The dangers of nuances and barking up the wrong wind turbine
Ms Kitt - the original Catwoman - is 77 years of age. She’s also maybe four foot eleven tall and weighs as much as a sliced pan. She must have rattled around in that overturning mini-van like a ball-bearing in a barrel. Even getting into it must be a challenge. Short women trying to climb aboard an SUV in high heels need crampons and oxygen tanks.
The ongoing success of a car that wants to be a double-decker bus and which guzzles eight litres of fuel just to get into motion is testament to the marketing prowess of the manufacturers. It testifies also to the current incompetence of the environmental opposition.
Environmental activists seem to have surrendered, globally, to people-carriers or SUVs. Greenpeace ignores them. GREENPEACE - which used to shin up the smokestacks of chemical companies at the drop of an emission - leaves these intimidating petrol guzzlers alone. In fact, environmental activists these days seem more committed to selling us the Kyoto Protocol than getting excited about emerging trends like the abolition of the Chinese bike.
The bike hasn’t been totally abolished in China, but, like a tire with a slow puncture, its place in the scheme of things is shrinking. The Chinese are getting off their bikes and into cars in unimaginable numbers, greatly helped by a clear pro-car, anti-bike planning policy in cities all over China. Millions of fit people have taken their first steps to obesity. The impact on the environment will be mind-blowing.
But the environmental movement, which should be leading the debate on this and other urgent issues, hasn’t brought it to public attention, largely because the environmental movement has lost its grasp on the public imagination.
Which is one of the reasons for the disappointing results of the Green Party in the European and local polls. Commentators who, post-election, warbled on about Sinn Fein working hard on the ground, as if working hard on the ground had a predictable payoff for anybody willing to do it, missed the point that nobody does more work on the ground than the Greens. Their Deputy Leader, Mary White - who failed to be elected - slaves more diligently in her constituency than does almost any other politician.
Failure to apply themselves isn’t why the Greens have lost so much of their Outsider/Alternative ground to Sinn Fein. The central factor in their relative decline is that the environment has gone mainstream and massive, as opposed to alternative and personal.
Of course, the Irish Greens aren’t helped by their fatal urge to bark up the wrong wind turbine. The wind energy issue, which should be a big vote-puller for them, is becoming a drawback.
Many of their election posters showed a wind turbine. Once you’ve seen one wind turbine, you’ve seen them all. They define repetitive ugliness. Yet the Greens put up pictures of chilly spikey wind turbines instead of human beings. Bad move. Post-election, however, they continue to bark up the wrong wind turbine. They’re for wind energy, yet in recent weeks have opposed the setting up of wind farms in particular areas. Aesthetically, they may be right. They themselves would probably claim that their stance is nuanced. But nuance doesn’t win elections. Nuance about wind energy confuses busy people who might otherwise be pro-Green.
Nuance about wind energy allowed the Environment Minister Martin Cullen, TD, on a radio programme on Saturday to portray the Greens as a self-indulgent bunch who do nothing but obstruct progress. A Green spokesperson named Deirdre interrupted him, accused him, sniped at him and made smart comments every time he paused to draw breath, which, as you know with Martin Cullen, isn’t often. She gave as good as she got.
But therein lies the nub of the problem. People who vote for the Greens don’t WANT them to give as good as they get. They don’t want them to behave like normal politicians. They want them to be different. A real alternative, not just in policy, but in attitude and performance, too.
Proving your capacity to scrap as contentiously as Martin Cullen is counter-productive. Particularly if you’re fighting about percentages of failure to implement international laws related to stuff nobody can see (like emission levels) using the big grey words of the lexicon like “sustainable” and “renewable” and “biomass.” Nobody ever manned a barricade for biomass, and nobody ever will.
It is a crucial mistake for the Greens to cast themselves as regulators of the Government’s implementation of EU directives. They used to be David fighting Goliath, which always attracts anti-establishment voters. Once David becomes a full-time Goliath-regulator, David stops being heroic and alternative. He’s just another aspect of the establishment and there’s no emotional payoff for supporting him.
Another, even more serious consequence of the Greens becoming just another opposition party with regulator-aspirations is that it makes the environment a purely administrative matter, as opposed to a personal matter. It lets individuals off the hook.
That was blindingly obvious to me, this weekend, as I wandered around an Atlantic Homecare store. There was no evidence that the Greens were informing the thinking of the thirty-something couples with children in the shop.
Not only were those couples NOT seeking ways to keep fuel-expensive heat inside their properly insulated homes in order to preserve the world for their offspring, many of them were going the opposite way. They were choosing yokes to send fuel-expensive heat DIRECTLY into the open air. They were happily smacking down their credit cards for the privilege of loading into the back of their people-carriers one of the most environmentally-hostile bits of deck-furniture ever invented.
Yes. That’s right. Half the shoppers were buying patio heaters big enough to heat the Isle of Man.
And what were the Greens on about, in recent days? Wind turbines. No - they weren’t pushing wind turbines. They weren’t saying wind turbines were a great advantage. They were supporting OPPOSITION to wind turbines in particular locations.
A few weeks back, the Greens had posters up everywhere starring wind turbines. Not starring the candidates they hoped to get elected to Europe and to local authorities. Instead, we were treated to a shot of a wind turbine and some unreadably small print suggesting that wind power was a good thing.
Without attributing too much significance to posters, the fact is that wind turbines are among the ugliest artifacts ever designed: cold, spiky, inhuman. And that’s when you get them on their own. Breed them on a farm and the end result is the visual quintessence of chilly inhumanity. Yet the Greens gave hero status to the wind turbine during the election - and now, a few weeks later, are questioning their location in some areas.
It can be argued that this is a nuanced approach to the energy issue. Nuance never won an election and never will.
The Greens have allowed themselves to be reduced to a few issues moral equivalent of the local hospital. Not really environmental.
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