Syrup Is as Canadian as a Maple Leaf. That Could Change With the Climate

Another NYT scare below. It is highly likely that the changing seasons noted below are part of a natural fluctuation. Nobody is even trying to correlate the changes with CO2 levels. And even if there is a real decline in syrup production, it's not going to bother anybody much. Most syrup sold is ersatz, a factory product. We read: "In the United States, consumers generally prefer imitation syrups, likely because of the significantly lower cost and sweeter flavour"

UPDATE: It seems that the "decline" fears did not work out. We read: "Maple syrup production rises, despite shorter season. US maple syrup production increased slightly this year, even though the sap-collecting season was shorter than last year’s, the US Department of Agriculture said. The country produced 4.2 million gallons, up 1 percent from 2018."


A growing body of research suggests that warming temperatures linked to climate change may significantly shrink the range where it’s possible to make maple syrup.

In fact, climate change is already making things more volatile for syrup producers. In 2012, maple production fell by 54 percent in Ontario and by 12.5 percent in Canada overall, according to data from the Canadian government, because of an unusually warm spring.

Canada produces roughly 70 percent of the world’s maple syrup. That was worth about $370 million in 2017.

Warm weather can hurt syrup production because the process depends on specific temperature conditions: daytime highs above freezing with nighttime lows below freezing. This specific variation — which tends to happen as winter turns to spring, and fall into winter — causes pressure differences in the trees that allow the sap to flow. And it’s the sap that the farmers boil to create maple syrup.

To release the sap, maple producers make a small hole in the tree and insert a tap that allows it to spill out. But there’s only a small window of time when conditions are right.

“You’re really only talking six to eight weeks,” said Mark Isselhardt, a sugar maple expert at the University of Vermont. “Everyday that you don’t get sap flow has the potential to really impact the total yield for that operation.”

But because of climate change, some years those key temperatures are more elusive.

Instead of six or eight weeks to produce syrup in 2012, the Fultons had just 13 days. “We started the 8th of March and finished the 21st of March,” Mrs. Fulton-Deugo said.

“That type of condition will happen more often and it can have an impact like the impact it had in 2012,” said Daniel Houle, a biologist at the Quebec Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks.

In addition to the shorter tapping window, spring is also arriving earlier. The phenomenon is called season creep and it means that fall ends later as well.

That creates more headaches for producers, and not only in Canada, because the timing of putting in taps is crucial. “I’m in my sixties,” said Helen Thomas, executive director of the New York Maple Producers Association and a syrup producer. “When I was a kid, my dad had the rule that you tapped around March 15th.” This year, they were tapping in late January.

Production techniques, though, are thoroughly modern. For now, that has helped the farm to adapt.

While many imagine sap collecting into metal buckets attached to trees, the Fultons and most other syrup producers now use plastic taps connected to long lines of food-grade plastic tubing. The tubes zigzag through acres of forest from tree to tree before pouring out into a collection tank. Because the system is cleaner than older methods, it allows producers to tap earlier without fear that the trees will plug the holes, the way a scab covers a cut, before the sap begins to flow. On the Fulton’s sugarbush, the taps were in the trees weeks before the sap ran.

To help coax the sap out of the trees, producers use vacuum pumps. “We’ve seen that you get basically double the amount of sap when you use vacuum,” Mr. Isselhardt said.

But the weather conditions still need to be right. And, of course, you still need trees.

Maples need to be about 40 years old before they can be tapped, though they don’t come into their prime, according to Ms. Thomas, until they’re about 90 years old. “If I planted maple trees today, it would be my grandchildren that would be harvesting the sap from them,” she said.

But a recent study suggests that the changing climate is a threat to that process of growth and renewal. Andrew B. Reinmann, an ecologist at the City University of New York, along with colleagues at Boston University and the United States Department of Agriculture, looked at what happens to trees when snowpack declines.

