Thou Shalt Be Green

Time was, Americans could banally say “the conservatives” were the base of the major conservative party (i.e. the party that conserves classical liberal ideas). Today that party’s base is supposedly “the religious right,” and Newsweek was not alone in warning of “A Religious-Right Revival” last September upon Palin’s ascendancy into the GOP clerisy.

But if “the religious right” is the conservative GOP’s base, then the conservative GOP is no longer conservative. For religion is not a conservative value. In fact, to the extent that it prefers faith over reason, central authority over the individual, and the idealistic construction of a better world, it is a liberal value. With its unreasonable and unnatural moral standards and doctrines of infallibility, religion offers liberals a pretext for replacing the limited, natural rights basis of conservative government.

The prophet of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville (“peace be upon him,” as Muslims superstitiously demand upon mention of their less lettered prophet), warned 150 years ago that in the US “trust in common opinion will become a sort of religion, with the majority as its prophet.” And so it is that a “religious revival” lurks today, but issues in fact from the faithful Left’s consensus-flaunting green movement. Conservatives should always be skeptical of politics infused with populist religious ardor, whether it’s the state religion of Mother Russia or the enviro-jihad for Mother Earth.

The green movement is a political religion. Many are the liberals that snickered at Mandy Moore’s character in the movie “Saved” for her naïve evangelism, but espouse the enviro-jihad’s dogmas of sin and salvation. In the green religion, the original sin of humans is to exist: for if carbon dioxide is a pollutant, so are we. Environmentalists choreograph entire lifestyles to save humanity and reach “Ecotopia" (a term The Economist sardonically employed to describe a “carbon-neutral” city in the UAE, where “a huge degree of central planning, control and even restrictions on individual freedoms is needed to make [it] work.”)

For example, the mother-son authors of the new book “Generation Green,” having consulted the Delphi-organic Oracle, decree (with all the modesty that can accompany a life-style controlling dogmatic “Guide to Living an Eco-Friendly Life") what food you should eat, what stores you should buy it from, the blankets you should sleep in, the lights you should work under, the deodorant you should use, and the sports you should play. Even on partying, these haughty neo-scribes command you to e-vite guests to a green party where you serve organic free trade iced tea in eco-friendly glass bottles, then rummage through the neighbors trash to find something you can makeover with eco-paints and turn into art, which can later be sold to make money for a green cause.

Remember the offense Minnesota’s middle class took when Northwest Airlines distributed its “101 ways to save money” list to its laidoff workers? “Shop in thrift stores,” “borrow a dress for a big night,” “don’t be shy about pulling something out of the trash.” NWA apologized. Why won’t Generation Green?

The green faith has settled in, and no apologies linger. “It’s almost as though you’re debating some mystic,” says Twin Cities based talk show host Jason Lewis “No matter what happens it’s confirmation of global warming.” Enviro-jihadists “are basing it on faith, it is the new religion, and it is the religion of socialism disguised as an environmental policy.”

Nature magazine reports this year – the coldest since 2000 – that the earth will not warm until 2015. Oceans stopped warming five years ago. 31,000 American scientists signed a petition this year rejecting global warming. Over 650 international scientists met this month to dissent to man-made global warming, including Nobel Prize winner for Physics and self-described “sceptic” Ivar Giaever, who said, “Global warming has become a new religion.”

If only Generation Green and its international apostles would apply the creative logic of their eco-party fundraiser to the nuances of science and its negative feedback loops. Melting ice bergs release iron, for instance, promoting growth of CO2 consuming algae. Pollutant particles reflect sunlight, cooling the planet. Money lost to Minnesota’s Next Generation Act, which will make energy more expensive by requiring the state’s utilities to provide 25% renewable electricity by 2025, could have been spent on important ventures, such as preventing nuclear terrorism, which is not exactly an eco-friendly threat.

The enviro-jihad is romantic at heart, so who better than the great Spanish romanticist Gustavo Adolfo Becquer to poeticize its mission? In rhyme 11, after rejecting two mortal beauties, he meets his unattainable ideal:

I am a dream, the impossible,

Vain phantom of fog and light

I am incorporeal, I am intangible;

I cannot love you

-Oh come, you come!

The green religion's ecotopia is just as impossible, but the effects of striving for it will be all too tangible.