Greens Getting Warmed Up

Peter Cresswell at Not PC quotes Kathleen O'Brian at the Star-Ledger pondering: "Now that money is tight, will environmentalism turn out to have been just a passing trend—the political equivalent of the pet rock?"

Pretty unlikely, given Obama's picks for Sec. of DOE, EPA, etc. Right after he's done signing the $825 billion dollar boondoggle, look for Green issues to get much more press as Cap and Trade or Carbon Tax debates take center stage.

Progressives have gotten a whole new political lease on life with the election of the most 'environmentally friendly' administration in American history and they are just getting warmed up.

My evidence? Well, apart from the continuing talk in Congress about the need to "do something," there is this:

"People are becoming more in cognito in whatever their little luxuries are," she said. "So even if they buy organic or fair trade products, they're not going to flaunt it. They're going to be a little more subtle about it."

When a movement can exert the degree of moral leverage that instills this kind of guilt, you can be sure a culture is in the grip of a new medievalism.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider this:

"It's going to be the official policy of the land that we now do worry about greenhouse gases," [Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank] said. "This idea that, 'I'm an American — I can spew out greenhouse gas to my heart's content' will die off," he said. "There is a new sensibility about being sustaining, and not just in the environmental sense. The economy wasn't sustained, in that we couldn't go on forever the way we were."

Green totalitarianism continues unabated, just as the AGW hypothesis is crumbling in the face of new data and continual blowback from skeptics. Things are about to heat up.