Those Fashionable Causes

The Gaia-worshipping eco-preachers are getting a little too personal. A little too hysterical. And will carbon offsets now be part of the divorce settlements of the stars? Baltimore Sun Blog post on the subject gets this reaction in the comments:

The problem is far greater than the Senate casting an historic vote on a global warming bill this week. Over the next 20-years the world will begin to see the growing emergence of major indicators that humankind will very likely become extinct in this very century. Panic will definitely set in. That is the consensus of the World Innovation Foundation that represents the independent voice of the world’s scientific community incorporating over 3,500 of the finest scientific, engineering and technological minds on the planet.

Human extinction!? It's the consensus. Maybe we should retreat to the ark to preserve the species. Or take our cue from the zoo? WaPo:

Pandas are naturally solitary creatures, living separately from each other. Humans, on the other hand, tend to be more social. But when the social bond falls apart and people start living more like pandas, the drain on the environment is greater, Liu said.

"If you increase the number of households, you need more land to build houses, you need to have energy to cook food and to heat in the winter time," Liu explained. "If you need more land, then you cut down the forest and cut down trees for fuel, you destroy more habitat for the pandas. There's a direct connection."[snip]

In the United States alone in 2005, 38.5 million rooms would have been unnecessary (along with heating and lighting costs) if divorced households combined to become the same size as married households.Also in the United States in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved if the divorced households had remained the same size as married households.

Too bad for the pandas. The word is out now that they're not just cute anymore. (Oh no, what will WWF use for their logo now?!)

This may be the end of glitterati support for the movement. It's just too inconvenient. And you know, liberals don't like guilt. That's left for us social conservatives. Besides, after a while, their parties are gonna get boring and ugly, (if they haven't already) at least in NY. Times:

And then the artist in me wanted to present a commentary, not just a solution.”

And so it was that Mr. Stark, who had been commissioned to put together the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s awards gala last month, directed the museum to shred its office paper for six months, producing a harvest that he augmented with 12 years of his personal tax returns and his own office’s papers. He then turned the resulting 6,000 pounds of paper strips into giant topiaries and chandeliers, floridly archaic shapes fashioned from trash. It was the language of excess — those topiaries recalled the gardens of Versailles — expressed in the material of frugality.

The endeavor was not without contradictions or mishaps, said Mr. Stark, who had to comply with the museum’s fire codes requiring that all that material be flame-proofed. “So then we had to find the organic fire retardant guy,” he continued, “and for two and a half months we were dipping 6,000 pounds of paper in fire retardant and then trying to dry it out by spreading it on the floors of our warehouse.” As the date of the event loomed closer, Mr. Stark looked out upon the soggy landscape, realized he needed help, and bought three energy-hogging commercial dryers to finish the job.

There were no reports of pandas at the party.

Trash to trash. Dust to dust.

What will be the next fashionable cause?

UPDATE: Holman Jenkins, WSJ on Al Gore's Inner Peace Prize, "The Science of Gore's Nobel"

UPDATE: Gentry media liberal Brian Williams nominates Mother Earth for Time Person of the Year:

My nominee for 2007 Person of the Year is a woman--a woman with a history of abuse, a woman who has never run for elective office, someone we all know, someone who makes her presence known on a daily basis in all our lives and, for my money, is better than any male alternative. That woman is Mother Earth. I think the environment is the compelling issue of our time.

And a green campaign to light one less candle for Hannuka:

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.