Sri Lanka: The First Country to Destroy Itself by Going Green?

Rajapaksa’s final action as Sri Lanka president was to cling to power just long enough so that he could find a country that would accept him in exile

• Already one of the most highly indebted of emerging markets nations, Sri Lanka saw its tourist industry first devastated by a scorched-earth final military campaign against Tamil Tiger rebels that led to credible reports of widespread rape and abuse.
• Then, within a decade, the emergence of the COVID virus essentially finished off tourism on the island.

Green is the new red

• Going green is a pillar of the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement, which aims to include ESG goals in evaluating the investment-worthiness of companies and countries beyond mere profit and loss
• Within weeks of the president's diktat, rice production was down 20 percent and food prices shot up

When America sneezes

• It is a cautionary tale, and one in which a number of indebted emerging market nations will have to deal with various ripple effects from the island's collapse.
• The ESG movement effectively shames institutions into a kind of hollow virtue-signaling
• With the passage of time, I think it will be ultimately seen as a giant sham
  1. Using loans from China, Rajapaksa went on a vanity spree, building a seaport, convention center, and performing arts center — all named after himself — and, as the final jewel of his narcissistic crown, Rajapaksa International Airport, the kind of boondoggle for which the word “boondoggle” was invented in the first place.
  2. In the dead of night, a Sri Lankan military transport took him, his wife, and two bodyguards to the Maldives, whence he departed for Singapore — ending the Rajapaksa clan’s decades-long grip on power and offering some slim hope that a new government might steer a way through the sad morass that is the Sri Lankan economy.
  3. Already one of the most highly indebted of emerging markets nations, Sri Lanka saw its tourist industry first devastated by a scorched-earth final military campaign against Tamil Tiger rebels that led to credible reports of widespread rape and abuse.
  4. Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s final action as Sri Lanka president last week was to cling to power just long enough so that he could find a country that would accept him in exile.
  5. But as Sri Lanka is arguably the first country to topple itself due to an untoward and unrealistic attachment to its own kind of Green New Deal, it’s fair to wonder what will happen now that Sri Lanka has sneezed.
  6. For decades it was a shibboleth that “when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.” America’s global impact was such that nations around the globe felt a ripple effect from whatever bumps in the road the U.S. economy encountered.

   

https://spectator.org/sri-lanka-woke-green/