The Spoilers

Canada and Australia are now being viewed as the bad boys of the international environmental movement. Neither country has made much of an effort to join those like the European Union which have pledged to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and to lower their footprint on the international atmosphere. Which is to say that under new management of a new government, Australia has decided to throw in the clean-up towel, joining Canada.

Even China has ingenuously portrayed itself as becoming more environmentally conscious, although there is little sign that anything substantial has been put into play; their constant smog levels are staggeringly dreadful, impacting on peoples' health and raising carbon emissions worldwide. The dependence on particulate-producing coal-fired furnaces with huge smokestackes in evidence everywhere continues unabated.

The United States never did sign on to Kyoto, and it too has a significant impact on global carbon dioxide emissions, given its massive population and its industrial and mining and exploration activities, largely dependent though not to the same scale as China, on coal-fired energy. Though through the enactment of cleaner-burning fuels regulations and better automotive designs there has been some notable reductions.

India is another hugely populous country, emerging at almost a similar rate to China, as a great source of environmental pollution. Not to mention all of the other catch-up economies elsewhere in the world, all wanting a piece of the manufacturing-and-trade pie. No one seems to be listening really seriously to the little countries whose fragile existence within areas threatened by rising sea levels is making them frantically anxious over their future.

And now, here's Britain suddenly discovering just as others have done that the renewable-energy replacements for petroleum products are costly, inefficient and hugely unpopular with consumers and taxpayers alike, though they're obviously one and the same. People generally feel they should support green energy, but when it comes to paying their energy bills their enthusiasm tends to wane proportionately to the constant rise in consumption and pricing.

"The 'green crap', as the Tories call it, are the funds that pay for insulating the homes of elderly people and which support thousands of British manufacturing jobs.
"This is depressingly cynical -- only bothering about political spin, not in protecting our children's future", complained the Liberal Democratic president Tim Farron on news that the governing British coalition has begun to turn its back on green energy.

Prime Minister David Cameron is reported to have informed ministers of the Crown to scrap the "green crap" driving up household energy bills. He promised at one time to lead the "greenest government ever", and that promise undoubtedly endeared him to the hearts of voters, who in theory would support that aspiration, but as a practical measure don't appreciate higher energy bills.

Still, his government has promised to "roll back" green levies which amount to roughly $190 annually on the average consumer's energy bill. "He's telling everyone, 'We've got to get rid of all this green crap'. He's absolutely focused on it", admitted a senior Conservative source; denied, of course by Mr. Cameron's office. The pre-election campaign slogan "vote blue, go green" has been deep-ditched.

In Canada, environmentalists are livid about Prime Minister Stephen Harper's casual attitude toward green energy alternatives. Wind power has proven hugely unpopular as a blight on the landscape and a threat to people's health. Solar-generated power has not proven anything but costly, and the Province of Ontario which pushes both expensive alternatives had gifted consumers with the most expensive energy costs in North America.

While the Official Opposition in Parliament blame the Conservative-led government for Canada's blooming bad reputation on the energy file, it was a Liberal government under Jean Chretien, formerly prime minister, that signed onto Kyoto, promising that Canada's future emissions would be sharply reduced. Trouble was, the Chretien government did nothing to forward that goal, and nor did the succeeding Liberal government of Paul Martin.

Environmental protection yes, to a degree. A degree that doesn't hamper resource extraction, manufacturing, and any number of other vital indices of a country's wealth. Besides which, a whole lot of skeptics keep reminding the puzzled public that the jury is still out on the causes of climate change and that it could very well be that human activities have little-to-nothing to do with the changing climate and environment, and nature everything.

And no one, particularly any human agency, can tell nature how to conduct her business.