Environmentalists Jump the Shark

Some environmentalists are blaming the recent tomato salmonella scare on global climate change.

If this keeps up, global warming will also undoubtedly be blamed for male pattern baldness, gingivitis, navel lint, erectile dysfunction, your uncle’s hemorrhoids, and boring public radio.

Has environmentalism finally “jumped the shark?” Or at least the Al Gore version of Greenism?

This week, the enviros found themselves the butt of jokes and potentially on the wrong side of a red-hot political issue: drilling.

All of this comes as a rude surprise to a movement that has been used to be treated with deference, with its every proclamation and nostrum regarded with solemn respect and acquiescence? We need new low-flush toilets to save the planet? Of course. Replace our light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs? Certainly. Blame climate change for the plight of polar bears? They had the pictures!

Then came this week:  

• A Tennessee think tank reported that Al Gore's home energy use surged more than 10%and that the apostle of conservation “burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.” Quite a carbon footprint for a man who won the Nobel Prize for nagging us about out carbon footprint.
• The reaction to the rotten tomato story suggests that climate change alarmism is quickly changing from great-moral challenge-of-our-time to punch line. When a blog for “Discover” magazine reported the link between the bad tomatoes and global warming, the site was inundated with hundreds of derisive comments along the line of: “Are [you] F***ing kidding me!?! This is pure tripe. If you tree huggers had any sense of reality you would have learned NOT to blame every issue on global warming.”
• Environmentalists who have pursued policies designed to drive up energy prices found themselves in the awkward position of having to defend policies that – inconveniently enough – drove up energy prices.
• The Los Angles Times reported that environmentalists began to feel the political earth shifting beneath their feet. “The environmental movement, only recently poised for major advances on global warming and other issues,” reported The Times, “has suddenly found itself on the defensive as high gasoline prices shift the political climate nationwide and trigger defections by longtime supporters.”
• New polls came out showing strong public support for offshore drilling to deal with record high gas prices.

Up until recently, environmentalists were able to essentially play political tennis without a net: they were able to assume positions of moral superiority and confer cultural virtue, without ever having to explain how much all of this would cost or who would pay the bill.

Four dollar a gallon gasoline changed all that. When John McCain and President Bush came out in favor of lifting the moratoriums on drilling for the nation’s untapped billions of barrels of oil this week, congressional Democrats pulled out their usual talking points… only to find that they were channeling Jimmy Carter.

“We can’t drill our way of this problem,” they explained, as if we could instead tax, litigation, regulate, or demagogue our way out of spiraling energy costs.

Wisconsin Congressman Steve Kagen floated a variety of conspiracy theories involving grasping, evil oil companies, denouncing what he called the policy of “drill and burn.” But, like other Democratic politicians, he had little to offer in the way of relief for the drivers, truckers, and middle class voters in his district who have no alternative.

There’s a reason for that: liberals have long supported higher gas and energy prices; their policies of enforced scarcity made the price spike inevitable. Now the bill has come due and people are noticing.

Last weekend, Kagen was campaigning in Seymour with Collin Peterson’s (D-MN), who explained that higher gas prices were “needed.”

Lectured Peterson: “we needed these higher prices to force us to change our ways.”  

Kagen’s opponent in the fall election, former Speaker John Gard, immediately leaped on the comment, calling on Kagen to repudiate the endorsement of $4 a gallon gas. Fat chance. Liberals have cast their lot with the greens.

But they are now discovering that the pieties of the environmentalist elite – unchallenged in the salons of Cambridge or Madison – will be a bit harder to sell in the truck stops of northeast Wisconsin.

-June 20, 2008