The Hill They're Going to Die On

One of the key problems that politicians faces is how to spend political capital, that vague and soft feeling of goodwill that allows our governing class to get this or that policy implemented.  The amount a politico can spend and still stay in office, when dealing with this issue or that.  When the big issues, the really big issues come up, he asks a harder question:  Is this a hill I want to die on?  It seems Stephane Dion has chosen his hill, last year's most fashionable political cause, the environment.  He hopes that it will be this year's fashionable cause too.  The great majority of Canadians have limited or non-existent scientific background, they hear the media - whom they sort of trust - and many scientists - whom they greatly trust - tell them that a vast cataclysm approaches.  They nod their acceptance.  If environmentalism is a religion, with its fanatics and rank and file members, Global Warming is damnation. 

Christians for millennia have believed that sin and a lack of faith will bring a soul to hell.  The preacher calls for repentance and belief, the congregation nods says Amen.  Christianity used to be full of Sunday Christians - most of these people now sleep in on the Sabbath - and so environmentalism is full of Monday Greens, or whenever they pick up the Blue Boxes in your area.  Global Warming is about as remote an abstraction as hell-fire to most modern Canadians.  Gaia make me Good, but not just yet.  As religions go extreme environmentalism is about as lame, and ultimately doomed, as it gets.  If you don't follow the Articles of the Green Faith you'll bring about the end of civilization, if you do follow the Articles of the Green Faith you'll do precisely the same thing.  Witness the tremendous antipathy shown by extreme environmentalists toward nuclear power, the cleanest and most efficient (excluding the high capital costs mandated by government regulation) source of electrical power in human history.  Anyone interested in a clean future, as opposed to a Green (i.e. anti-human) future, is championing nuclear power.  Talk of sustainability is a gambit.  You cannot power a modern post-industrial society with wind generators and solar power. 

We are passing through a Green Fever, similar to the ones experience in the late 1980s and early 1970s (when the first Earth Day was celebrated).  Rejecting religion does not replace the need it filled.  Whether in the Florence of Savonarola's day, or modern Canada, long periods of prosperity tend to imbue many with guilt and a form of self-loathing.  The attempt to substitute material goods for spiritual values is, of course, futile.  Sooner or latter this sense of futility provokes anger and guilt among the deluded.  They sense, dimly, the placing of false idols (ideals) before true ones.  A return is needed, to first principles, to nature, to some imagined golden age - conservatives are forever, falsely, being accused of doing exactly this.  They seek absolution.  Stephane Dion is offering exactly that.  As generations of ministers of the cloth have found, parishioners want to be only so holy.  True piety might be unpleasant or inconvenient.  A little sacrifice for a little while is fine, but let's not go to extremes.  The Liberal leader is about to find out this brutal fact, about the gap between belief and action - luckily he served in Jean Chretien's cabinet, so it won't be too alien an experience.  If he does force an election this fall he will lose.  Majority governments are won and lost in this country in the 905 region, a region utterly dependent on the car.  Stephen Harper, rather losing sense of himself, called Dion's Carbon Tax plan "crazy" and that it would "screw" the country.  Quite right, but hey it's a cult and they're drinking pretty deeply at the kool-aid these days.