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Red turns to green
Environmentalists like David Suzuki constantly warn that we should imagine the ecological repercussions of the products we purchase, the activities, ranging from digging the raw materials, to the processing, manufacturing, transporting and selling. What I find amazing is that when they understand the environmental aspects of the marketplace, they of all people should understand that free market capitalism is the only system that works and yet they treat it as their worst enemy.

Snip story about the making of a pencil as told by Milton Friedman's "The Pencil Story"

The Kyoto crowd of all people through their understanding of the environmental impact of the market place should realize that a centrally planned command economy could never co-ordinate all of the logistics in the making of the lowly pencil as told by Friedman, without collapsing and resulting in no pencils. Yet even though the disastrous Marxist experiment of the Soviet empire fell with the Berlin Wall and vanished all together two years later on Christmas Day 1991, Leftists everywhere continued their war on freedom and capitalism by reinventing itself by switching from a Red banner to the Green banner.

The 1992 UN Rio conference, the grand daddy of today's global climate change movement started in haste, less than a year after the Soviet Union's demise was a poisonous passing of the torch by the Hard Left. Marxists during the Cold War said capitalism was evil because it made people poor. Reinvented Marxists like the Kyoto crowd now parrots the line that capitalism is evil because it makes people rich. The greenhouse gases from soccer mom's driving SUVs are responsible for floods; droughts and monster hurricanes of Biblical proportions go the rhetoric.

The Green Party siphons away votes from the socialist NDP. When the Kyoto crowd and Soviet Suzuki longs to over regulate peoples lives by their push to ban SUVs, incandescent light bulbs, having many children and "unnecessary" air travel, they are nothing more than Soviet style Marxists waving a green flag. Environmentalists long to micromanage people's lives economically and socially just like their Soviet ancestors. It is 1984 and Big Brother is green,

Xess wrote: There's so much there I don't know where to start. I want to point out that environmentalism is not counter to capitalism and that environmentalists don't want to control peoples lives.

I'm just not entirely sure how to properly word my response and have probably missed some obvious points I can mention to counter those in the letter.

CaptainZoidberg wrote:I'd just ask him about how capitalism is supposed to preserve the environment. If a company acts to maximize its own profit, and spending money to not harm the environment brings no immediate profit to the company, I can't imagine anyway that you could preserve the environment without government regulation.

Darth Wong wrote: I know how these people think. They will answer that it is not in the long-term interests of any company to destroy the environment or kill off their own customers. The problem is that companies simply don't think on such a long term. Corporate behaviour is dominated by what shareholders want, and shareholders want quarterly profit. Anyone who has any experience with the stock market knows this: share prices can plummet and CEOs can be threatened with dismissal based on a single bad quarter. A whole year of reduced profits is considered a catastrophe; this is their idea of "long term".