Green Was the Flavour of the Month

For about the last thirty years, the environment has shifted into and out of the public sphere of concern. The 2008 Canadian federal election has brought it to the forefront in a big way for the first time in Canadian history. The Liberals and Greens are pushing harsh environmental reforms to stop "global warming". With all the fear mongering, guess who's leading the polls? Neither. In fact, the environment is what's sounding the death of the Liberal Party of Canada. At this point, they are at serious risk of collapsing into an insignificant fringe, just as Joe Clark's Tories did in the 1990s. For years we've been told to go green or else risk destroying the planet, and people believed it, so we thought. At first, 2008 seemed like it would be a banner year for the environmental movement, that is until a sting of unfortunate events happened.

First we saw an unusually cold and snowy winter, which brought record snowfalls to the Ontario, Quebec, and the US North-East. That was followed by a wettest summer in years with average temperatures after pro-global warming people predicted it would be the hottest and driest on record. In fact, this is the third year in a row where IPCC estimates where way off base. You can't just call that a casual, short term trend following their own logic. It proves definitively that the current models are wrong. Scientists who would try to dismiss that have their heads in the sand. These being the vary same people that call a typical week long summer heat wave definitive proof of anthropogenic global warming. However, to argue whether global warming exists or not is irrelevant at this point.

People like to join bandwagon causes, that is until something bigger comes along. Canadians and Americans are an easy enough people to read. They will join an cause only provided that they are not somehow inconvenienced by it. Until recently, the global warming movement sat just fine with people since they could feel good about themselves buying a Prius, organic local foods, and using "green" cleaners. This really didn't cost them anything or inconvenience them in anyway. Then things changed. In the United States, the sub-prime lending crisis reached critical mass as Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac went into receivership. They were followed by Washington Mutual and AIG. People are rather easy to frighten and the speech by George W Bush didn't help things much. People soon began imagining the return of bread lines and tent cities akin to the Great Depression of the 1930s. For years, we've been told that green policies will not hurt the economy. That may be true, if times are good. If times are bad, green is the economy's worst enemy. We already have Stephane Dion and Elizabeth May proposing carbon taxes that will hurt industry. We all know that when industry has to pay more tax, it does one of two things to cover it: it gets passed onto consumers, or employees get laid off. As costs rise, the standard of living drops. The carbon tax will have a negative effect on the economy. How much so is a moot point. The thing is that now people feel it to be a threat. They are now inconvenienced by the green movement to the point of having their jobs threatened. People don't give a rat's behind about helping the planet if they are poor and don't have a job. The threat of that has been enough to derail Dion's Green Shift. Human beings are naturally more interested in preserving themselves, to hell with everything else. The green movement is as I predicted, the flavour of the month. That month is now over as we entre a bitter economic winter. Green is dead and it's taking the Liberals down with it.