The United States is not so poor that it actually needs to recycle. It recycles not under the impulse of economic imperatives, but of government mandates.

These passages are taken from an article by Daniel Greenfield:

Environmentalism, like every liberal notion, is sold to the masses as modern and progressive. It’s the exact opposite. …

Prince Charles, that avid idiot and environmentalist, visited a Mumbai slum a few years ago and said that it had some lessons to teach the West.

“When you enter what looks from the outside like an immense mound of plastic and rubbish, you immediately come upon an intricate network of streets with miniature shops, houses and workshops, each one made out of any material that comes to hand,” Prince Charles wrote in his book, Harmony.

The Prince of Wales is quite the author. In addition to Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, he has written Shelter: Human Habitats from Around the World, The Prince’s Speech: On the Future of Food and The Illustrated Guide to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them.

One might be forgiven for assuming that the royal brain twitching behind those watery eyes is preparing for some sort of apocalypse. And it is. The apocalypse is environmentalism. Or from the point of view of the environmentalists, who spare some time from their public appearances and their mansions to pen tomes on the future of food and how to choose chickens, the apocalypse is prosperity. 

People of that sort think that instead of getting the slum dwellers of Mumbai into apartments, we ought to be figuring out how to build shelters out of random garbage. Think of it as the recycling can solution as applied to your entire life.

That is the sort of lifestyle that environmentalists think of as sustainable. …

More recently another deep thinker, Peter Buffett, [multi-billionaire] Warren Buffett’s son, took to the editorial pages of the New York Times to denounce Third World philanthropy.

Just a note in the margin: We ourselves are not very keen on philanthropy (though we very much like private personal generosity), because it seldom if ever makes any real difference to those it is bestowed upon, its chief effect being to make the philanthropist feel good. But the point here is more important. It is that these people, Charles and Peter, are so fabulously wealthy they can afford to despise wealth. They pleasure themselves with silly ignorant musings on how it is morally superior, more beautiful, to be poor.

“Microlending and financial literacy — what is this really about?” Buffett asks [in his NYT op-ed]. “People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?”

To the slum dwellers, the beast isn’t capitalism, it’s that gnawing feeling in your stomach when you haven’t eaten for a day. But Peter Buffett, who lives a life almost as privileged as Prince Charles, bemoans the idea of getting people to the point where they aren’t worried about where their next meal is coming from because it just turns them into capitalists and consumers. …

Instead of helping the Third World live like us, the perverse children of the rich dream of making us live like the Third World. …

Recycling is big business because the government and its affiliated liberal elites decided it should be. It’s just one example of an artificial economy and it’s small stuff compared to the coming carbon crackdown in which every human activity will be monetized and taxed somewhere down the road according to its carbon footprint.

The ultimate dream of the sort of people who can’t sleep at night because they worry that children in India might be able to grow up making more than two dollars a day, is to take away our prosperity for our own good through the total regulation of every area of our lives under the pretext of an imminent environmental crisis.

The Global Warming hysteria is about absolute power [in the hands of a self-appointed elite] over every man, woman and child on earth.

Environmentalism is wealth redistribution on a global scale. The goal isn’t even to lift all boats, but to stop the tide of materialism from making too many people too comfortable.

The liberal billionaire who clamors about sustainability … dislikes the middle class …

As princes and aristocrats always have …

… with its mass produced cars and homes, cheap restaurants full of fatty foods, and television sets and daily deliveries of cardboard boxes full of stuff, and shopping malls. He thinks, in all sincerity, that they would be happier and more spiritually fulfilled as peasants.

Beneath all the empty chatter about social riches[!] and sustainability is that need to impose progressive misery.

Beneath the glossy surface of environmentalism is a vision of the American middle class learning to dig through bags of garbage, the detritus of their consumerism for which they must be punished, to become better people.