Prince Charles recently visited a Mumbai shantytown and praised its "sustainability" in which residents recycle their waste and build their own homes out of whatever materials come to hand. There is of course a word for this form of "sustainability", it's called grinding poverty.
In 1984, Orwell depicted the rise of the ultimate totalitarian state as being organized by socialists determined to end class warfare by permanently removing all social mobility. The society of Oceania is characterized by a ruthless hostility toward the remnants of the Middle Class or the Outer Party, who exist only to be cogs in the bureaucratic machinery of terror, constantly spied on and at risk of torture and death. The vast majority of the population are Proles, lower class workers who are denied education or any chance at advancement. They exist to serve as worker or soldiers. That is the vision that the repressive left has had for too long. A small elite ruling over a vast impoverished working class. Orwell saw the danger of that vision being translated into an actual system, creating another tyranny with a vast gap between the upper and lower classes.
Environmentalists already helped outsource countless jobs to China, where environmental standards are far worse. Witness the air quality in Beijing. And China has no intention of signing on to any initiatives that will handicap its industry in any way. If environmentalists genuinely cared about the environment, they would be working to reverse the flow of manufacturing jobs back to the United States by compromising on realistic standards and regulations that would protect against pollution that endangers humans and permanently destroys natural environments, without enabling businesses to still be competitive. Instead environmentalists have doubled down on a fraudulent global warming threat, and are treating "carbon" as a pollutant. It's hard to envision this as anything more than a bullet in the head for the last remains of what was once a great manufacturing sector.
