Posts By Steve Mac Donald

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is a reflection of failed ‘Green’ policy, the shadow of an idea that doesn’t work on so many levels that even prominent members of the Green movement have begun soul searching over their own contradictions about the ideas which encouraged it’s genesis (and its goals) in the first place.

Perhaps the best, and most recent example, comes to us from Walter Russell Mead in his review of George Monbiot’s recent admission that "…because of a whole series of intellectual mistakes, the global green movement’s policy prescriptions are hopelessly flawed."  A  "thoughtful and brutally clear expose of the intellectual bankruptcy of the green movement from one of the smartest people in it." 

Why is it always the really smart people who are so stupid?

Mead sums it up: "regardless of what is happening to Planet Earth, the green movement does not have coherent and workable solutions."

Greens like to have it both ways.  They warn darkly about “peak oil” and global resource shortages that will destroy our industrial economy in its tracks — but also warn that runaway economic growth will destroy the planet through the uncontrolled effects of mass industrial productions.  Both doomsday scenarios cannot be true; one cannot simultaneously die of both starvation and gluttony.

…

More, Monbiot also acknowledges the contradictory and inconsistent nature of the green solutions.  He acknowledges that there is no prospect for democratic politics to impose the draconian limits on consumption and economic activity that green dogma requires.  Every ‘solution’ the greens have come up with has a fatal flaw of some kind; none of it works, none of it makes any sense.

All of this is true, whether it comes from a prominent intellectual of the movement like Monboit, some dopey, indoctrinated public school kid, or say…a misguided New Hampshire State Senator who can’t read the writing on the wall and is afraid to educate his own constituents on the costs of failed policy.  Policy whose expense and waste do not go down if we continue to pursue them.

Read more