In the next few years there may be a growing divide between green chic and pragmatism. Those with safe public sector jobs will disport their shiny new Priuses (prii?) while those who have lost their jobs in the private sector will bang around in rust buckets or take the bus like true greenies should. The implication will be that greenies are smarter.

However I believe while some ideas coming from the Australian Greens and Greenpeace have some merit other ideas are fantasy. The alternative to coal fired baseload electricity is nuclear power. If not please explain why wind and solar heavy Spain, Denmark and Germany want to follow that path. Far from being smarter the Prius driving green hypocrites depend on both coal and taxpayers to maintain their fantasies. While green chic has the high moral ground we are in for a tumultuous few years before a return to pragmatism.

We can argue whether Green ideology is a part of the left or not; in fact, the most extreme Green thinkers, such as the Deep Ecologists, seen themselves as being "post-Left" and direct some of their most trenchant criticisms toward leftists.

However, this article proceeds upon the basis of a false premise; Marxism is not a part of the Left. If Marxism is a part of the Left then I personally would say I am not a part of the Left. The article simply assumes that Marxism is a Left ideology. Socialism is all about the emancipation of the working class and the working classes were the most enslaved in precisely Marxist (and Fascist) economies.

While I agree with Barry’s analysis of some “green” positions as utopian and backwards-looking, the main thrust of the article suffers from the same reactionary “leftism” of the Langers and others in that sad little clique of “last superpower”-ites.

A belief in the necessity of change for the better is one of the hallmarks of the left. Marxism itself is subject to change and development for the better. Engels was a product of his time. His language was a reflection of the era in which he lived. He wrote “man… becomes the real, conscious lord of nature” using both a gender exclusive pronoun and a feudal allusion. Does that mean we cannot develop our ideas further than patriarchy and feudalism?

Engels celebrated the conquering of nature by human labour but dialectics recognises that embedded in this is an element of human labour being conquered by nature. We can pump billions of gigalitres of water out of the Great Artesian Basin for the expansion of what will become the world’s largest mine at Olympic Dam but we will rue the environmental consequences. We can build a desalination plant to overcome Adelaide’s water shortage but destroy the fish stocks, sea grasses and molluscs of Spencer’s Gulf by returning a blanket of brine to the floor of the sea.

Barry is preoccupied with excluding from the “left” people who are prepared to actively challenge the multinationals and their local capitalist off-siders on environmental grounds, just as he excludes from the “left” those who oppose US-led imperialist aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan because Bush’s foreign policy is “objectively progressive”.

“Sustainability” is not a barrier to the utilisation of natural resources by the “conscious lord of nature”, but a spontaneous appreciation of the need to be guided by dialectics in doing so. Only in this way can we ensure that there will be a “nature” available to be used. Only in this way can we advance from the destruction of nature for the private gain of a few towards its continuing use for the benefit of the majority who are poor and striving for liberation.

I always thought the Left was for the workers and their families, derived from where the third estate (the common people) sat in the historic French parliament.

Barry York is spot on, in pointing out that that being left is not being capital G green. In my mind we are all green, every one wants to care for our planet, a timber worker has no future without trees, and kids can’t swim in the local creek if it’s polluted. But being green has been hijacked by a political force that Barry exposes as being masked as the left.

This difference can be seen in Tasmania’s former Premier. Jim Bacon was a young Melbourne left-winger when he first arrived in Tasmania and grew up to reshape Tasmania as Labor premier, but was relentlessly attacked by the Greens.

When he became Premier in August 1998, Tasmania's government was debt-ridden, the state's population was shrinking and the community divided.

His reconstruction helped turn the economy around, drew the state towards consensus with grassroots consultation and was marked by decisions, including the purchase of a fleet of passenger ferries that symbolically ended Tasmania's isolation. He supported AFL footy in the State as well as boosted the tourism industry.

In 2003, he was able to report that unemployment was down from 10.2 % to 7% - the lowest rate in decades and only 1% behind the national average; with 206,800 people employed in Tasmania - more than ever before;

He fully supported down stream processing and job creation. Under his Premiership he supported infrastructure projects such as gas, and the RPDC was commissioned to undertake an international search to develop world class guidelines for a pulp mill.

Clearly the left is about supporting working families and jobs in sustainable industries.

