zero sum is not a sustainable environmental policy

It wasn't enough to reignite the affirmative action debate. Now Obama wants to start wearing Jimmy Carter's sweater.

Of course Carter did some really good stuff and should get full credit for the work he did to promote solar energy and better windows and so forth. He tried to address an important problem and he had some great ideas about how to fix specific things. But politically he was a nightmare - living proof that handling a situation badly can be worse than not handling it at all. Thanks to that sweater of his, anyone who openly supported alternative energy was heavily stigmatized in the 1980s. The backlash was like a tsunamis.

What Carter failed to appreciate is why so-called tree huggers had come to be so thoroughly hated by the time the 1970s were over. It isn't because people enjoy seeing the environment trashed. It is because the Democratic party has consistently structured the environmental movement as a zero sum game. The hatred springs entirely from approaches that fall most heavily (or entirely) on the working class.

To borrow a phrase, it isn't sustainable.

The conservatives are already having a field day. Notice how this quote zeros in on the zero sum:

And when Obama says, "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," he almost seems to suggest a finite worldview, in which someone's bounty by needs must come at someone else's expense. So our bountiful food means others go without?

I once encountered a situation where people fought the establishment of a nature preserve. The appropriate liberal response is supposed to involve labeling these people - "low information", tree haters, etc. - and then move on, cluck-clucking about how the world would be so much nicer if only people would do what liberals tell them to. I was curious, though. Why would anyone not want a nature preserve? Answer: because their schools are funded by property taxes and their schools are already experiencing economic distress. These people genuinely do believe liberals love trees more than children*.

When the latte crowd wants something, the traditional approach is the lazy one: just say gimme. If that doesn't work, they make their signs bigger. When that doesn't work, they chain themselves to something. (I SAID GIMME.) They do not build alliances. They focus on building their own power - which is to be used to force other people to GIMME GIMME GIMME. When they encounter objections, their response is to simply demonize anything that opposes their desires. Rather like little children. Just like the supporters of Obama's campaign ('if the working class won't vote for the candidate we want, they must be _______').

There are always the same three questions the latte types don't want to face (and never do):

• Does it work? (How is the actual benefit measured?)
  
  
• Unintended consequences? (Is anyone keeping track? Anyone even paying attention?)
  
  
• Who is really paying the cost?
  

This is not the way to "save" the environment.

• Because you can't win that way.
  
  
• Because you do harm that way.
  
  
• Because it creates backlash and that works against the environmental movement.

To cite just one example, instead of waging war on the people who cut down lumber, environmentalists could put that energy into making bamboo a viable alternative for lumber and grass into a viable alternative for paper. But they don't do that because that would be real work. It's easier to just wage war on those evil, naughty lumberjacks. Bad lumberjack!

(And just in case the economic attacks weren't enough, we'll bring The Lorax and his friends right on into the classroom, for the express purpose of shaming the lumberjack's children**.)

If the environmentalists win, the working class tends to lose. That is why the working class backlash is so intense that they will deliberately destroy things that environmentalists worked so hard to save. They have nothing but fury for a movement that cares nothing for poverty or whether schools for poor kids are funded, but who will work this hard for a tree.

Obama does it again when he suggests that high prices are a necessary part of forcing people to cut back on gasoline usage. By the time such an approach even reaches the SUV drivers who waste fuel, the poor will be completely unable to access transportation. So what about them? Oh wait: nobody is going to care about them until their distress suddenly becomes a crisis of the sort that affects those Americans who do matter. (That's official Democratic party policy - right? When Bill Clinton changed all that, the liberals called it "moving to the center".)

The environment does not have to be a zero sum game. The Democratic party has made it that way. Some groups - the ones that are actually dedicated to saving the environment (as opposed to being dedicated to making liberals feel good about themselves at someone elses' expense) are actively seeking ways to make alliances instead of setting up either-or scenarios.

But that isn't how the liberal elite like to look at things. Too lazy to actually think about what it would take to save the world, they like how Democrats reduce things to simple slogans. Put your cans in the bin and the world will be just fine, thanks.

Voluntary sacrifices are ok (when we say so) but real costs get passed on to those who don't have the political power to fight back.

There have even been environmentalists who suggest, straight faced, that the planet is overpopulated so someone has got to go. Of course they do not mean themselves.
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* Of course, they realize liberals love their own children. It's working class children who are disposable - because the working class itself is disposable. At least, that's what working class people think rich liberals believe. There certainly isn't much to contradict that view, anyway.

** Worth asking if this tactic would still be acceptable if it were a cute cartoon creature that "speaks for the unborn babies", instead of one that "speaks for the trees".

p.s. my favorite approach to make grass into a viable alternative for paper? find some way to grow paper-useful high-volume weed grass on landfills or toxic waste sites - places that are no good for anything else and need to be rehabilitated.

My preferred approach to overpopulation? We seriously, seriously need to get out into space. No, I am not kidding. It is the only thing that can relieve overpopulation - frontiers have always been good for economic growth. It is safe to assume that ecological entities follow the same rule that businesses, economies, and biological organisms do: if they are not growing, they are declining.

Oh - and like I said here, the key to the problem of gas overconsumption is not to dump hate on them for what they're doing that you don't like. Actually solving the problem means actually addressing the issue of what exactly they are supposed to be doing instead of driving. What is the alternative?