Snowpack is important because, when temperatures dip, it acts as a blanket over the ground that prevents the soil, and the tree roots that reside in it, from freezing. By scraping off snow from some of the forest plots at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire during the first four to six weeks of winter, Dr. Reinmann and his colleagues were able to mimic the delayed snowfall that is predicted by century’s end in the National Climate Assessment.

“After the first year of snow removal, growth rates of the sugar maple trees declined by 40 percent or so, and growth rates remained suppressed between 40 and 55 percent below their growth rates prior to the start of the experiments,” Dr. Reinmann said.

Dr. Reinmann has also been running a separate experiment where he heats up the soils to see if the increase in warmer temperatures linked to an earlier spring would offset losses from frost damage. So far, his results suggest that it doesn’t.

Diane M. Kuehn, a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, has researched the perceptions of climate change by maple syrup producers. “What I heard frequently from people was that they’re not concerned about themselves during their lifetime,” she said, “But they are concerned about future generations and their families.”

SOURCE





75 Conservative Groups Oppose ‘Any Carbon Tax’ Days After Mitt Romney Was Reportedly ‘Looking At’ One

Dozens of conservative groups signed an open letter opposed to “any carbon tax” bill that Congress might consider.
The letter comes after Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney told reporters he was “looking at” a carbon tax bill.
“A carbon tax increases the cost of everything Americans buy and lowers Americans’ effective take home pay,” conservative groups wrote.

Seventy-five conservative groups signed a public letter to Congress opposing “any carbon tax” days after reports that Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney openly considered backing carbon tax bill.

“We oppose any carbon tax,” conservative groups, led by Americans for Tax Reform, wrote in their letter, which was published online Monday morning.

While the letter is not specifically aimed at Romney, it’s meant to warn Republicans that their conservative base is not in favor of taxing carbon dioxide emissions. (RELATED: Mike Bloomberg Devotes $500 Million To Ending Coal Industry, Influencing 2020 Elections)

Only a few GOP lawmakers have backed carbon tax legislation, but there’s been a growing lobbying effort by some groups to get Republicans to back a carbon tax as a way to fight global warming.

Big corporations, including oil and gas companies, have increasingly embraced a carbon tax. Exact proposals vary, but supporters often push carbon taxes in exchange for tax cuts elsewhere, fewer regulations or a liability shield against climate change lawsuits.

U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) speaks at a news conference about the Tobacco to 21 Act, which would raise the minimum age to buy tobacco products and e-cigarettes to 21, on Capitol Hill
U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) speaks at news conference about the Tobacco to 21 Act, which would raise the minimum age to buy tobacco products and e-cigarettes to 21, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., May 8, 2019. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein.

Romney recently told E&E News he was “looking at” carbon tax legislation put forward by Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons — the same legislation Coons co-sponsored with former Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake in 2018.

“Taxes have never been my intent, but we’ll see what he has to say,” Romney said. “I would very much like to see us reduce our carbon emissions globally, and we’ll see if this might help.”

Romney’s remarks got a strong response from conservative activists opposed to carbon taxes, which they say will hit working-class Americans hardest and do little, if anything, to fight global warming.

“It isn’t surprising that a man with a car elevator in his garage would consider supporting a tax that would hurt the working man while benefiting the money changers in the financial temples of Wall Street,” Dan Kish, distinguished senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Romney’s office said Romney has not committed to any legislation to tax CO2 emissions. Though if Romney did embrace such a policy, it would stand in stark contrast to his 2012 presidential run when he railed against the Obama administration’s “war on coal.”

“Senator Romney is listening and having discussions with many of his colleagues about various proposals, and he hasn’t committed to any legislation,” Romney spokeswoman Liz Johnson told TheDCNF.

Americans for Tax Reform Founder and President Norquist speaks during an on-stage interview with The Atlantic's Senior Editor Thompson at The Atlantic Economy Summit in Washington
Americans for Tax Reform Founder and President Grover Norquist (L) speaks during an on-stage interview with The Atlantic’s Senior Editor Derek Thompson at The Atlantic Economy Summit in Washington March 18, 2014. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.