The root cause of our civilization's unsustainability is the very triumphalism promoted in this article. We can only destroy the ecosystems that support us because we see ourselves as separate from them and superior to Nature. But we will never escape from the fact that we are animals that need food, water and air to stay alive. These are only maintained by functioning ecosystems. Our denial that we are part of Nature, and our belief that we are superior to it are products of our recent ability to harvest large quantities of finite fossil energy. This allows us to boost agricultural production - and our population - temporarily above the limits imposed by a solar (photosynthetic) energy economy. Those times are now coming to an end and we will soon learn our real place in the universe as Nature reasserts itself. We are not going to like it but "Mother" Nature simply does not care either way. Ideological trumphalism, whether of the left or right, can never subsitute for the reality of the natural universe - and fools (individuals or species) always mete out their own punishment.

This is ultra-left-chauvinism at its worst. Whilst human beings did, do and always will shape their environment to their purposes, they don't do it as they please but within the limitations set by nature, of which humans are a part, though a uniquely self-conscious part.

Barry York points out that Marx and Engels views were consistent with the scientific revolution: but his own aren't. It's the overwhelming consensus of the most relevant scientists globally that climate change is not only real but proceeding much faster than even the worst projections of the last few years - the unpreceded speed of the melting of the summer Arctic ice is the 'canary in the coal mine' here.

And these scientists are not reactionaries or captured by the multinational-dominated fossil-fuels industry denialists and delayers with whom Barry York seems happy to line up. Their biggest enemy has been the Bush administration - again an ally of Barry York given (as also pointed out here)his alignment with that sad little clique of Langerites who support the Iraq invasion and occupation.

Overwhelmingly nationally and globally it is the big business lobbies which seek to deny, delay or minimise environmental concerns - whilst it is clearly the working class and the poor of the developinfg world who have, are and will suffer most from environmental degradation, especailly climate change (moving to Bangladesh any time soon Barry, to live on the delta and 'dominate' the storm surges as they flood the land and houses of millions of people)?

So, let's see - Barry lines himself up with the corporate sector, the imperialists, and against the interests of the labouring poor, peasants and workers of both developing and developed world. And he's on the left? yes, there are reactionary elements within Green politics (e.g. neo-Malthusianism or KESAB-ism), but that's why those of us of a red-green persuasion, who want to have BOTH an environmentally sustainable AND a classless world are fighting to counter their influence within the very broad field of environmental politics. Barry York and his clique are barriers or irrelevant to that key struggle.

I think Barry mistakes stalinism for socialism in his denial of the dialectical nature of our relationship with nature.

When Marx and Engels talk about control over the envrionment they are talking about its enrichment, not its destruction.

Environmental destruction is an example of our alienation from our own humanity, an alienation stemming from the exploitative nature of capitalism and the fetishism of commodities.

The orkers' revolution, with its overthrow of the material bases for exploitation, and its democratic organs of rule, gives us the opportunity to re-engage as humans with our environment and not, as Barry in common with the capitalists and their apologists seems to suggest, to propogate its destruction.

Liz Ross from Socialist Alternative (www.sa.org.au) wrote a phamplet on this called Capitalism: It's costing us the earth. Have a read.

I enjoyed this article and think it makes an important contribution to the debate, even though I do not share the author’s ideology. The fragmentation of the European communists in the 1970s and 1980s into identity/issue politics (race, feminism, environmentalism) and the moral bankruptcy of Marxist-inspired regimes revealed with the collapse of the Soviet empire did indeed create a vacuum that has been filled by the green “left”.

I’d disagree that this is a new phenomenon, however. Reactionary/romantic anti-progressive ideas have long been part of the left – the modern green left stands in the tradition of Robert Owen, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin et al. The author is correct, however, that these ideas also have a natural home on the right. It is interesting to see how supposedly opposite political poles now merge on many political issues – that the far right and far left are united in opposing GM food, attending anti-globalisation rallies, calling for population controls and reduced immigration, opposing uranium mining, etc

I do miss an intelligent and plausible authentically progressive left voice in current discourse, if only for the sake of a good argument. By “progressive left” I mean believing material progress is good, technology is beneficial, and human welfare and freedom, not the environment, is the central progressive value.

As a farmer, my first experience with greenies was when my wife and other young females were able to prevent us males pushing the Buntine railway 1000 acre dam catchment for farming when diesel rail power came in.

It is since that time that I have always had respect for Greenies even some of the so-called Raggedy Arsed male camp followers.

And finally one must point out, that it is our so-called money-minded progressives who must take the blame for our present global financial predicament, much much more than the Greenies.

The simple difference between countries which chose a nuclear energy solution, and Australia, is that we have the uranium, and we also have the experience of the nuclear testing at Maralinga.

We are who knows best that it is stuff which is too dangerous to touch.

