As the credit crunch bites, environmental policies are being ditched. But oddly we are doing better at saving the planet
Julie Burchill can't stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don't want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.
Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the "nutbag ecologists" are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans.
So the salad days are over; it's the end of the greens. Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence.
But the problem for the green lobby isn't that it has been overrun by "toffs": it's the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone.
Only a year ago, according to MORI, 15 per cent of those polled put the environment in their top three concerns. That figure has dropped by a third to 10 per cent this month. Now that people are fighting for their own survival rather than their grandchildren's, they put crime, the economy and rising prices at the top of their list.
According to Andrew Cooper, director of the research company, Populus: "There is a direct correlation between how people perceive the economy and the importance they place on the environment. When times are tough people resent paying more to salve their conscience." This means that fewer people are now buying organic chickens from smart supermarkets when they can pay £3.99 at Lidl. With all food prices rising, the organic market is being credit-crunched. Demand for it grew by 70 per cent from 2002 to 2007; now it has stalled, according to the consultancy Organic Monitor.
The vast new organic Whole Foods Store on Kensington High Street in London is so quiet you can hear the cheese breathe in the specially designed glass room. Meanwhile the demand for takeaway pizzas and McDonald's has risen as people find the cheapest way to eat.
When David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party he said that green issues were at the top of his agenda. His slogan for the local elections last year was "Vote Blue, Go Green". But in the past few months he has realised that voters have lost the appetite for their greens. He has only given one environmental speech since Christmas. Once he used to talk about putting a £3,000 windmill on top of his house. Now the message is not about conserving the planet but preserving his bank balance. He wears catalogue clothes, grows his own vegetables and holidays barefoot in Britain because it is less extravagant, not because he is trying to reduce his global footprint.
In fact, when the Tory leader's bicycle was stolen a week ago, the message of the story was not how green he was for riding his bike, but how broken our society has become when a politician finds his bike nicked from under his nose.
Boris Johnson was the first to realise that the tolerance for green taxes may have peaked. When he became Mayor of London, he dropped plans to charge a £25 congestion fee on gas-guzzling cars.
The Tories have quietly been reviewing many of their green policies. A range of measures designed to penalise motoring and other polluting activities has been put on hold in case they alienate families struggling to pay their bills. A proposal to tax the highest emitting cars up to £500 more than the greenest vehicles has been quietly shelved, as has the plan to raise taxes on short-haul flights. Instead George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, has promised to cut tax on fuel when oil prices rise.
Gordon Brown has also stopped discussing his solar panels and compost heap in Scotland and is trying to dissociate himself from local council rubbish taxes - even though they have been driven by central government plans to put up landfill charges.
Both parties are looking at ways of rewarding people for being green rather than penalising them for throwing out their yoghurt pots with their teabags. Mr Osborne, in a speech last month, admitted: "When people are feeling the pinch, we need to make it pay to go green. Instead of being fined for not recycling, households should be paid for recycling."
When Barack Obama first decided to run for the presidency, he embraced the green cause. Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming had just become the biggest grossing documentary in history and Mr Gore had won the Nobel prize. But recently Mr Obama has been talking more about thrift than trees. Instead of showing off his recycling skills, he explains that his children don't receive Christmas or birthday presents.
It's not just the economic downturn that has harmed the green order. People have become wary of environmental causes that can turn out to do more harm than good. They don't want wind turbines marching across Britain's moors when nuclear power stations can do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They worry that washing and bleaching all those non-disposable nappies may be damaging the ozone layer, that the massive incentives for biofuels have distorted the world food market, and that green taxes are actually stealth taxes.
But paradoxically, just as Britain is turning its back on the environment, the country is finally becoming greener. Fewer people are moving house so they are buying fewer new white goods such as washing machines and fridges. They may not be queueing up for £9 organic Poilâne bread, but for the first time in a decade they are discarding less food. They buy less impulsively and think more carefully before their weekly shop. Children are wearing hand-me-down uniforms rather than new ones made in sweatshops.
Bottled water sales have fallen. Garden centres have reported a 10 per cent rise in the sales of vegetable seeds in the past 12 months. People are saving money by growing their own potatoes and carrots. They are turning off their central heating for a few more months of the year and ditching their second car rather than buying an electric runaround. And instead of carbon-offsetting their holidays, they are simply going on fewer of them.