Even with GOP support, a carbon tax bill is not expected to pass Congress or get signed into law by President Donald Trump. Conservative activists, however, see carbon tax legislation as an ever-present enticement for moderate Republicans looking to score political points with liberals.

“A carbon tax increases the cost of everything Americans buy and lowers Americans’ effective take home pay. A carbon tax increases the power, cost, and intrusiveness of the government in our lives,” conservative groups wrote to lawmakers Monday.

So far, GOP-sponsored carbon tax bills gone nowhere in Congress. Legislation introduced by Coons and Flake last Congress gained little traction, and a carbon tax bill introduced by former Florida Rep. Carlos Curbelo fizzled out after he lost his 2018 re-election bid.

SOURCE




Reality bites Joe Biden’s “Clean Energy Revolution”

Tallying its huge impacts on our energy, industries, living standards and personal freedoms

Paul Driessen

Presidential candidate Joe Biden recently announced his “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice.” While it might be viewed as a Green New Deal Lite, the plan would inflict enormous economic, environmental and societal pain on most of the nation, for no climate benefits.

First, as I’ve pointed out here and elsewhere, Mr. Biden’s “climate emergency” exists in computer models and alarmist reports, but not in the Real World windows. Tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, melting ice and rising seas are no more frequent or severe than humanity has experienced many times before.

Before we destroy our energy and economic system, we need to see solid, irrefutable proof that we face an actual climate crisis – and be able to debate and cross examine those who make such claims. So far, instead of a debate, climate crisis skeptics just get vilified and threatened with prosecution.

Second, anytime you hear the term “environmental justice,” you know someone is trying to create a new category of victims, sow more discord along racial and economic lines, and punish someone new in the name of “justice.” While we still have pockets of pollution, America’s cars, air and water have been cleaned up dramatically since 1970. Moreover, the best way to prevent, survive and recover from any disaster is to have the energy, wealth and technologies that fossil fuels continue to make possible.

Third, there’s nothing clean, green, renewable or sustainable about wind, solar or battery power. Those technologies require enormous amounts of land, concrete, steel and other raw materials – and many of their most critical materials are extracted and processed using child labor and near-slave wages for adults, with few or no workplace safety rules, and with horrific impacts on land, air and water quality.

Fourth, the Biden plan would cost many times the “$1.7 trillion in federal funds over ten years” that his talking points use to entice voters: dollars, lost jobs, lower living standards and fewer freedoms.

The former VP would rejoin the Paris climate treaty; reverse many Trump corporate tax cuts; seek or impose multiple mandates, “enforcement mechanisms” and “legally binding” emission reductions; and at some point demand cap-and-trade schemes and/or taxes on what he likes to call “carbon emissions.”

That term is intended to suggest dirty soot coming out of smoke stacks. The actual emissions are carbon dioxide, the life-giving gas that humans and animals exhale, and plants use to grow and produce oxygen. The more CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere, the better and faster crop, forest and grassland plants grow.

Mr. Biden would also impose tariffs on “carbon-intensive” goods imported from countries that “fail to meet their climate obligations.” That will quickly affect just about everything we eat, drink, drive, do and use – because his plan would soon make it difficult for America to grow or produce much of anything ... and China, India and other rapidly developing countries are not about to reduce their fossil fuel use.

Every Biden Plan provision would increase the cost of living and of doing business. The folks he hobnobs with – who will write, implement and enforce these rules ... and bankroll his election campaign – won’t much notice or mind the soaring prices. But middle and blue-collar classes certainly will.

Other components of the Biden Green New Deal multiply those impacts and costs.

* His ultimate goal is to rapidly replace America’s fossil fuels with industrial wind and solar facilities – to provide electricity for factories, hospitals, homes, offices, data centers, vehicles and countless other uses.

Modern industrialized societies simply cannot function on expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent electricity. As Germany, Britain, Spain, Australia and other countries have shown, that kind of energy eliminates 3-4 times more jobs than it creates – especially in factories and assembly lines, which cannot operate with repeated electricity interruptions ... and cannot compete with foreign companies that get affordable 24/7/365 coal-based electricity and pay their workers far less than $15, $25 or $45 per hour.