Re Stoifan,

If the rapid artic melts of 07 and 08 are the "canary in the coal mine" of climate change, wouldnt that make the rapid artic freeze of winter 08 (back to average levels since records began) the elephant in the coffee shop?

I look forward to the day that your sort (activist red-green) are cast back into the pits of irrelevancy. Should the climate continue to plateau that day may not be so far away as you might think.

These simplistic classifications of these ones are "Left" and those ones are "Right" do seem somewhat pathetic to me.

Most often I hear them spawned by those who seek 2 invoke prejudice in difference and use this in turn to garner votes, themselves most often being rooted in either one or the other of 2 opposing triangles when debating.

To me, *Greenies* embrace life, embrace diversity and the magnificense of the our collective inheritance, this our planet earth, knowing full well, that Life evolves, ever adapting and ever changing to overcome and thrive in our environment.

So, to suggest that *Greenies* are striving to take us bak to solely cottage industry in the village is a nonsense that seeks to pidgeon hole them and invoke fear in others who think that they will somehow have to be "downgraded" in life.

And *Greenies* want access to energy all right, as they are also healers, who will with clean, sustainable green tek terra form and heal the wounded land that like the Original people has been selfishly used and abused by the transplanted genocidal poms and give the cockies, the base of our economy, something to really look 4ward to.

Once we have rooves shingled with solar panels and adorned with wind harvesters, pooskinerus recycled from our waste to produce lots of yum yums and refoliage the place to depollute, cool us down and giv us fresh O2 in abundance, sucking up excess CO2 in the process, with battery storage bakup banks for emergencies and the surplus energy being sold bak to science & industry, in this great southern land with so few relatively people to look after it both could and should only get better for everyone.

My interpretation of recent comments by G.Soros - !REGULATE!

1. Cap salaries
2. Cap profits
3. Pump wages up
4. Keep families in their homes
5. Keep property values stable

[6.] Unburden us all and the planet from the polluters.

7. Up the Green <-> GREEN BROWNY for Prez.

...Adam...

The fundamental left-right distinction, it appears to me, is between those who consider that people who are left to use their own initiative will get things more or less wrong, and those who consider they will get things more or less right. The left, I take it, assumes that people need to be taught, led and guided in order to make correct decisions: the right assumes that they can work things out for themselves. Looked at it this way, obviously both sides are making wild and incorrect generalisations. But for any given situation one or the other assumption is usually correct, and any rational person will make a decision based the evidence they can gather from that particular context. I am 'left-wing', for instance, when it comes to State education. I am 'right-wing' when it comes to child welfare payments. I am left-wing about unemployment benefits, right-wing about single parent benefits, right-wing about climate change and left-wing about religion; and so on. Other people see me as left or right wing depending on their own ideologies, but all I am doing is making a decision based on the evidence. And anyone who is not doing that is a fool.

the first actual greenies i met were north shore liberals, whose life was 'every prospect pleases', except for a worrisome air-quality aspect.

then the trots imploded, and their psychological drives led them to the green movement as a way of connecting to a society that had laughed them into irrelevance. the 'watermelon warrior' was born.

discussions about who is lefter than whom can be amusing, but not these. in oz, left or right matters not, only 'in' or 'out'. of parliament that is. the rest are chatterati, eternal adolescents chock-full of opinions but utterly unable to realize them. so far are they disenfranchised that they do not even know they are impotent politically, nor can they conceive of a different reality. they are enslaved by social conditioning even as they imagine they argue for 'truth justice, and the australian way'.

the mothers of australia have failed in their duty, raising only believers in the emperor's new clothes.

Interesting analysis.

The notion that one has to be left wing to be green is relatively new. When the Franklin Dam protestors were battling the united front of unions and big corporates I am sure they would not have perceived the cause of workers and greenies to be synonomous.

I think it is nothing more the shrill chatterings of the ultra-right wing. Whenever an issue poses a threat to economic radicalism and extreme capitalism it has to be painted with a left wing hue in an attempt to sway the middle class hoi polloi to their viewpoint.

Cinders "the RPDC was commissioned to undertake an international search to develop world class guidelines for a pulp mill.

Clearly the left is about supporting working families and jobs in sustainable industries"

Is Cinders telling us that the irrational opposition for the Gunns Pulp Mill only came from Liberals on the mainland?

Finland can have pulp mills dotting their lake shores but Tasmanian lefties have fought a loosing battle to construct a world class pulp mill?

