how did green become the new black?
Unless my calendar, eyes and ears are lying to me, yesterday was Earth day. The sci-fi environmental epic we know as Avatar was released on DVD and cable channels were busily pitching hybrids and “green” products, trying their best to capitalize on today’s eco-fervor stoked by fears of global warming’s potential effects and a number of commercial campaigns selling supposedly eco-friendly products at a markup. Oh sure, you’ll pay a little extra, but it’s worth it if you actually care about the planet’s future, right? Actually, no. It’s not. Now don’t get me wrong. When you have the chance to get some real benefit from installing solar panels or using a product that doesn’t contain chemicals scientifically proven to be harmful to your health in standard concentrations, by all means, go for it. Just don’t let marketers trick you into buying greenwashed products at drastic markups or hijack perfectly valid ideas, turning energy efficiency and safety into a premium product with a big surcharge.
Take hybrids, which are often billed as a solution to our environmental woes, come packaged with an aura of green fuzzies and sold with commercials about a driver’s harmony with nature. But they’re really an upgrade to the efficiency of a standard gasoline engine. Likewise, solar panels only harness cheap and readily available energy of our home star in our quest to keep up with growing demand, rather than forever change how we can coexist with nature. Same goes for wind, tide and geothermal power. What’s important here isn’t the feeling of reuniting with the Earth or forking over some extra cash to feel like you’ve really helped the planet. No, the real point of clean and cleaner technologies is energy efficiency. We should be aiming to make hybrids and clean energy the standard, relying on the economies of scale to keep prices down and giving consumers more. To elevate some technological advances into luxury products aimed at a stereotypical group of clients is nothing less than a huge disservice to the promise of green tech. All it does is marginalize what we need to save a lot of money, energy and effort in cleaning up our messes down the road, and rolls it up into a political stereotype along with a bigger price tag because of a few key words in the product’s name.
We’re not going to get any closer to nature than we do today. We live in a natural world and spend our lifetimes here. That’s about as close as one can get to septillions of tons of molten rock and billions of tons of flora and fauna. We should be taking care of it not out of some grand spiritual duty to Gaia, or because it’s chic PC. We should be taking care of it because it’s our home and dammit, it’s a lot nicer to live in a clean, neat house than a dingy apartment with dirty laundry and bursting trash bags strewn across the floors. Of course some things emphasized by today’s eco-crusaders will never change. We’re not going to have 100% local, organic farming across the world. Due to the explosion in our population, we need to have huge, centralized, global farms that produce food quickly, cheaply and efficiently. Without these farms, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. We could make them more sustainable and look for ways of increasing the overall quality of our food if we take regulation seriously, but not every farm could be free-range and antibiotic-free. Likewise, we’ll need to invest in nuclear fusion and nuclear power because we need them to obtain realistic energy independence. Huge shifts in infrastructure won’t happen overnight. The same goes for greenwashing efforts like the carbon taxes so vilified by conspiracy theorists from the right. They simply give companies the ability to buy a fee to carry on without feeling the market pressure to invest in energy saving and pollution reducing technologies.
If you consider yourself an environmentalist, you should be rebelling at the notion of having “green” turned into a marketing buzzword and thrown around like a political designation. Being “green” should be a goal for every person and every company not because there are warm fuzzies and a feel-good premium attached to asking whether the paint in your new house is chemical X free, but because we have the selfish urge to save money with energy efficient appliances, tax credits, smaller, lighter, fuel sipping cars, and water saving bathrooms. In the quest for a cleaner industrial world, greed could be very useful and motivate people far more than pictures of lush, green meadows and smiling faces of sandal wearing college kids telling them that throwing a battery into the landfill makes the planet really, really sad and might contribute to global warming.
I wouldn’t normally post just to high-five, but this is a classic. I have absolutely nothing to add.
A realistic energy independence should include investments in aneutronic nuclear fusion, because it is neutron-free and waste-free, inadequate for production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Greg, I found the premises reasonable except: “…that throwing a battery into the landfill makes the planet really, really sad and might contribute to global warming.”
In normal times, pretending the planet is alive and sentient in the manner of the crackpot Lovelock is harmless. In these times when there is a concerted bid by a cartel of elitist groups that have left of sane ideologies, who are using environmentalism and Earth worship to insidiously progress their Leninist fantasy NWO program (Strong and his hippy missus being prime examples), where children are being enlisted to support the cause through wrong science education (Gore’s sci-fi CD*), advertising with groups actually going round schools lecturing on the invented evils of beneficial CO2 and how we are “hurting” the planet, I feel any comments in otherwise enlightened writings that are in anyway promoting the nonsensical surmises that the eco-socialists are capitalising upon to be implicit support of their destruction of democracy in their bid to gain total control of every aspect of education, business, social and private life and world finance.
*Educators that are obliged or voluntarily show fat Al’s propaganda CD to kids may get a copy of the presentation “Not Evil Just Wrong” (or “Day After Tomorrow”) that can be shown alongside “AIT” to give a balance in the flow of information they are absorbing. I believe the CD is free for educators.
It makes me ill that these immoral Leninist Nazis are promoting the brainwashing of our kids with lies, exaggerations and fantasies to further their profiteering and political ideologies and that governments, politicians and civil servants are aiding and abetting their crimes to further their own self-interests.
If you want to support the documentary makers, you can buy the CD via this site:
http://www.noteviljustwrong.com/store
There is a special page for teachers:
http://www.noteviljustwrong.com/educational-resources
As I said above, I believe the CD is free for educators.
If you wish to learn how this band of ne’er-do-wells were spawned, reading the following would go a long way in fulfilling that wish.
Waldheim’s Monster: United Nations’ Ecofascist Programme
http://www.ecofascism.com/article18.html
A review: Bramwell’s trilogy on The Hidden History of Environmentalism
http://www.ecofascism.com/review11.html
and there are a number of titles and reviews that may also interest linked in the side bar in the above pages.
Bramwell’s trilogy on The Hidden History of Environmentalism
If you need honest information on any aspect of the CO2 fraud and how it is being used to progress NWO ambitions, feel free to contact me @yahoo.com with clothcap4 before the @.
Clothcap, you know, I really can’t remember the last time when hyperbole flooded by invocations of unrelated -isms made for a compelling argument. Actually, if you were to follow the links, you would find a concise explanation as to why the idea of using a warming trend in our climate to establish a New World Order is absurd.
There really is a fair bit of alarmism which is way out of proportion and doesn’t help with the problem in any way shape of form, but there’s also a great deal of solid and sound science which says that the planet is warming up and we have to make a few accommodations over the years to deal with it, including investment in green tech. If you’re going to throw out random “-isms” and conspiracy theories, you’re just as bad as the very alarmists you’re decrying. Two wrongs don’t make a right.