* “Rigorous new fuel economy standards” would speed the rate at which 100% of all cars and light trucks become electric.

This program would be supported by “more than 500,000 new public charging outlets by the end of 2030,” to augment private charging stations in homes and neighborhoods – paid or subsidized by taxpayers. It would also require upgrading home and neighborhood electrical systems to provide far more power for rapid vehicle charging, and longer hours of peak demand. Another trillion dollars?

Extending mileage for (much more expensive) electric vehicles would mean lighter, smaller cars ... and thus thousands of additional deaths and millions of additional serious injuries. Dollar costs would soar. But how do we quantify the cost of  injury and death tolls?

* Federal tax and environmental laws, subsidies and other incentives would be used to persuade counties and communities to “to battle climate change” by altering their zoning and other regulations “to eliminate sprawl and allow for denser, more affordable housing near public transit.”

This would significantly impact suburban living and property values. And packing more people into more apartment buildings would likely mean diseases spread more rapidly and to more people.

* Other federal programs would provide subsidies and incentives for home and business owners to reduce “the carbon footprint” of US buildings 50% by 2035. battery disposal?

This could involve retrofitting them for improved energy efficiency and/or replacing gas furnaces with electric heat or heat pumps – or just tearing down and replacing entire buildings. More trillions of dollars.

* The Biden plan would also ban new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.

This would lock up vast quantities of valuable, vitally needed fuel. It would replace tens of billions of dollars of annual federal and state government bonus, rent, royalty and tax revenue with tens of billions in subsidies for pseudo-renewable energy. It would eliminate millions of jobs in the petroleum and petrochemical industries, in numerous companies that rely on those industries, and in countless sectors of local and state economies that depend on all that public land energy activity and revenue.

* Finally, a new transcontinental high-speed (electricity-powered) rail system would connect the coasts – or at least a couple of cities on each coast – for a few trillion dollars and with a lot of eminent domain.

This is California’s costly “bullet train to nowhere” on steroids. It would bypass numerous towns and cities, marginalizing many of them and destroying trillions of dollars in property values – especially if his rail system is intended to replace or significantly reduce air travel and long distance driving.

The cumulative electricity demand for all these Biden Green New Deal programs would be at least double what the United States currently generates. It would mean wind turbines and solar panels on scales that few can even imagine ... especially as they are installed in less and less windy and sunny areas. And if all this power is to be backed up by batteries – since coal and gas-fired backup power generators would be eliminated – we would need billions of batteries ... and thus even more land and raw materials.

Exactly how many turbines, panels and batteries? On how many millions of acres? Made from how many billions of tons of metals and concrete? Extracted from how many trillions of tons of ore? In the USA or overseas, in someone else’s backyard? Under what child labor and environmental standards?

After banning oil and gas permitting, would Mr. Biden open other federal lands to exploration, mining and processing for the rare earth and other materials these massive “renewable” energy systems will require? That would certainly create new industries and jobs. Or will America just have to be 100% dependent on Chinese and other foreign suppliers for all these technologies?

All of this smells of eco-fascism: state control of companies and production, government control of our lives, and silencing and punishing anyone who challenges climate crisis claims or green energy agendas.

Perhaps Mr. Biden can address all these issues – at his next town hall meeting or press conference. Indeed, the time to discuss these issues is NOW. Before we get snow-jobbed and railroaded into actions we will sorely regret. Or maybe those of us who realize how insane all of this is will just have to opt out -- and establish Biden-free zones and climate sanctuary states where none of his policies and restrictions apply.

Via email





Pollen is getting worse, and climate change is the culprit

The claims below are nearly right.  Current higher levels of CO2 are good for plants so they send out more pollen.  But while CO2 levels continue to rise, global temperatures are not rising

For millions of people, high pollen counts are a perennial woe, and one that has kicked into high gear in the Boston area recently. But pollen seasons are getting longer and more intense, as allergy sufferers will surely attest, a trend specialists have linked to global warming.

