Green Backlash

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"But all is not quiet on the farm. In the Senate, tensions over corn’s new role..." Nice summary over the battle for alternative fuel policy on Capitol Hill courtesy of The Council on Foreign Relations. Includes the repeal of tax breaks to Big Oil & Gas, aversions to a review of the 2002 Farm Bill, as well as alternatives to corn (Switchgrass) for producing Ethanol and other biofuels.

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Green Backlash

Written by Jack Hudson

The backlash on the green trend has finally arrived, and the question now is if the current wave of environmentalism has staying power.

The people at Spiked see environmentalism fundamentally as an emotional spasm, a twitch of guilt and angst, which dresses itself in "frightfully dry statistics" to look grown up. Greenormal argues that "the fact that it is fashionable at the moment gives us no indication as to its prospects, either way." But my favorite recent sentence for clarity and wisdom comes from the New York Review of Books:

The genius of the tobacco companies has been to exploit not just the purchasing habits of the young and the addictive centers of their brains, but their dreams for a better life and their constant search through fantasy for meaning and identity.

That's a sentence which says more than it lets on -- not only because the climate change issue (especially the US auto market) is remarkably like where tobacco was in 1950 (which is a grim prospect), but also because it hints that what the people at Spike really want, as do the people giving green awards and organizing Live Earth, is meaning and identity.

Here is the full article from the current New York Review of Books, written by Helen Epstein, the daughter of Barbara Epstein, the NYRB editor who died of lung cancer last year. Barbara Epstein was also the editor of Anne Frank's Diary.
Green Backlash

Disclosure: Whenever I see the word meaning, as Helen Epstein uses it, I think of Viktor Frankl. Frankl once proposed a Statue of Responsibility, a 300-foot stainless steel statue for the west coast to complement the Statue of Liberty on the east coast. The design seems somewhat uninspired. Maybe they should commission Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, DC to come up with something. Not sure what Spiked would think of that . . .

Photo by David Neubert