Greening with the Patricians

Since the release of "An Inconvenient Truth," we have seen environmental action (or, perhaps rather, environmental attention) move from the fringe to the mainstream, almost overnight. It is not the scope of this quick note to speculate upon the validity of Mr. Gore's evidences, and I will point out that wastefulness in any capacity is a bad thing, be it gasoline, food, scrap iron, &c.

Conservation is good.

However, as with any such rapid development in philosophy, a kind of "rage," or "craze" has been born; along with that craze comes a growing belief that one cannot feel good unless they are contributing to the solution. For some people this means attempting to levy feelings of guilt over those who are seen as contributing to the problem, and since we have seen an exponential growth of environmental sentiment, it is a mathematical certainty that there will be a correlating rise in the number of guilt "mongers."

Guilt is bad.

Environmental agendas have been vanguards for the Left for some time now, and this convenient rage (pun intended) fuels their ambitions (again, pun intended) at a critical juncture in time. Along with this, however, is the promulgation of a common stereotype that the Right is out to fulfill their ambitions upon the brow of labor, over the toil of the lower income brackets: that the so-called "common folk" are indentured to the capitalists.

Right is Czarism.
Left is salvation.

Therein lies the problem. At this critical juncture what boils down is that those who can feel good about helping the environment are largely those who can afford to feel good. It is the brow of labor which sweats in these times, and requiring lower income families to purchase more expensive equipment and/or fuel in order to further one agenda merely serves to punish those families. Nominal savings in energy usage concurrent with rising energy prices becomes a wash, and we are left with "feel good" environmentalism wrought upon the toil of the lower income brackets. Chances are that an American scraping by on $22K per year is not going to care a whole lot about how any moose one light bulb is saving, let alone someone living in abject poverty in Calcutta. For many the thought of owning a Prius is a nice idea, but when you can only budget $2K for a used car the economy (and often even the condition) are right out.

Include in this the number of people who believe that rising fuel costs are a good thing...Erik Kirschbaum, for example. These are nice things to say, when one can afford to say them (or, rather, actually live by them) all the while blatantly flying in the face of the problems that these people profess an attempt to alleviate.

Left is Czarism.
Left is popular complacency.

Environmentalism is the fight of the patrician Left, at least as it is currently waged, and to ignore that fact is to ignore a very important feature of this election year. They purvey of themselves to be the caretaker of the downtrodden, yet it is one of their proudest vanguards which is currently leading to many of the economic woes of those who are least capable of paying for it.

Until people are able to deal with the "greening" in a rational manner rather than as a mania, it will continue to be a major, unspoken factor of economic difficulty.