Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:21:48 +0000 – By Steve MilloyPublisher, JunkScience.com/Author, "Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them"
Move over red, white, and blue -- America is going green. Green energy. Green technology. Green homes. Green cars. Green jobs. Green commerce. Green living. Green government. We've just elected our first green president, Barack Obama, as well as numerous senators and local representatives who campaigned on promises of leading America to greener pastures. You can color our your future green.
The green vision goes something like this: we are going to live in a "sustainable" manner and be kind to the planet. We will shrink our carbon footprints, eventually becoming carbon neutral.
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But perhaps, unlike others in a mad rush to start bicycling, recycling, and carbon de-cycling, you've been distracted from the greening of America by the many other crises and controversies our nation is facing: the global financial meltdown, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamic terrorism, volatile gasoline prices, spiraling health care costs, illegal immigration, and so on. They are, indeed, a formidable lot. That said, it's time you recognize that a great green tsunami is heading your way, threatening to wash away your standard of living and many of your liberties.
Like many Americans, your sense of the green movement may be that it simply advocates small lifestyle changes to benefit the environment. But the green agenda, in fact, is much more ambitious; it promotes countless new restrictions and regulations designed to reorder society from top to bottom.
And so the greens bombard us with an endless list of "dos" and "don'ts": Take colder showers. Turn the heat down. Use less air conditioning. Dry your clothes on a clothesline. Drive small, fuel efficient vehicles or stop driving altogether. Avoid imported or non-locally grown food. Bring your own bags to the supermarket. Buy energy efficient lightbulbs. Lose weight. (Fat people allegedly use more gasoline.) Buy expensive "green" electricity. Shun bottled water and drive-thru restaurants. Use cloth diapers. Clean your house with "natural" products. Use a non-motorized push lawnmower. Pay more for "fair trade" coffee. Don't use disposable cameras. Vacation closer to home.
All these admonitions have something in common -- youliving on a smaller, more inconvenient, more uncomfortable, more expensive, less enjoyable, and less hopeful scale. And the greens' moral hectoring is just the beginning. Green ideologues are bursting with an impatient zeal to begin dictating, through force of law, your mobility, diet, home energy usage, the size of your house, how far you can travel, and even how many children you can have.
You may be tempted to dismiss all this as a gross exaggeration. Make no mistake: living green is really about someone else microregulating you --downsizing your dreams and plugging each one of us into a brand new social order for which we never bargained. It's about you living under the green thumb and having the boundaries of your life drawn by others.
The central concept of this book is that there is hardly any area of your life that the greens consider off-limits to intrusion. There is almost no personal behavior of yours that they consider too trivial or too sacrosanct to regulate.
Greens aim to bring about their brave new world through federal law or local ordinance. But where that's not practical, they'll settle for inducing artificial shortages, pricing you out of your "bad" habits by hiking taxes and surcharges, or simply trying to condition you, and those around you, to believe you are engaging in an act of severe personal transgression.
The greens justify all this as necessary to solve our alleged "planetary emergency." But they don't intend for you to live this downsized and penitent lifestyle for some finite period of time until the supposed crisis is over. It is to be a permanent restructuring of life as you know it.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of "Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them" You can get a free chapter of Green Hell at GreenHellBook.com.
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