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There are signs that some on the more sensitive members of the green left may already sense the ground shifting beneath them
The enemies of fossil fuels were out in the streets of Bucharest and other Rumanian cities this week protesting Chevron’s plans to move the country towards shale gas self-sufficiency. They bore banners sporting such balanced messages as “Chevron US, you can’t just drop in uninvited and leave death in your wake.” Agence France Presse reported one student declaring “We have seen the effects of fracking on the environment in the U.S. and we do not want the same to happen here.”
But what she meant was that she had “seen” the kind of agitprop peddled by the likes of the movie Gaslands. There has been virtually zero impact from fracking in North America, but it has been established as a “cause” for young rebels, thus the facts must not be allowed to intrude on the social media-fuelled Two Minutes Hate.
The question is how much longer the public is going to be sympathetic to such theatrical displays. The more obvious it becomes that radical environmentalism is effectively the ally of regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, the more tolerance for it is likely to decline.
As it becomes clearer that many of those who want to hold up fracking in Europe, or halt the Keystone XL pipeline, are as much enemies of democracy and prosperity as any strongman or caudillo, their inordinate power must wane. Indeed, there are signs that some on the more sensitive members of the green left may already sense the ground shifting beneath them, although not from one of those fictional fracking earthquakes.
In a piece that appeared on the Post’s opinion pages on Tuesday self-confessed “greeny” professor Robert McLeman of Wilfred Laurier University expressed support for pipelines. While his declaration was hemmed in with many proclamations of conspicuous virtue (he’s a bike-to-work, carbon-offsetting locavore kind of guy), and ritual condemnations of oil company subsidies and railroad neglect of grain farmers, he acknowledged that oil is going to be with us for a long time, so is best transported by pipelines, even, gasp, Keystone XL.
Let’s see if Professor Leman is now summoned for trial by campus guardians of appropriate green thought, or subjected to one of those outbreaks of hashtag outrage.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://business.financialpost.com/2014/04/09/peter-foster-how-much-longer-before-the-public-tires-of-extremist-environmental-theatrics/