Please elaborate Cinders

As another blogger at Strange Times, I pretty much agree with what Barry is saying in this article. First of all, I'd define "Left" in a similar way to Rhian: that is, Left-wing people believe that "material progress is good, technology is beneficial, and human welfare and freedom, not the environment, is the central progressive value"

One of the most important differences between a full-on "Green" point of view, and a left-wing view, is that a left-winger looks at environmental damage as a cost that needs to be dealt with, and the more extreme type of Green views it as a sin that must be avoided at all costs. It's interesting to see how angry people like mike-servethepeople and michael_in_adelaide get - they appear to assume that Barry is advocating environmental damage for its own sake:

"The root cause of our civilization's unsustainability is the very triumphalism promoted in this article....Our denial that we are part of Nature, and our belief that we are superior to it are products of our recent ability to harvest large quantities of finite fossil energy"

Well, I proudly believe that we _are_ superior to "Nature". "Nature" condemned us to live short, fearful lives, enslaved to the seasons and wild beasts. Instead of accepting that in a "sustainable" way, humans rebelled against it and built the society we live in today. The problem with our society is not that it is too far removed from Nature: the problem is that only a part of humanity has been able to get rich so far. We need more civilisation and more material progress, not less. Humans are perfectly capable of working out how to mend any environmental damage that happens along the way.

It's definitely pseudo-left to just be "against capitalism", to pretend to be interested in human liberation, while having ideals that would slow down human progress, and keep the poor as they are. At least B.A. Santamaria had the guts to admit he was a right-winger who hated the modern age, and dreamed of a return to a time when we all lived as peasants.

Many of you seem to have the view that the world is like a picture of Mickey Mouse, with the economy the face, and the society and the environment the less important ears. Actually, they are concentric circles. If you trash your environment, you trash your society and your economy. Putting human welfare first is just like sawing off the branch you are sitting on.

It is easy for any mathematically literate person to show that endless growth in population or consumption is a delusion, although some economic growth can continue if it means working smarter and not using up more stuff. Our present population growth rate here in Australia, carried on for 800 years, would bring us to the point of standing room only on every square meter of the continent. You might take a look at the Worldwatch Institute site for the statistics on what is currently happening with regard to shortages or losses of arable land, fresh water, fish stocks, biodiversity, fossil fuels and minerals that are vital for our technology, and capacity of the environment to safely absorb wastes.

As for technology solving all our problems, this really belongs with the religious fundamentalists' idea that we don't have to worry because Jesus is coming soon. Land the Sumerians salted up and wrecked 6,000 years ago is still wrecked. The dodo and the thylacine are still extinct. The truth is that there have been a number of collapses of societies in the historical and archaeological records. Some are described in Jared Diamond's "Collapse". The human suffering they caused was immense. It is actually you people who are antihuman.

While the central progressive or core values of the left might lie in human welfare, progress and freedom it cannot be denied that a similar care for the environment serves to support those values.

Arguing whether we are superior to, or at one with, nature is superfluous when we are over exploiting our resources - a situation that will eventually lead to the opposite of those core values - a decrease in human welfare, freedoms and progress. We are not better or worse than nature - we are part of it even if we evolved with a complex and intricate brain enabling us to use nature's resources to sustain societies, progress technologically and scientifically.

Ultimately being Green is to be mindful that we don't operate in a vacuum and that the natural cause and effect of our actions on the environment will affect us all regardless of whether you are left, right, psuedo-left (whatever that is) or calathumpian.

Pelican
I don’t disagree with you that we need to care for the environment, nor would the driest right-winger or reddest Marxist say that the environment doesn’t matter. The issue is one of relative priorities, and trust in human ingenuity.

Yes, we must look after the natural environment, because we cannot survive without it. We must be responsible stewards of natural resources, because our long-term welfare depends on it. We should care for nature, because it is valuable to us in many other ways besides these narrow utilitarian considerations. But to see nature as intrinsically good, capable of providing moral as well as pragmatic constraints on human activity that we should not try to overcome, opens the door to anti-humanist ideology.

You say that we are part of nature, and that is obviously true. It follows that what we do is natural - a city is no less natural than a wasps’ nest, a fish farm no less than a beaver’s dam. The romantics’ dichotomy between artifice and nature is false, there is no moral priority of the world unaltered by humans over the world we make – quite the reverse, if the latter provides a more congenial environment for humanity. I am no Marxist, in this I agree with Marx –the industrial revolution “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

And at notionally the opposite end of the political spectrum, I also agree with von Mises:

“The immense majority strives after a greater and better supply of food, clothes, homes, and other material amenities. In calling a rise in the masses' standard of living progress and improvement, economists do not espouse a mean materialism. They simply establish the fact that people are motivated by the urge to improve the material conditions of their existence. They judge policies from the point of view of the aims men want to attain. He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.

