Kotkin: Jerry Brown, High Priest of ‘Green Religion’

Liberal geographer Joel Kotkin has penned an extensive critique of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate policies, as Brown jets off to Paris with President Barack Obama for the UN’s climate summit.

While Brown touts California’s aggressive environmental policies and recent economic growth, Kotkin notes that the state’s middle class has been decimated and that its economy is “too de-industrialized to make a difference” on climate change. Brown’s policies are little more than religious dogma, Kotkin writes:

President Obama looks to California policies for his future climate policies. On this issue Brown is the rock star, and will be in Paris, cool again after all these years.

Brown’s green religion now has a most powerful ally, the leading Jesuit on the planet, Pope Francis. This alliance offers something of a religious redemption for Brown, a former seminarian who has rejected most traditional Catholic teachings on such things as gay marriage , abortion, population control, and, most recently, euthanasia….

What will be Brown’s main legacy? A more environmental pure but severely bifurcated California and, if he and his compatriots have their way, an accelerating decline of the Western world and arguably the stagnation of the entire world economy. But Brown and his crony capitalist and priestly friends will be happy. They may have messed up the world, but they will always have Paris.

Read Kotkin’s full article at the Daily Beast.