If the devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist, arguably the Environmentalist’ Greatest Trick is convincing the world that they really stand for conserving, rather than spending flagrantly.

The socialist and left wing parties eagerly calling on the common man to cut back on his showers, driving and plastic bags are busy unveiling massive spending programs that would choke all the not particularly extinct whales and polar bears of the north. The message is make sure to limit your showers to 1 minute of cold water, while shelling out more of your tax money than ever to fund a whole raft of conferences, initiatives and programs meant to tell people to waste less. Cut back on toilet paper so that deeply concerned politicians and celebrities can travel on jet planes around the world and feast on buffets while discussing how to best convince the common man to use less.

But then why be surprised, conservation for the greater good was always a staple of planned economies in the USSR or China or Cuba, just so long as you knew that the greater good was the good of the authorities and that the authorities always held an exemption. The common Russian farmer might be expected to give up his land, but the Commissar could always count on using that land for his Dacha. The rules that apply to the proletariat never apply to the leaders who wallow in their own indulgence while introducing new rationing protocols.

Hypocrisy is no obstacle to being an environmentalist prophet as Al Gore’s sprawling mansion and bouts of jetting around the world with rock stars has shown us. Just as the mansions of the Party elite have never created any kind of contraction to demanding that the peasant cut down his ration of bread by another few ounces. The beauty of collectivism is that it divides humanity neatly into masters and slaves, and if you’re smart enough to wield the rhetorical whip or come up with another convincing argument for cutting the rations, you get to split what they are forced to give up.

With all the tirades about the oceans rising, the polar ice melting, the atmosphere dissolving, the globe heating up, the polar bears dying out and all the catastrophe hysteria that has overrun the country, the last thing you should expect is to have the Prophets of Disaster actually listen to their own alarmist rhetoric. As everyone knows, preaching chastity excuses the parson for his own adulteries, and preaching green excuses the politician for his three swimming pools. With carbon credits as the new indulgences, cutting back is only for those too slow to jump on the bandwagon and preach it to others.

If you can churn out a commercial featuring a multiracial panoply screaming TICK TICK TICK at the audience, in between reciting prospective environmental disasters, you can go on showering as long as you like. At most you might be expected to buy a SMART Car and drive it to the premiere of your latest movie being shot on three continents for enough money to feed all of Africa well into the 22nd century.

Among the elite, conspicuous consumption has given way to conscious concern about consumption. The thing isn’t to cut back, but to spend money and buy something that signals your concern about consumption, such as expensive organic products, electric cars or a DVD of Al Gore using his beak to point out melting icebergs on a slideshow of the Arctic. As Conspicuous Concern becomes the new hip, shallow people show how deep they are by spending more money on the status symbols that show just how opposed to wasteful consumption they are.

And environmentalism at the government level is truly no different. Obama’s campaign isn’t being run on a platform of spending less, but spending more. More programs. More projects. More logos and slogans and money all somehow geared toward using less energy. But can you spend more to spend less and waste more to waste less? The laws of thermodynamics would seem to say otherwise.

And while the mindless celebrities who circle any trend like starved vultures continue to preach to us that we need to stop using toilet paper and drink rat’s milk, the political culture of consumption that gave birth to their idiocy continues rolling along just fine. That culture is perfectly happy with oil prices because it doesn’t affect their own padded pocketbooks but does drive public disaffection that they hope to exploit.

It isn’t that they really want the public spending less, but their business allies want the public spending more on the things they want to sell, things with a Recycled logo or Biofuels or Ice Cream guaranteed not to harm the habitats of Polar Bears. The trick is to get the public to buy less and spend more, on the products they buy and on the government they’re forced to accept.

The economic politics of Green creates forced scarcity in formerly prosperous nations at the bottom rung and squeezes the middle class by adding surcharges to everyday products to fight imaginary problems, surcharges that benefit the corporations and the parasitic Green industries that exist to certify and wastefully and unnecessarily process and recycle products that don’t need it at added expense.

The real economic logic of Green has nothing to do with melting icecaps but with selling a product for 150 or 200 or even 2000 percent of its original cost by attaching some sanctimonious tripe to the label about saving the earth. The real economic logic is about forcing businesses to comply with regulations drafted by politicians at the urging of their friends who just happen to run companies that will profit from those regulations. And that is why the real color of green is the highway man’s color, the camouflage of highway robbery.

Real conservation has never been on their agenda or they might actually listen to the Sierra Club when it opposes immigrant. Real cutbacks in waste are not on their agenda or they might stop jetting around the country and the world for conferences and concerts. Real reductions in energy use is not on their agenda or they might actually cut back on their own energy use instead of buying carbon credits. But it’s much easier to victimize Asthma patients and working class people who find themselves having to pay more for everything they buy thanks to the mesh of regulations they implement, than to actually show more responsibility in their own lives.

The Politics of Green is all about appearance over reality, about a sprawling mansion with a green sticker on it and a SMART car parked right in front of the driveway with that embarrassing SUV inside.

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