It's the downturn that has made greenery look unappetising - but it may yet prove to do more than anything to save the planet.
#3
Keep in mind that these results are why the Dem's want $10/gal gas. Of course it will devastate the economy but many dem's are too well off to care.
#1
I think I saw a much shorter version a while back which suggested O bit Hill at her own game - figuring out how to get the most bnag for the buck - conceding those states were she was a shoe-in and campaigning in less populous states to pick up some easy delegates. Avoiding winner-take-all states, etc.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/07/2008 15:14 Comments ||
Top||
Relations between India and Pakistan have once again come under severe stress and are passing through a very difficult phase. India is blaming Pakistan and specifically the ISI for the terrorist attack on its embassy in Kabul. The US and Afghanistan seem to concur with the allegation, putting Pakistan in a defensive and awkward position, despite its claimed innocence.
India also accuses Pakistan and the ISI of being directly or indirectly complicit in the spate of bomb blasts that recently hit several cities across India. There may not be an iota of truth in any of these charges, but Pakistan's internal fragility emboldens neighbours to scapegoat their failures, with the world believing them and ignoring our denials.
What came to my utter dismay and surprise was that Iran too had joined the chorus demonising the ISI and attributing all its problems in its southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchistan to the intelligence agency. It is accusing ISI of harbouring the outlaw Jandullah group.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Is it that gross neglect of Iran's eastern province over the years has given rise to social unrest and low intensity insurgency somewhat similar to what we find in our own Balochistan and Tehran finds it convenient to blame it on us? Just as we too blame India and Afghanistan for the unrest and turbulence in Balochistan. The logic is that they must be fuelling the insurgency in Balochistan and some groups in FATA/NWFP to lock up our military as a retaliatory response to their belief that we continue to support militant activity in Kashmir.
But is it not true that the Indian security forces continue to commit gross human rights violations in Kashmir? India blames us for all the terrorist attacks and insurgencies without pausing to introspect. New Delhi or to be more specific South Block is not prepared to show any flexibility in coming to terms with either Pakistan or the real representatives of Kashmir in resolving the simmering problem that has bedevilled our relationship.
At the same time it blames Pakistan or Bangladesh if radical groups of Muslims commit acts of violence in any of the states in India. This circular blame game has to come to an end. Certainly, more mature and dispassionate analysis of the security situation is warranted by each of the countries in the region.
It is also important to realise that moves to destabilise each other will eventually engulf the whole region. Leaders of South and Central Asia are expected to break from past prejudices and focus on the shared boundaries and civilisational bonds that unite the region and not the converse.
Pakistan and India cannot allow the peace process to be derailed. The price of failure at this time, especially for Pakistan can be massive. With an insurgency on the western borders and expanding internal militancy it would be highly detrimental to have the eastern border once again lapse into an active conflict zone.
Apart from making an honest effort at resolving the less intractable issues like Siachen and Sir Creek and seriously addressing the problem of Jammu and Kashmir, India and Pakistan will have to make some serious adjustments in their strategic calculus to be able to place the peace process on a solid foundation.
India is a rising economic, political and military power in the region. The US in particular and the West in general are facilitating its ascendancy to advance their own national interests. The Indo-US civil nuclear deal, the 10-year defence agreement and enhanced cooperation in civil space and high technology commerce is going to dramatically shift the strategic balance in India's favour.
The US is now providing India all the space to operate and advance its military, economic, commercial and cultural interests in Afghanistan. It was therefore not surprising when India established a host of consulates totally disproportionate to the requirements of diplomatic needs.
In contrast, look at what Pakistan receives from US in return for all that it has done over the years: it provided support during the Afghan Jihad, gave sanctuary and succour to millions of Afghan refugees and suffered the ill effects of blowback on its society from the invasion of Afghanistan and the brutal 'shock and awe' campaign. And Pakistan continues to suffer. All our efforts, national resources and energy seem to go in vain and we are rewarded with "do more", only to sink deeper into a quagmire. Besides, there is such gross interference in our national affairs that our political and military leaders are no more the masters of the nation's destiny. It is shaped not within and by the people but through pre-arranged agreements.
No wonder then that the Pakistani establishment wants to countervail this rising disparity by trying to play a proactive role in South Asia, Afghanistan and the Muslim world, sometimes creating influence through proxies and non-state entities that is at times clashing with state institutions and interests of regional powers.
