The Goode Family and laughing at the greenshirts

Green has gone from omm to ha ha. America’s ABC presents a new animated sit-com, The Goode Family, which mocks this most earnest new faith of the guilty class.   Of course, the BBC tried more gentle (and I suspect funnier) mockery of such greens three decades ago in The Goode Life, before the green lifestyle became a tiresome religious mission.     Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger say the green bubble has burst: Gestures that were once mundane--bringing your own grocery bags to the store, shopping for secondhand clothes, taking the subway--were suddenly infused with grand significance… What downscalers offered was not a better way to reduce emissions, but rather, a way to reduce guilt. In 2007, we asked environmentalists in focus groups about green consumption. None thought that consuming green would do much of anything to address a huge challenge like global warming. They did it anyway, they said, because it made them feel better… Apocalyptic fears meld seamlessly into utopian hopes. The end of the world is near--unless we heal all that divides us…   (W)hile utopianism has a bright side–it is a way of imagining a better world–it also has a dark side characterized by escapism and a disengagement from reality that marks all bubbles, green or financial…   And then, almost as quickly as it had inflated, the green bubble burst. Between January 2008 and January 2009, the percentage of Americans who told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that the environment was a “top priority” dropped from 56 percent to 41 percent.... Whatever romanticized vision of a simpler life that might have existed a year or two ago has largely been replaced by a fearful vision of a life of poverty or, at least, greater insecurity. UPDATE But some climate preachers still act like extras on a vicious green-baiting satire: GIVE up lamb roasts and save the planet. Government advisers are developing menus to combat climate change by cutting out “high carbon” food such as meat from sheep, whose burping poses a serious threat to the environment. Out will go kebabs, greenhouse tomatoes and alcohol…   “Changing our lifestyles, including our diets, is going to be one of the crucial elements in cutting carbon emissions,” said David Kennedy, chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change. Kennedy has stopped eating his favourite doner kebabs because they contain lamb. And: Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white. A global initiative to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so that they reflect more sunlight and heat could play a big part in containing global warming, he said yesterday. Andrew Bolt   Painting roofs white to combat climate change?   Dear God. And this idiot has been appointed by Obama to be his energy secretary? Bloody hell.

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