Three cheers! At last a breath of fresh air amid the greens' ideological pollution and the Malthusian genocide it promises.

David Jackmanson is correct to point out that BA Santamaria was fairly open about the implicit fascist sympathies of his folksy "anti-modernity" rants. It's useful too to remember that the Nazis had much the same green romanticism with their "blood and soil" fantasies. But notice how the debates nearly always end up with some Malthusian squawking on about a presumed need for depopulation!

mil-observer,

With a few statistics from the CIA World Factbook and a scientific calculator, it is possible to show in about 3 minutes that with our present 1.6% population growth rate we will reach one person on every square meter in Australia in 800 years. It will take 400 years in the Solomon Islands, 10,000 years of even 1% growth would give (if it were physically possible) a solid ball of people with a radius bigger than the solar system. The same sorts of figures apply when you consider growth in consumption of energy or anything material. Don't take my word for it. Get a numerate friend to walk you through the calculations if you don't understand exponential functions. If you believe in unending growth, you have a problem with the laws of mathematics, not Malthus.

Personally, I don't want to worship nature or have depopulation for its own sake, just respect for a natural world that isn't perfectly understood and has limits that are clearly being exceeded. If we had the technology to make the interior of Australia green and fertile, I would have no problems with a bigger population, but it is incredibly stupid to have a quasi-religious faith that some technological solution will turn up for any problem.

Here's just one example of what can go wrong, despite human ingenuity. If your soil and climate are really suitable for potatoes, you can feed up to 4 times as many people to the hectare as with grain. In Ireland,the population grew from about 1.2 million people in 1600 to 8.5 million in 1848, all entirely dependent on two varieties of potato. Growth was especially fast because land was divided among all the sons on the farmer's death. However, both of these potato varieties were vulnerable to the late blight, which arrived in Europe from Mexico that year. A million people starved directly, and huge numbers were forced to emigrate. Yes, the British colonial masters made it worse, but hundreds of thousands of people starved in the rest of Europe as well.

Yeah, it's a pretty fast-growing religion this anti-population stuff. Seems to be the same source of mutterings over an abacus that brought us this totally dysfunctional monetarist system and the dark age we're entering due to such fanatical faith in said simpletons' system.

Divergence, your arithmetic is very simple - doubtless seductively so to many. But the actual fluctuations are what really matter in studying population growth.

Yet most important in that sense is the fact that privation creates "population volatility" (a more useful, less misanthropic and less presumptuous term than "overpopulation"). With volatility, we see high reproduction in poor and other very stressed areas, because people fear for the chances of survival among their offspring. The opposite trend is clear from the developed world where we see the other extreme of population degeneracy, forcing younger generations and migrants to feed and obey a ruling generation of baby-boomer dead wood.

Your example of the Irish Famine is similarly misguided and further misleading. It was the colonialism of Ireland from 1600 that actually spawned higher, less stable populations for such similar reasons of survival - brutal warfare, transportations for the same, migration intakes and local food shortages - but with the added stimulus of intensive commercial operations. Your reference to Irish traditions of property inheritance is presumptuous, if not condescending to Irish culture; you recognize no variations or flexibility in what was hardly a practice done by some different species.

Eugenicists and other simple-minded and arrogant psychos (often racist, or at least imperialist) may dream of the ages when only thousands of people showed them up for their actual inferiority. Technology has enabled us to reproduce and survive in such health and strength that now it is billions who reveal such feudal nasties for the dull misanthropes they are.

Divergence

Another of my favourite quotes is Stein’s law, which says: “if something cannot go on for ever, it will stop.”

You’re right about the mathematical inevitability of population growth at current rates eventually reaching clearly unsustainable levels. But who expects population growth of 1.6%pa for 800 years? Australia’s fertility rate is now below replacement rate, and global fertility is falling steadily. Most demographic models suggest the phase of relatively rapid growth will end around the middle of this century, then population will probably level off, and perhaps decline a little. We don’t need draconian neo-Malthusian fertility control or similar policies.

Similarly, we can’t grow consumption of individual natural resources exponentially for ever, so we won’t. Instead, we’ll do what we’ve always done – find newer, more efficient and therefore less resource-intensive ways of doing things (e.g. substituting silicon fibre for copper wire, and satellite telecommunications for landlines), and find more valuable ways of using the resource we have. Most economic growth is not about doing more and more of the same stuff, it’s about finding new and more productive ways of using the stuff we have.

