Earlier, I wrote about the environmental movement, and that their underlying motive is essentially anti-man. I also said that as an intermdiate step, they have adopted the elimination of technology. What is more interesting, however, is not so much their goals, as the tactics they will adopt in pursuing those goals.

Does anyone else recall all the mercury scares of the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's? Even in this decade, mercury was, for a time, the great devil of the eco-pantheon. Why eco-augurs found traces of mercury in fish entrails it signaled the end of civilization. Fear of mercury leaks from fluorescent bulbs was used to argue for their elimination. Horror over the traces o mercury in coal was added to the threat of acid rain to argue for giant windmill farms. We were constantly told that minute traces of mercury were going to kill off all the wildlife and parts per trillion of mercury in fish was going to kill our children. It became such a commonplace, that the giant mutant bear in the movie The Prophecy was even blamed on mercury. It was everywhere, and it was going to kill us.

Until the eco-gurus decided they like CFL bulbs. Suddenly mercury in quantities equal to hundreds of cans of "contaminated' tuna was no big deal. Mercury was not only not a concern, but it could be cleaned up with a damp cloth by an average homeowner. While lead paint and asbestos require just slightly less effort to clean up than it took to put a man on the moon, apparently mercury contamination is slightly more of an inconvenience than an incontinent dog. The element which was slated to wipe out all multicelled life suddenly became as innocuous as water.

Of course the truth is a little different. It wasn't that the eco-gurus had changed their minds on mercury at all. Rather they had failed to get rid of the fluorescent bulbs through their mercury scare, so they had changed instead to the global warming tack. And since a call for eliminating bulbs requires a replacement, they latched on to CFLs, not because they were a good alternative, not even because they were the only alternative available, but precisely because they had mercury in them.

Because of mercury?

Yes. recall at the beginning when I said the ecologists have as a half-step in their anti-human agenda the removal of technology? Well, that does provide a nice explanation for their promoting of mercury laden CFLs. You see, the run of the mill middling environmentalist, the "soft greens" will accept the cover story that they are adopting CFLs to help stop global warming. In fact, the whole government will accept it. So, in short order, the old fluorescents will be dead and the rest of us will be saddled with these CFLs. And, then, seemingly quite by accident, someone will "discover" that the mercury in CFLs actually is harmful. And we will be forced to abandon them as well.

Oh, we won't be left without light. Doubtless some even less efficient and more costly alternative exists. The point is not to remove technology all at once, just to make it as costly, poisonous and inconvenient as possible, to help prove the environmentalists' point.

This is hardly the first time. CFCs were banned and replaced with substitutes that were mostly either flammable or toxic. DDT was eliminated and replaced with mosquito netting. Nuclear power was halted, new permanent generators were stalled, and we are left trying to make do with aging power plants and expensive temporary generators.  And then there were the refineries, domestic oil exploration, and so on.

It is the environmentalist agenda, and it is an incremental one. They know they can't ban technology outright, they can't return us tot he cave in one step. So instead they take our technology a little at a time, banning whatever works and making us use the second best, then the third best, then the fourth. At last we have no choice, and when they argue that technology is costly and dangerous and makes our lives no better, eventually most of us will start to agree.

And very few will be left who remember how things started, who remember that technology only became risky and expensive when we started listening to the environmentalists. But not many, certainly not enough.

So, as a result of their own bad advice, of the disastrous outcomes of their own policies, we will find ourselves in a situation where we will willing accept still more of the same.

POSTSCRIPT

Amusingly, the environmentalist model is much life that adopted by the government as a whole. They throw money at a problem, demonstrate how that money made nothing better and ask for more. After a few rounds of expensive failure, we become so committed to their "solution" that we don't even question the sense in throwing still more money at the problem.

Same with the environmentalists. Their solutions usually make things worse. (Eg. Nuclear power is about the cleanest alternative, yet the one they most strongly oppose.), yet they use those bad results to argue against industry and technology. Were it not for the environmentalists, half the problems they decry would not even exist. (I speak, of course, of the real problems, not imaginary issues such as AGW, which simply has never come close to being proved, or man-made "dead lakes",which have existed since pre-colonial times in the Americas, long before industry.)