Tomato environmentalism

Many green crusaders start off with a passion for the environment but end up embracing big state solutions. Blue environmentalism - with its belief in wider ownership, technological progress and market-based polluter-must-pay mechanisms – offers more hope for the planet.

“Environmentalists Are Like Tomatoes: They Begin Green, But By The End Of The Season They Are Red. In Short, Eco-Socialism Masqueraded As Environmentalism.”

- A quip quoted by Professor Michael Novak, author of ’The Universal Hunger for Liberty’

For many years – on key subjects like the natural environment, the arms trade and poverty - good intentions liberals have shamed conservatives. Voters have had to choose between conservatives, who are competent but lack an interest in breadth issues, and liberals, who are passionate about great causes but lack the tools to deliver any sustainable progress.

Michael Novak believes that it is time to redeem the environmental cause from those who falsely see hope in a bigger state.

Blue, or entrepreneurial, environmentalism

In National Review, John Fonte reviews Professor Novak’s ‘The Universal Hunger for Liberty’, and writes:

“Novak declares that it is time for a “blue” environmentalism to replace the “green” environmentalism that began in the 1970s and had great successes, but was sometimes “contaminated” with “eco-socialism.” Blue environmentalism is realistic and not opposed to economic growth: It holds that nature exists for man and not vice versa. Blue environmentalism “takes seriously the obligation to help the poor” escape from poverty by promoting markets and liberty, as well as the obligation to deal responsibly with our natural habitat. Novak characterizes “blue” as the “color of liberty, personal initiative, and enterprise” as contrasted not only with “green,” but explicitly with “red”—the traditional color of the Left and socialism.”

Journalist Thomas Bray, analysing claims by liberal left greens that the environmental movement was dying, suggested that command-and-control environmentalism had had its day. Entrepreneurial environmentalism could replace it, however.

Bray wrote that command-and-control, tomato environmentalism was characterised by “ever-increasing government regulation; public ownership of ever-growing amounts of land; restrictions on where and how people can live; international treaties limiting carbon dioxide (and thus energy use).” All this, he said, was “predicated on the assumption that the political elites know best how to organise things in a sustainable way”.

Blue, entrepreneurial environmentalists offer a different way forward…

• They believe that properly-defined property rights can often avoid the overuse of ‘unowned’ natural resources that economists have called the ’tragedy of the commons’.
• They support green taxation of cars, airlines and factories that are not meeting the external costs of their activities. Unlike those who would use green taxes to fatten the state, however, entrepreneurial environmentalists believe that non-polluters should receive tax relief equal in size to the tax burden on polluters.
• They believe that green technologies discovered by enterprising businesses offer more hope to humanity than the tomato environmentalists’ preference for an economic standstill.
• They believe that consumers and investors can be as powerful agents for change as values voters.

Comments

[simon clewer]

Greenies are bubbleheads with nothing to say - don't bother trying to see them as "greens" turning "red" ... just take joy and comfort that they find a home among the leftists, the confiscators and the bubbleheads in cahoots, sharing ignorance and prejudice together.