“There’s really good research showing that allergy seasons are getting more severe, and more people are developing allergies, because of climate change,” said Dr. John Costa, medical director of the allergy clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere provide plants with more food, making them larger and leading to more pollen, sniffling, and sneezing, research has shown.

Jennifer M. Albertine, a visiting lecturer in environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College, grew timothy grass in a greenhouse with elevated carbon dioxide and ozone levels to try to simulate what might happen to the common pollen producer if carbon dioxide levels increased to 800 parts per million, roughly double what they are now.

The plants produced about 2.5 times as much pollen. “It’s plant food, right? So when you have more carbon dioxide, the plants are going to grow bigger,” she said. “And when you have bigger plants, you have more pollen.”

Making matters worse were April’s record rains, which allowed grass and vegetation to flourish.

In the past few weeks, pollen counts have increased because it has been dry, Costa said. Rain weighs down pollen, sending it to the ground. In dry, gusty weather, pollen flies into the air.

So rain offers a reprieve, but at a cost. “We will pay for it eventually,” Costa said.

The gender of trees also plays a role, said Naomi Cottrell, principal of the Boston landscape architecture firm Crowley Cottrell.

For years, cities and towns asked landscape architects to avoid planting female trees, which bear fruit or seed pods that can litter sidewalks and muck up car windshields. Instead they planted male trees, which emit pollen.

Male trees have become so prevalent that plant nurseries, bowing to supply and demand, overwhelmingly stock male saplings, Cottrell said.

In the meantime, pollen will continue to wreak havoc on allergies. Dr. Andrew MacGinnitie, clinical director of the Boston Children’s Hospital division of immunology, provided a few pointers — limit exposure by closing the windows and turning on the air conditioning, which can filter out pollen; shower before bed to wash the accumulated pollen away; and take an over-the-counter antihistamine, or use a nasal spray.

SOURCE





The environment is too important to be left to eco-warriors

Australia's Noel Pearson below draws on his consultive Aboriginal culture to argue that environmental issues should be resolved in a non-confrontaional way.  He makes a powerful case against current Greenie behaviour.  What he overlooks is that the Greenies WANT confrontation. They get their kicks out of parading as more righteous, more caring and wiser.  It fulfils ego needs for them.

You can see that in the way they immediately dream up a new issue as soon as they get their way on their previous issue.  Nothing satisfies them. Nothing can satisfy them.  Their lives would be dull and empty without their campaigns.  We are not dealing with psychologically whole people where Greenie campaigners are concerned


Can a cause for the right succeed in the long run if it is pursued through unrighteous means? Can causes for the good be selective in their adherence to science? Or do righteous ends justify unrighteous means?

This is the crisis confronting environmentalism. It suffered a grievous loss at the federal election and the Adani red line is broken. This may be a crisis of legitimacy. The question is whether political environmentalism is turning off voters and hardening attitudes against the necessary effective policies to secure future sustainability. Are the means employed by political environmentalism destroying the possibility of Australia achieving the desired end of sustainability through consensus? Or is consensus unnecessary because the morally right end means the maxim “by any means necessary” applies?

Political environmentalism is undermining the cause of sustainability because short-term expediency and tactical opportunism is trumping long-term strategic consensus-building. Environmentalism has degenerated into the binary of cultural war when it needs to transcend such wars. Its leaders have led the movement into a zero-sum game, where political victory in one battlefield is countered by loss in another.

We should first explain what we mean by causes for the right.

Political parties seeking power in government are not in the business of the right. Electoral politics are by definition ruthless, with few holds barred. Lies, half-truths, fake news, negative advertising and dirt files are part of the repertoire of power in politics. One party’s Mediscare is the other party’s retiree tax.

Former Labor NSW state secretary and federal minister Graham Richardson captured the ethos of politics in his memoir Whatever It Takes. Noble and ignoble things are achieved by marshalling political power.

