Environmentalism! Remember that carry on?

This used to be the preserve of 'hippies' and new age oddballs and other groups of eh, smelly people you ignored but during the Celtic Tiger it was starting to grab hold in the mainstream before quickly dieing a death when the monster that is the economy needed to be fed again when the recession started.

For a while it used to be popular to begrudge people or otherwise have a go at them for owning a SUV because of the perceived fuel wastage of driving one of those. So environmentalism provided a convenient stick to bate people better off than yourself but also on the flip side it allowed people living very wasteful lifestyles to feel better about themselves too. They could do carbon offsetting which means you pay some clever entrepreneur's company a few bob and they use some of it to buy some lad in Thailand a shiny new Honda GX-35 engine for his tuk-tuk and replace the old, polluting 2-stroke. The company pockets the rest.

When the Green Party got into power they surely helped to bring environmentalism out of favour as they used just about every environmental problem as an excuse to extort money from ordinary people to put it into the hands of the Government or else shovel-ready pork-barrel projects. Car scrappage scheme, mandatory BER certs, new lower tax for post-08 cars, subsidies for solar panels, septic tank inspections. These were all nice little earners for whoever the Greens and FF were looking out for.

The subsidies were never worth it anyway as an ordinary individual, they were just an excuse for the government to give money to certain "registered installers" and the government would get the money back off you in the long run. If you had a company with a big wind farm you could probably milk them indefinitely but a normal individual always gets screwed in the end. In Belgium they are now looking at charging a €200 annual tax on people who have solar panels so I'm sure that will make its way over here. Things that start off in mainland Europe, good or bad are considered as progress over here.

I'm glad the Greens are gone because some of the stuff the more extreme environmental nuts have downright scary ideas like forcing people to live in cities because they think living in the countryside uses too much resources and putting ridiculous property tax on houses they deem too big or too hard to heat. At least these nuts will have nobody in Government who will listen to them. There were also alarmist mad scientists who insisted that if we didn't build a supermassive sprinkler system in the Atlantic to spray water into the air we'd all be DOOMED before long or that we are inches away from the global warming "point of no return" where the planet irreversibly heats up to boiling point and beyond.

So what started off as hippies wanting to save the whales eventually just became an excuse for taxing people or taking their money through a government supported private company and restricting their behaviour. It is a shame really because I would be interested in clean energy technology and what have you but not the gobshite political movement that follows it. As soon as you mention solar panels now to someone they think of some jumped up young lad landing up to the front door with shiny brochures and promises of subsidies, trying to get them to part with their money