Environmentalism: RIP
The editors of National Review Online accurately sum up the characteristics of environmentalism:
Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960s. Every ecological problem was instantly transformed into a potential world-ending crisis, from the population bomb to the imminent resource depletion of the ‘limits to growth’ fad of the 1970s to acid rain to ozone depletion, always with an overlay of moral condemnation of anyone who dissented from environmental correctness. With global warming, the environmental movement thought it had hit the jackpot – a crisis sufficiently long-range that it could not be falsified and broad enough to justify massive political controls on resource use at a global level.
Let us hope that their conclusion proves to be true:
With the collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process and the likely rejection of cap-and-trade in Congress, climate mania may have run its course.
Barber Threatened with Legal Action for Recycling Hair
Big Brother Watch is reporting a story from the Blackburn Citizen…
A hairdresser called Jeff Stone has taken home the cut hair from his salon for 40 years, to use on his compost heap. The council has now said that this is against the law, because it is ‘trade waste’. He and other shop-keepers have been forced to pay the council £100 for trade waste sacks to be collected from his shop to comply with recycling guidelines, with the bags going into landfill rather than being used in the sensibly and environmentally useful disposal he has used for so long.
…and is rightly angry about it.
Mr Stone has also been told that he cannot take home newspapers he buys for his customers to read, since they were bought with cash from the till.
Some days I think that we are on a national suicide mission.