That’s why I believe continuing economic growth is sustainable, in every sense of the word.

mil-observer,

Where did I ever blame individuals? People call this sort of situation a Malthusian trap precisely because people really do have litte or no choice. If the State won't look after you and you can't trust the financial system, you will want children to support you in your old age, and even more children if the ones you have are likely to die. If the people in the next village are likely to try to massacre you, you need lots of young men for defence. If you have to go further and further for water and firewood, then children can help carry some of the load so you have time to grow food or earn money.

If you don't like examples with colonialism, which I admitted was part of the problem, consider the Anasazi, the Maya kingdoms, the Sumerians, the Greenland Vikings, etc. You might read Steven LeBlanc's "Constant Battles" and Jared Diamond's "Collapse".

China seems to be getting out of the trap with coercion, but so far, development is the only way to help people get themselves out of it without compulsion. Even then cultures can be slow to change. (Consider fertility rates in Saudi Arabia.) Unfortunately, development requires quite a lot of resources per person. This graph shows environmental footprint (consumption) against rank on the UN Human Development Index. No country is giving its people wonderful lives on a tiny footprint.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b2/Highlight_Findings_of_the_WA_S0E_2007_report_.gif

It doesn't help the debate if you call me a Nazi or I call you an innumerate fool. Let's play the ball and not the man. It is amusing, though, that you want to heap blame on the baby boomers, as if some postman who happened to have been born in 1950 ia the cause of your problems.

Rhian
As a whole I don't really disagree with anything that you have said. In some of the detail though while man has always strived to increase or improve the material conditions of his/her existence, we can diferentiate between say advances in medical and food technology as being different to the attaining of wealth.

Do we really need all those material possessions to strive for happiness which is really what mankind strives for through those advancements. A focus on the attainment of wealth can actually work against human development and happiness in many areas like work/life balance, psychological health and of course the environment.

Thinking futuristically, I would see a world where the wealth is more evenly spread. Noting of course that it would be almost impossible for absolute equality.

When we have an economic system that is not sustainable (for the most part) and actually encourages material accumulation as a worthy goal one minute and then works to decrease spending the next - it does seem a bit hodge podge and we have created a difficult instrument which requires precision fine-tuning and one that relies on expansion.

Humans are smart for the most part and we are capable of achieving great things and learning from our mistakes. There even appears to be talk of more regulation even in free-market USA since the financial crisis.

mil-observer
It would be impossible to discuss issues of sustainability or the environment without looking at the impact of population. To ignore it would be counter-productive. Technological development, frugality and being smarter without thought to population issues is to ignore a major aspect of the issues we are facing.

I am not sure how this relates to religion. It seems on OLO there is a propensity to use religious association with anything that someone disagrees with or labels like Malthusian. If anything de-population as you put it, is sorely under considered in issues of this nature.

Divergence, it seems you're losing it badly – try to connect with other people's recorded thoughts and opinions when debating. It makes the situation more honest and thereby much more enlightening. I never claimed that you ever did “blame individuals”, just as I never dished out any of the blanket labels, and never said anything about “some postman who happened to have been born in 1950”. A pity that such imagination as yours there cannot consider innovative ways of accommodating fluctuating populations.

I merely referred to feudal, eugenicist psychos because such are the priests of a strange quackery that is a logical consequence of Malthus' simplistic head counting. The vile quality of a Malthusian worldview is that it compels brutal suppression of innovation, local initiative, and even more brutal determinations over “who eats and who doesn't” (as John Passant put it succinctly in a related OLO thread the other day. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8150&page=0).

Your over-reaction seems to prove that I was too restrained in expressing my warnings about just where your Malthusian faith is headed. As for my supposed ad hominem tactic, you extrapolate several obvious misrepresentations from my text, thus expressing a dishonesty worth ad hominem dismissal.

pelican: on Rhian's support for the notion of sustainable economic growth, you refer to an economic system that is monetarist and which, in practice, often acts against actual productivity. Within the prevailing monetarists' claims to efficiency, takeovers and mass retrenchments are deemed profitable, as are practices which cannibalize infrastructure or raise prices while scrapping expanded services and R&D. Such circumstances describe actual degeneracy, not growth.

To put the challenge crudely, do you believe that “economic growth is best represented by $1 turned into $10, or 5 grain seeds become 6? If you believe the monetarists' symbolic notions and their preoccupation with figures, rather than the evidence of actual physical production, then any discussion will "lose touch" in a closed system. Reflection on monetarism seems apt, because Malthusians would hold similar, or at least very compatible, views about supposedly finite resources, while ignoring humans' infinite creative power.

