Salad Days Over for the Greens

RUSH: Steve in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Great to have you on the program, sir.

CALLER: Rush, it’s a great honor to speak to you —

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: — and dream of mine.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: I want to congratulate you your 20-year anniversary, and my father introduced me to your program nearly 20 years ago. He’s a World War II veteran, and some of my fondest memories are listening to your show with him.

RUSH: Wow. Well, that’s cool. I appreciate that.

CALLER: Rush, you know, I’m call from Prudhoe Bay and I work for a company that does some drilling — or exploration support for the oil companies.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: And what I wanted to mention with you, on the Democrat mantra has been, you know, the oil companies have all these leases secured and they’re not doing anything with them. And, you know, Shell Oil has been trying to drill on leases that they secured several years ago, and they’ve been held up in court by the environmental lobby.

RUSH: Of course. And the animal rights people, and the entire left which mobilizes to prevent any of this.

CALLER: You know, they’ve invested an enormous amount of money outfitting ships to do this work on leases they are paying for, and they are active on these leases. They’re activity is in the court system.

RUSH: You know, I have a — oh, what did I do with it? You know, I’ve got it somewhere here. I’ve got four stacks here today. There is a story about some people who finally have figured out what the environmentalist movement is. It’s a UK news story. Yeah, here it is, here it is, here it is. Let me grab these out here and share this with you. This is by Alice Thomson. It’s in the Times of London. And the headline here: ”Suddenly Being Green is Not Cool Anymore’ — Julie Burchill can’t stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don’t want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.’ Basically the environmentalists, the green bunch is just a bunch of rich elitists who wants to enforce their own worldview on everybody.

‘Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the ‘nutbag ecologists’ are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans. So the salad days are over; it’s the end of the greens. Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence. But the problem for the green lobby isn’t that it has been overrun by ‘toffs’: it’s the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone. … Now that people are fighting for their own survival rather than their grandchildren’s, they put crime, the economy and rising prices at the top of their list,’ meaning economic matters are trumping all of this. So it’s a small, little step, but it’s in the UK paper, and finally these environmentalists and these greenies are being accurately portrayed as who and for what they are.