While causes for power are amoral, there are causes for the right. Civil rights and the anti-apartheid movement are examples. Emancipation and antislavery are even older precedents. Such causes mobilise the political process and power for good ends. Conservation is such a cause. Few would dispute it is a moral duty of humankind regardless of political affiliation and preference.

Causes for the truth must be ethical, otherwise they suffer damage. Moral integrity is the great currency of righteous movements, but the political environmentalists have jeopardised the cause of conservation by allowing it to descend into the hyper-partisan battlefield of culture and politics.

It is exposed to the 51-49 per cent risk. When your party wins 51, then you may win tactical victories, but when it is 49 you have put your cause in peril. This is what has happened to Adani after the election.

I want to allege five profound mistakes the political environmentalists are making in Australia:

First, they are alienating the lower classes in their droves. This is the lesson of the 2019 election. The political environmentalists pushed climate policies that worked for the post-material middle class, but cared less about the economically precarious. More than the costs, it is the movement’s superior cultural attitude that pisses off the lower classes in such a visceral way.

Second, they are alienating indigenous peoples by pushing the costs of conservation on to those who have not created the crisis. Indigenous leaders such as Marcia Langton and Warren Mundine have highlighted the green lockup of indigenous lands from development.

These groups manipulate and exploit divisions within landowner communities. They divide and rule the same as mining companies do, setting up puppets that favour their agenda. We saw this in the campaign against the Kimberley Land Council. We see it in Cape York in relation to Wild Rivers and blanket World Heritage listing proposals.

Traditional owners supported conservation goals and helped create by agreement new national parks and other conservation tenures. But the political environmentalists are never satisfied. They want everything locked up.

They are making enemies of the country’s largest landowners because they use electoral leverage with governments to subjugate land rights. If they are alienating the land rights movement, which is more aligned to conservation than other sectors, what does that say about them?

A third problem is they are at the forefront of deploying so-called “new power” in their public campaigns. Through the diffusion of social media and decentralised campaigning, green groups began to seriously challenge the “old power”. GetUp co-founder Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms explain this development in their 2018 book New Power.

Breaking the old power monopoly is welcome; however, the dilemmas of social media and its susceptibility to manipulation and its effects on civil society and democratic governance are troubling. Twitter and Facebook have just created online mob behaviour. Hardly platforms for moral causes.

And the political environmentalists have used the new power to promote conservation and climate change action in as cynical a way as the forces against which they are pitted. Getup and Sleeping Giants use the same tools of manipulation as deliberately as Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica.

A fourth problem is the political environmentalists are highly selective in their adherence to science, and in so doing bring science into disrepute in public policy debates. Who really believed the black-throated finch was the environmental issue of Adani? The poor critters were used as a proxy for opposition to coalmining.

Why the charade? The Queensland Labor government should have been honest with the public and said: the policy question we face is whether the Galilee Basin should be opened up to coalmining in the context of its contribution to the crisis of global warming. But because they wanted to walk two sides of the street at once — intimating to greenies they did not support Adani while intimating to regional workers that they supported coalmining — they did not bring the crux policy question to a head and provide their answer to it.

They lacked the courage of their convictions and simply did not have the leadership to untie the Gordian knot that expanded coalmining in the Galilee Basin represents. And now the May 18 loss sees them stampeding over the poor birds and anything else standing in the way of their electoral prospects next year.

The stances environmental groups take in relation to any number of issues — nuclear energy and aquaculture, for example — evince a selective adherence to science.

Does not environmental science tell us about the interconnectivity of the planet, and if nuclear power is used in Europe, Asia and the Americas, and contributes to lower carbon emissions, why is the debate on nuclear power not on the basis of science and the mitigation of risks associated with nuclear energy, instead of a green version of obscurantism?