I'm rather surprised the name "Herbert Spencer" has not yet arisen.
It was Spencer after all who -on reading Darwin's legendary piece- coined the term "Survival of the Fittest". He pointed out that the 'rules' of the laissez faire marketplace were very similar, if not identical to, Darwin's theory of evolution.
In other words, Capitalism is absolutely 'natural'.
This is quite probably true; however I would like to demonstrate a connection between this 'natural' system, and one of my favourite things.
Beer.
In a closed system, like a brewers vat, wonderful little organisms called 'yeast' go forth and multiply. In just a few days, these little buggers eat all the available sugar, and excrete alcohol.
Then they die, poisoned by their own toxic excretions.
Of course, in a more open system, this very natural consequence is generally avoided, by "Regulators"; predatory organisms which keep populations stable, and prevents them from sharing the fate of the yeast.
I would suggest our very natural Capitalist system has pushed us in the same direction as the yeast, both physically and economically.
In the absense of natural predators, we must regulate ourselves, for the sake of our offspring.
Surely as rational beings, we can find a more 'humane' method of regulation than killing each other off in endless wars, and enduring endless boom and bust economic cycles.
And as our population becomes more and more dominant, our world comes to look more and more like a closed system.

It is funny how socialists try and claim the environmental high ground.

All the socialist states were the worst polluters Soviet Russia, china, and all the satellites.

With capitalism and democracy brought pressure not to harm the environment.

The green movement itself is not a rational movement, tending to focus on populist perception as taswegian noted its phobia of nuclear has to a large extent been responsible for the huge reliance on coal.

We will eventually need to choose for ourselves nuclear or global warming.

As regards Herbert Spencer, certainly he was one of the first to believe that Survival of the Fittest related to man not the animals.

It is also interesting that Spencer was a follower of Hegel rather than Immanuel Kant.

It is also so interesting that Marx also was a student of Hegel.

So what a mixup we have of true history, when we find Adam Smith the father of the free-market telling us to make sure we know the difference between need and greed -

So looks like we need to be sure what the word success really means, just as freedom also like faith contains the same connotations.

Reckon we could blame most of it on the English language, possibly done deliberately to help capitalism get along, as was said years ago by the group who wanted to bring in Esperanto as the major global language.

Cheers - BB.

I would like to know where all the raw materials for the billions of solar panels and wind turbines is going to come from.

Recycling obviously.

But I might be wrong. Could the Green centrists on OLO inform me of the mines (sand, gallium ((bauxite & coal)), aluminium, selenium, cadmium, iron & copper)that they enthusiastically supported for construction at any time over the last 20 years?

I recently read that there is a shortage of the type of sand required in the manufacturing of ICs

Oh, and of course such mines will have to be Carbon neutral since Australia is on a mission to save the world.

Oops silly me, I have done it as well, correction, CO2 neutral. I certainly didn't mean to confuse that black nasty stuff with an odourless, colourless gas whose atmospheric concentration has been rapidly increasing over the last 8 years. While over the same time period global average temperatures have been falling. The same gas that botanists have described as plant food for god knows how long.

Rhian,

In 1930 or even 1950, I would have agreed with you and mil-observer that everything will be right if we help to spread development and just political systems everywhere around the world. Once people have access to family planning and large families don't pay, birthrates will drop to near replacement levels and can be fine-tuned with minor incentives.

In 2008, there simply aren't enough resources to do this. I refer you to the statistics on the Worldwatch Institute and Redefining Progress sites. There is also a graph on p. 10 of the 7/10/07 New Scientist, showing that, with present technology, it would take the resources of 3 Earths to give everyone a modest European standard of living, even with no social inequality. Our agriculture is based on fossil fuels as much as that of the Irish was based on the potato. See this article (originally from Harper's Magazine 2004)

http://agonist.org/don/20070114/eating_fossil_fuels

Then there is the damage to our environmental life support systems. To agree with you, I would have to believe that there is a vast global conspiracy involving much of the world's scientific community and many others. Petroleum geologists lying about peak oil. Hydrologists lying about falling water tables. Agronomists lying about how grain productivity can't keep up with population growth. Biologists lying about extinctions and collapsing fish stocks. Faked satellite pictures doctored to show deforestation, degraded land, and melting ice. Our own government lying about water shortages...

