Thursday 29 November 2007

We'll all be 'rooned

In the 70's I was an impressionable teenager that did door knocks raising funds for the National Parks and Wildlife service, joined the World Wildlife Fund (now called World Wide Fund for Nature), and was naive enough to believe the "Club of Rome" report about how most finite resources were going to run out in the next 10-15 years...

In the 80's I first studied the "greenhouse effect" and possible global warming while at Uni doing a course on environmental chemistry. It was around that time that Greenpeace was gaining support and WWF decided to morph from an endangered species/habitat conservation society and jump on the anti-nuclear bandwagon. Since I knew that from a global environmental viewpoint coal-fired power stations were a much greater threat than nuclear power stations, I quit WWF and generally was disillusioned by the whole "green" movement. While I'm all in favour of protecting endangered species, eliminating pollution and building a society that uses finite resources more efficiently, I find that the Greens attract too many phobics - those with a dread fear of nuclear power, GMOs, and so so. There's a point where rational concern about safety and ethics turns into paranoia.

I was reminded of this when reading an article by Steve Biddulph on the SMH website today. If you want to have a chuckle, go and read this waffle. It was so reminiscent of the Club of Rome that I had to smile. I think I'll keep a clipping of this article just so I can send it to the author in 2014. While I make no claims as a futurist, I'm fairly confident that Australia in 2014 will look a lot more like it does now than that predicted by Steve Biddulph. If nothing else, I suspect that the Liberals will still be getting more votes than the Greens in 2014 - in fact I wouldn't be surprised if it was the Labor party that lost more votes to the Greens in future.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

1 comment:

mOOm said...

Labor is probably happy that the Liberals chose Nelson and Bishop today.. will help keep them in power longer, though I don't really see a strong recession coming here so Labor probably can survive for at least two terms anyway.

With preferential voting it's actually surprising that third, fourth etc. parties aren't stronger in Australia than they are as your vote isn't "lost" if you vote for a "minor party" first. Most people vote Liberal or Labor as first preference though...