achieve results. China is more attractive beacuse they can decide without such decadent obstacles to get things done. State capitalism in pursuit of green credentials is a preferred option.
Such preferences feed into the value sof the greens: the collective needs must override individual rights and this can be achieved more rapidly if all liberties are curtailed. (The calls for critics of climate change to suffer the same laws as holocaust denial sums this attitude up very nicely). Their arrogant belief in being right justifies the destruction of parliamentary democracy and its supplanting by a Platonic dictatorship (whether by party or by bureaucracy) to see that greening is achieved.
What a shame that the outcome of such management would be the misallocation of resources and rampant corruption (sounds like a large communist country to me). If we do face a crisis of such proportions, the political preferences of the Greens would condemn us to the prolongation and exacerbation of the crisis.