Barry's is an important article (and certainly not because I've been name-checked), but because the dangers of environmentalism are coming increasingly to the fore. What Barry calls "pseudo-left-wingers" (though I think the moniker "left-wing" per se, is currently redundant) are increasingly unchallenged in their political programme - a programme that advocates restraint!

'Restraint' and a sneaky condemnation of humanity are certainly not the most appropriate mindsets best designed to change the world.

The so-called "Green New Deal" being designed by environmental advocates across the world is intended to "employ" people in the undeveloped world as carbon-neutral stewards of their forests. Authoritarianism, psuedo-colonial attitudes to the carbon-neutral Third World amd contemptuous attitudes to one's fellow man in the First World are certainly not the stuff of any left-wing politics that I have ever subscribed to.

In the rapidly ensuing economic downturn, beware mainstream environmentalists who will increaingly follow the logic of their politics of restraint and revel in frugality and the war-economy. The dangers of their localism and parochialism, (their food miles infatuation, for example) will increasingly manifest itself in protectionism with all the political dangers that follow on from that.

Barry is raising a critical issue of some political-historical importance here. Are you for humanity's development, or do you blame humanity's development? If you buy into the latter - whatever provisos you may wish to append to it - development (improving living standards and other material benefits) will always play second fiddle to demands for austerity. If we buy into the environmental argument, we will not have a leg to stand on when living standards are cut; there will always be a higher ethical justification of it being in the interest of CO2 reductions, for instance.

Green advocates will always argue for austerity (which they falsly use as a counter to "profligacy"... in typically moralistic fashion). Those who want a better world for all (whatever "left-wing" label is attached) need to argue for development without prefixes; and that humanity is the source of creativity. Humanity and humanity's dominion over nature - is the solution not the problem.

Divergence: Good that you call "our government" for its lies about water shortages. I hold back on commenting about the other "lies" because there is so much misrepresentation, exaggeration and other distortion in sensationalist media that has already discredited itself on these issues and their implicit claims about "peak humanity".

But the "water shortage" canard is perhaps the worst, because its implications are potentially the direst for subject populations. As a rule of thumb here in Melbourne, the population has risen at least 1 million since the last meaningful development of water infrastructure. Since privatizing the public utilities of water supply, the free-trade cowards and whores of the major parties refer to little but austerity measures - always claiming that it is somehow nature that's working against us - even for this and previous years when rainfall and catchment rose significantly compared to past drought years.

The logic is simple: privatized water seeks profit and enjoys the whore-state's imposition of restrictions austerity as a cover for casual and regular price rises. The private water firms' investors thirst for profit means they cannot countenance any contribution to expanded water infrastructure, despite increased demand, except the most token and dishonest feedback-plunder of public treasure via MORE privatization i.e., PPPs! The major parties' free-trade lackeys just serve such continued looting of public purses.

Good on you AustinWilliams. Austerity is fascism. Note too that so many of the green misanthropes do indeed drive the most offensive and guzzling off-road SUV-4WD cars, while expressing all manner of vicious austerity for developing countries. I personally know one couple so disposed, and I have seen whole suburbs dominated by such nasty green hypocrites. These people are fascists; they are not "leftist" in any meaningful sense at all.

Divergence
I can empathise with your point that it may not be very rational to think that most scientists are liars. However, a significant number of people seem to think that most politicians are liars.

But it is factual that of the 13 existing Climate Change Computer models, not one agrees with another. So, are 13 groups of scientists all liars because they can not verify each others results? Anyone who thinks so would be in a distinct minority. But could it also be that the simplistic label of liar doesn't allow for self interest, taking the path of least resistance, hubris, chasing grants and a tendency of some to be fearful & pessimistic.

It would be true however, to say that scientists who predicted in the early 70s that the world food production would collapse were mostly wrong. At about the same time some scientists were predicting a coming ice-age and they have been shown to be mostly wrong. I say mostly because some parts of the USA experienced snowfalls 11 months of the year in the mid 70s and experienced extended cold periods.

Life is often a bit more complicated than truth and lies.

I am waiting for some truthful statements from OLO Green centrists about some factual instances of mines being accepted as necessary by Green groups.

Or is sourcing raw material for technological solutions to Global Warming similar to the pulp mill, Australians mainlanders are happy to import paper from Finland but view it as immoral to source Tasmanian paper.

NIMBYs and proud of it.

"Since when has it been left wing to be green?" Well Barry, since the left found that their desired redistribution model could be achieved through nefarious other green means, with their lazy political class corrupting statutory instruments based on models which will never work but to soak up large sections of our families earnest wages,property value,and savings.

I think you have put them down for the count, Dallas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.