Non state entities? Like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Lashkar-e-Taiba?
And it is these moves that give rise to apprehensions regarding our motives and allegations.
Eh? You're murdering the citizens of foreign nations and you think they have "apprehensions about you?
India, Pakistan and Afghanistan must realise that terrorism is a process.
Fascinating
It occurs as a result of accumulated failings of states that provide the breeding ground for a self-destructive cycle.
Pakistain being example number one ...
Terrorism is more about prolonged misrule and acute bad governance, which has been the case in our region and much less the result of conspiracies by intelligence agencies, states or non-state actors. It is only when you take effective measures to redress grievances of your citizens, look after neglected segments of society, show understanding and tolerance towards your own people and your neighbours that the state can overcome the threat of terrorists.
In combating terrorism we not only have to apply all the major elements of national power but it is equally -- perhaps even more -- important to evaluate the role of the state. It is high time that the states of the region and the US start examining their role honestly and address their shortcomings on high priority instead of playing the blame game.
The writer is a retired Lieutenant General of the Pakistan Army
Posted by: john frum ||
08/07/2008 07:13 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Pakistan is headed toward being a failed state with nuclear weapons.
How will we deal with it? Contrary to some here, you can't just nuke them all.
Are liberals more profane than conservatives? Online, the answer seems to be yes. Profanity, those taboo words banned from the broadcast airwaves, is a feature of many people's daily lives. It's much less so in the establishment media world. TV and radio broadcasts are legally prohibited from using it, most newspapers (including this one) have traditionally refrained from its usage.
That's not the case with the Web, where bloggers and readers face no such restrictions. That likely comes as no surprise; what may be surprising, however, is to what degree profanity seems to be a feature more common on one side of the political blogosphere than the other.
Which side is that? For answers, I turned to the search engine Google to see how common swearing is in the right and left blog universes by looking up the late stand-up comic George Carlin's "seven dirty words" in the most popular blog communities.
The results showed that online liberals tend to use profanity a lot more than online conservatives.
(Before I get further into the results, let me say that I am deliberately making a distinction between blogs that do not usually allow readers to make comments and those that do. This means that some sites, such as the popular Instapundit or Newsmax, were not included.)
Searching for Mr. Carlin's seven words and some popular variants at the top 10 conservative Web communities yields about 70,000 results. That is dwarfed in comparison to the 1.9 million instances of profanity on liberal sites.
Things aren't quite that clear-cut, however, since some Web sites have more pages than others. . . . Dividing the number of instances of profanity by the number of pages of the sites on which they appear, then multiplying the result by 100 yields what might be called a "profanity quotient."
The top 10 liberal sites (Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Democratic Underground, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress, Atrios, Greenwald, MyDD and Firedoglake) have a profanity quotient of 14.6.
The top 10 conservative sites (Free Republic, Hot Air, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, NewsBusters, Lucianne.com, Wizbang, Ace of Spades, Red State and Volokh Conspiracy) have a quotient of 1.17.
This means that 14.6 percent of all pages on the most popular liberal sites have profanity on them, compared to 1.17 percent of all pages on the conservative sites.
That's quite a disparity. . . .
I just took a quick look at DU and Kos to see if they'd picked this story up. Not yet, but if and when they do, I expect they'll condemn the m-----f------ writer for being a g--d----- Ref---liKKKan tool and repeating their s----- a-- smear that Progressives use too many m-----f------ swearwords. "We do not use too may f------ swearwords, and f--- you for saying otherwise a------!"
Posted by: Mike ||
08/07/2008 14:18 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[3 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Reminds me of what my father used to say:
"When you swear it is a declaration that you are not intelligent enough to come up with anything else to say."
#2
Meanwhile, the lefty blogs are totally clueless as to why the usage of profanity could be considered anything less than proper. "But it's what I feel like saying, and I should express myself! I'm a unique snowflake!" The idea that profanity lowers the level of discourse is completely foreign to them.
And the real irony is that the English language is very poor in foul language. You can't be very fluent with using the dozen or so profane words. Languages like French or Greek have hundreds of profanities.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
As the credit crunch bites, environmental policies are being ditched. But oddly we are doing better at saving the planet
