Family Security Matters » Publications » Exclusive: Great Leaps Forward – Walking in Mao’s Sandals

Family Security Matters » Publications » Exclusive: Great Leaps Forward – Walking in Mao’s Sandals: "Historically, recasting scientific problems in political terms invariably compromises science. Now the science of climate change
is at risk. There are eerie similarities between Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward intended, in 1957, to industrialize China in the virtual blink of an eye, and the Obama administration’s 2009 attempt to transition immediately from fossil/nuclear to renewable energy generation by introducing mandated increases in energy costs through Cap-and-Trade (aka “cap-and-tax”).

Both have crucial technological requirements, fundamental social engineering, the unshakable belief that decisions taken by governments are bound to improve man’s condition, and no accountability for consequences, predicted or unintended. Today’s windmills and photovoltaic cells, harvesting woefully diffuse wind and solar energy – part of the time and at very high cost – aren’t so different qualitatively from Mao’s backyard blast furnaces that produced brittle, useless steel.

Mao collectivized his population, moving peasants from borderline subsistence farming to disastrously unproductive people’s communes. The Obama administration would artificially increase the price of energy, and consequently everything else, worsening the economic hardship too many Americans already suffer, with nests of urban unemployment already approaching 20 percent.

Early in the Great Leap, Soviet assistance was provided, and farming methods modeled on the genetics ideas of T.D. Lysenko – dense planting – were dictated and touted as an enormous success. The outcome of the bogus genetics and utopian zeal was widespread famine with the loss of at least 30 million lives. No one knows that number for sure, but Lysenko’s environmental genetics long has been discredited."