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The Forum > Article Comments > Since when has it been left wing to be green? > Comments

Since when has it been left wing to be green? : Comments

By Barry York, published 12/11/2008

Politics abhors a vacuum; green ideology has filled the vacuum created when the Left went into hibernation.

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I think you have put them down for the count, Dallas.
Posted by Cowboy Joe, Wednesday, 19 November 2008 10:44:42 AM
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mil-observer,

Our politicians have undoubtedly made lying, pandering to corporate interests, and neglecting infrastructure into an art form, but you you need to ask yourself why, if there is plenty of water out there, instead of just building a few dams, they are going for buy backs of water from farmers and expensive, energy hungry reverse osmosis plants. They are set to double the voters' water bills.

If you are concerned about media hype, then look at the original research papers in peer-reviewed journals or the science news magazines that include articles and columns written by real scientists, such as New Scientist or Scientific American.

Cowboy Joe,

Fifty years ago it was rational to predict famines in the 1970s. In 1967, India was a net importer of food, had widespread malnutrition, and had a 2.4% population growth rate (30 year doubling time). There were 97 countries that were growing even faster, some very large. No one really anticipated the spectacular success of the Green Revolution, not even the agronomist William Paddock. This doubled or even tripled the yield of grain per hectare. Are you willing to bet your children's future that we can pull it off again, and in a number of different areas?

The scientist who will make a name for himself and really get the grant money is the one who thoroughly discredits anthropogenic global warming (AGW), not the one who writes a me-too paper. Scientific hypotheses gradually gather strength as results are replicated and the evidence for them grows. We know more about climate now than in the 1970s. Even if AGW is wrong, we are in trouble on a number of other fronts.
Posted by Divergence, Wednesday, 19 November 2008 1:45:16 PM
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One of the "biggest trouble fronts" is the Great Artesian Basin. The structure of the GAB is a matter of controversy: is it a closed plutonic system that is non-renewable, or an open system replensihed with rain along the north of the Great Dividing Range? Hardly seems to matter, since either way it is being used up at a rate greater than any replenishment if such actually occurs. Olympic Dam is only part of the problem, but set to become THE problem when it expands into the world's largest mine. Currently BHP-Billiton gets GAB water free and that's set to continue with the expansion of the mine.

Surprisingly, given the number of comments on Yorkie's less than important question of whether or not Greens are part of the left, this article on an earlier On Line Opinion (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=993) rated only two comments (neither are mine I hasten to add). It's by Lance Endersbee and titled "Australia's Artesian Basin - $14 Billion down the drain each year". I humbly suggest that the issues it raises are somewhat more important than those raised in Barrie's article.
Posted by mike-servethepeople, Wednesday, 19 November 2008 2:18:13 PM
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Divergence thank you for the balanced comments, very pleasing.

I am the non-better in my family. I have 300 m2 of backyard and I am saving in case it needs to be turned into a vegie garden.

What I wish to see is a response to the absolute fact that the climate will change i.e. colder or warmer and develop a national strategy to address this real potential climate threat.

Spending finite tax dollars on what is largely an emotional construct is not rational or sustainable. For example: it is quite likely that wind turbines will not operate efficiently during extended frigid temperatures or during extremely hot periods. Imagine a wind farm frozen solid due to an ice storm and it wouldn't matter then if the wind was blowing or not.

The electrical conductivity and resistivity of a conductor is temperature dependant. The conductivity of most materials decreases as temperature increases. In other words the hotter it gets the greater the electrical transmission losses. Losses are significant under normal conditions.
Posted by Cowboy Joe, Wednesday, 19 November 2008 9:17:24 PM
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I want to thank the editors for publishing my original article. The media rarely publishes anything reflecting the left-wing opposition to the green world outlook but is constnatly promoting the doom and gloom message of the greens. It's almost as though the mainstream media is happy to perpetuate the illusion that the greens represent a left-wing outlook - after all, it gives a free kick to anyone wanting to discredit 'the left'.

I think a prize should go to Mike-serve-the-people for using dialectics to transform Marx into his opposite: from someone whose theories enthusiastically endorsed capitalist progress and even greater human development through inventiveness and further political revolution into someone who would want development more or less halted because the supposed limits of nature have been reached or are dangerously close to being reached. Mike is just another conservative, telling the people to live within their limits. Genuine leftists say the universe is our limit.

Someone else made the point that Marx wanted to "enhance" nature. No supporting evidence was provided to support this claim. Marx was firmly in the modern camp of support for the exploitation of nature in the interests of society, especially the future socialist society. He supported the unleashing of the productive forces of society, freeing them from the narrow and stultifying direction of the profit-motive, not the restricting of their potential to the perceived limits imposed by the natural environment.

At any point in history, there have been people, invariably speaking for the ruling classes, warning the rest of us not to live beyond our limits and to live within our means. The green outlook is just the latest variant. Its defining quality is the belief that the natural limit has been reached, or is dangerously close to being reached, and we have to arrange our society around that.

This outlook is even more reactionary than capitalism.

Some of the responses on this thread have shown an open-mindedness to the argument and I thank those contributors.
Posted by byork, Friday, 21 November 2008 6:17:03 AM
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Quite the contrary, byork,

You, the Roman Catholic Church, and the ruling class are all growthists together, all happily marching us (and the other species) towards a mass extinction and civilisational collapse. If you want to dispute this, you need the science and statistics to support you, not mere assertion.

I am no expert on Marx, but from what I have read, he was no fool, did a great deal of research, and based his ideas on statistics from the real world. He did not regard his theories as religious dogmas. If he were transported to the 21st century, I suspect he would agree with Mike-servethepeople and not you. As a politician once accused of inconsistency said, "When the facts change, my ideas change. What do you do?"

The important division now is between growthists and people who accept the need for a more-or-less steady state economy (although some economic growth can go on by working smarter) and a stable population, and not between Left and Right. People in both groups can range anywhere along the traditional spectrum from Left to Right in their other ideas.
Posted by Divergence, Wednesday, 26 November 2008 9:37:20 AM
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