The proponents of safer nuclear waste disposal in Australia (which included the late Bob Hawke) have got a point that is worth subjecting to science rather than outright prohibition. While the case for domestic nuclear power may not be strong, it is a substantial source of energy throughout the world, and as a uranium producer we are obliged to consider our role in the management of its waste. There are strong geopolitical arguments in favour of Australia assuming this responsibility and mitigating the large risks involved, which we are better placed to carry than most other countries. After all, it is the green­ies who tell us the planet is one and national boundaries are environmentally meaningless.

The fifth and most fundamental problem is the political environmentalists have aligned environmentalism with socialism rather than conservatism. Another way of saying this is they have aligned environmentalism with progressivism rather than conservatism.

There is a fundamental philosophical problem at the heart of contemporary environmentalism. I do not mean in respect of the appreciation of the natural environment. I mean in respect of where our motive must come from in order to conserve the good things we have been bequeathed from our ancestors for the benefit of our future unborn.

This is the motive that is unanswered by the utilitarian calculations of liberals and socialists. Not everything is about price. Conservatives understand that some things are valuable because they are priceless.

English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s 2012 book Green Philosophy is the starting point for a new conservative approach to conservation. The approach is old — about stewardship and our responsibility to bequeath to future generations the gifts we received from our ancestors — but its application to the environmental crises facing our homelands, including global warming, is new. The climate obscurantists who are in the same binary as the political environmentalists and who think themselves conservatives should read Scruton. They should be the first to understand the conservation in conservatism but, alas, ­cultural war has caused a degeneration on all sides.

Progressive socialists don’t know what Scruton is referring to: oikophilia, the love of home that speaks to people’s connection with their environment, which animates their responsibilities. Instead, they propose large schemes, imposed from above by state diktat, while doing violence to the most important engine of conservation: the local connection of communities with their environment, and their concern to leave their descendants what their ancestors left for them. Progressives are more concerned with environmental posturing, cutting the correct moral gesture, being seen to be more enlightened and selfless, in contrast to the deplorables and knuckle-draggers.

The green leaders all want to be the next Bob Brown, renowned for their own Franklin Dam or Wet Tropics. They trample over politically weaker communities such as Queensland property owners uncompensated for tree-clearing restrictions that underwrote our Kyoto target in the 2000s. It was John Howard’s federal government and Peter Beattie’s state government that dispossessed these landowners without proper compensation.

Indigenous landowners are another politically weaker community that are ridden roughshod over by political environmentalists.

The folly of all of this is now surely clear. What can be done?

Ever since Richardson alighted on the strategy of garnering the environmental vote, Labor began outsourcing its environmental policy integrity to the political environmentalists. This yielded electoral returns in 1987 and 1990 but ultimately led to Labor bleeding market share to the Greens and being held hostage to political environmentalism. Labor’s environmental credibility came from environmental group endorsements after adopting their policies and acquiescing to their demands.

Rather than undertaking the principal responsibility of government, coming up with policies that balance development with environmental sustainability, it did preference deals with the political environmentalists. Environmental groups became experts at marginal seat politics, turning 2 to 3 per cent of the environment vote to win 51 per cent victories for their pet campaigns.

The hook-up with GetUp is the apotheosis of Labor’s dalliance with political environmentalism. What electorate is not going to be suspicious of the next bunch of out-of-towners hectoring them about how to vote next time? GetUp was Bill Shorten’s long game at mobilising AstroTurf activism and it has all ended in tears.

Labor must define its own environmental credentials in its own right, not as an alliance with the Greens or as the lapdog of a certain environmental milieu. Watching Jackie Trad squirm as Queensland Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch approved the Adani mine this week told the whole sorry story. Labor can no longer walk two sides of the street at once. It worked for Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2017 but not for Shorten in 2019. Voters might be fooled once, but not all the time.

To develop environmental policies free from deal-making with the political environmentalists, Labor must balance human society and environmental sustainability. The last thing the environment portfolio needs is a progressive from an inner-city seat, surrounded by a milieu of political environmentalists. Labor needs to take environment policy back to first principles and get its philosophy right first.

The environment is too important to be left to the political environmentalists.

SOURCE 

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