Green is the new red
Lorne Gunter, National Post
The decade just past marked the transition from red into green. It was the decade in which environmentalism replaced socialism as the authoritarians' and the busybodies' ideology of choice.
Why are so few environmentalists truly unhappy about the failure at Copenhagen? In the run-up to this month's Earth summit in the Danish capital, many "greens" were warning that if the world's leaders failed to reach a comprehensive pact to control climate change our planet was doomed within the century. In the summer, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon insisted "we have four months to save the planet."
But nothing that will save the planet came out of the UN eco-fest.
Yes, world leaders kinda, sorta agreed to limit global average temperature rise to two degrees Celsius over the next 100 years (as if they had some magical powers to achieve that end). But that is a political goal, not a scientific one. No formula has been worked out detailing what concentration of carbon dioxide in the air will keep temps from rising by more than two degrees. And even if there were such a calculation, it wouldn't matter: Leaders at the summit made no firm commitments to keep their countries' CO2 emissions to amounts within scientifically verifiable limits.
Given the absence of such commitments, you would think environmental ists like Al Gore would be in full hand-wringing, caterwauling dudgeon since the collapse at Copenhagen. Just weeks ago they were claiming we would die out as a species if no deep, binding emission cuts were agreed. None were. Yet, while not fully happy, eco-activists have not been screaming at world leaders over their unwillingness to accept meaningful emissions caps. Instead, the greenies have been doing their best to put a sunny face on the results.
Why? Mostly because saving the planet is not what environmentalism is all about. Saving the planet is just the excuse. Controlling other people's lives and redistributing global wealth is the true goal.
I'm not saying there is a conscious conspiracy by old socialists meeting in secret to rebrand themselves as new environmentalists so they can revive their Cold War-era campaign for international governance and regulation.
Rather, it's a mindset. The instinct to tell other people what to do is as old as human society. The instant two homo sapiens first came together, one of them probably decided that the other was doing things in a way he or she disliked and that what was needed to deter this miscreant behaviour was a new rule based on an appeal to the "common good."
So the mindset that today wants to tell others how much carbon energy they can consume -- what kind of vehicle is "responsible," how big their homes should be, how many hours a day they should run their furnaces or air conditioners or televisions, what kind of light bulbs they should use and so on -- is as old as mankind itself.
Sometimes it has manifested itself as a demand by high priests for devotion to pagan deities. Sometimes it has been the demand for blind loyalty to a monarch. Other times it has been the insistence that the church is infallible and must be listened to on all matters lest our immortal souls be damned for eternity. More recently, it has raised its preachy, sanctimonious head as communism, socialism, political correctness and environmentalism.
There is no question the political right has its incidents of interfering, controlling behaviours: the insistence, for instance, that the state pass laws upholding socially conservative morals.
However, it's no coincidence that much of the impetus for worldwide control of emissions comes from the left. Nor is it a coincidence that most environmentalists are also supporters of universal health care, social justice, high taxes, the heavy regulation of commerce and the transfer -- by compulsion, if necessary -- of hundreds of billions of dollars from rich countries to poor.
That's just their mindset: To be happy, they have to be telling others what to do based on a self-assured belief in their own moral and intellectual superiority.
That's why so many greens are at least half happy about Copenhagen. The Earth summit kept alive their demand for wealth transfers of historic proportions. And it saved their desire for a greater role for international bureaucrats in the business of sovereign nations.
When socialism collapsed as an intellectual movement in the 1990s, the intrusive, holier-than-thou, we-know-best attitude behind it did not disappear, it merely refashioned itself in the last decade as environmentalism.
lgunter@shaw.ca
