Why does everyone hate The Greens?

Why does everyone hate The Greens? After all, they are the ones trying to save the planet.

But you still have to smart about it. The Greens are not. To wit, from The Australian:

Senior Coalition figures are warning that legitimate debates over population levels, refugees and border protection are being hijacked by claims of racism and argue that left-wing policies — including ending offshore processing — are more likely to stoke racist sentiment than any of the immigration policies implemented by Scott Morrison.

In the wake of the Christchurch massacre in which an Australian shot dead 50 Muslim worshippers, former deputy prime minister John Anderson told The Weekend Australian it was essential for honest debates to be held about complex issues such as the social integration of migrants and refugees. The Nationals leader from 1999 to 2005 expressed concern that, among the intelligentsia, there was a “loathing of Western culture and an idea that it is to blame for everything”.

“The Australian people are not mugs. I don’t believe they are particularly racist,” he said. “I don’t think Australians think all belief systems are the same or that we should not be discerning about what those belief systems might allow.”

The warning is right, aside from the politics embedded within it. The LNP is the worst open borders nut of them all. It just pretends it does border protection by persecuting refugees while ripping down barriers for planes.

But I digress. The Greens push to shut down debate about immigration is poisonous. It breeds resentment everywhere, making them the very illiberal force that the right accuses them of being.

And it does worse. Much worse. The racial fixation of the Greens has completely swamped their core message, their raison detre if you will. So we come to this, at Domain:

Greens members volunteering in last year’s disastrous Victorian election campaign couldn’t explain to voters what the party stood for and what it could achieve, a scathing internal analysis has found.

…Documents seen by The Age show one-third of the Greens’ Victorian members quit the party in the 21 months to December, largely in a state election year when on previous trends the membership should have grown.

Mr Leppert said the party had to recognise it was “not the fresh face of voter contact strategies anymore”, and said Labor and the Victorian Socialists had been more effective in their field campaigns, particularly in the Northern Metropolitan region (traditionally, the Greens’ heartland).

The Greens, he said, “may need to be wary of a growing reputation for impure preference allocation practises while parties on the left [the Victorian Socialists and Fiona Patten’s Reason Party] are seen to be purer”.

So the answer is move left? No! For God’s sake the answer is to shift more green. It’s pretty weird when some random outsider has to remind The Greens that they need to be greener. The mass immigration defended by the party at all costs is not green, it is scorched earth.

Yet, unfortunately for The Greens (and the rest of us) the party can now rely on mass media to reflect its own ideological clap trap back to it. Via Greens apologist, The Guardian, comes a new report from the Wilderness Society:

Regional forest agreements have failed in the 20 years since they were established by state governments, says a new report, which reveals that record numbers of threatened forest dwelling fauna and many species are heading towards imminent extinction.

The report, Abandoned – Australia’s forest wildlife in crisis, has assessed the conservation status of federally listed forest-dwelling vertebrate fauna species affected by logging and associated roading and burning across Australia’s regional forest agreement (RFA) regions in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.

Released by the Wilderness Society this week, the report identified 48 federally-listed threatened species of forest-dwelling vertebrate fauna living in areas subject to state-run logging operations.

No mention at all in the story of the role of population growth and urbanisation in the rampant destruction. Yet this is what the Wilderness Society says about it today:

Without a liveable climate, the vulnerable ecosystems that sustain us, won’t. Deforestation is Australia’s hidden emitter — like adding 10 million cars to our roads.

Australia’s deforestation front ranks in the global top 10, alongside Borneo, the Amazon and the Congo. It’s primarily driven by agriculture (mostly for beef production), mining and urban development.

In fact, all major environment lobbies want to cut immigration desperately for this reason.

The latest federal government State of the Environment report, released last year, explicitly noted that Australia’s natural environment is being placed under acute strain from rapid population growth and economic development, and noted that these are the main drivers of environmental problems such as land-use change, habitat destruction, invasive species, and climate change.

These findings were confirmed by the latest World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Living Planet Report, which revealed that Australia’s East Coast has been trampled by over-development:

Australia’s east coast has been compared to the Amazon as a “deforestation front” in a new global report by the World Wide Fund…

The report assessed 11 deforestation hotspots, where broadscale clearing had occurred at problematic levels since 2010, and where deforestation was expected to continue in the next decade. Eastern Australia was the only location in the developed world to make the list…

More broadly, the WWF report explicitly noted that the near exponential rise in human population over the past 70 years has driven a commensurate surge in resource use and pollution:

The biggest single phenomenon in the last 50 years is barely discussed in the media, politics, business or education circles. It is the Great Acceleration – a unique event in the 4.5 billion-year history of our planet… with exploding human population and economic growth driving unprecedented planetary change through the increased demand for energy, land and water…

The 1950s marks an explosion in growth. After this time, human activities (left panels) begin to interfere significantly with Earth’s life support system (right panels) (these graphs are from Steffen et al., 2015 30 and all the references to the datasets behind them are in the original paper)…

None of this is new. The WWF previously nominated human population growth as the key risk factor for endangered species, noting that “the current rate of extinctions is 100 times what would be considered normal without the impact of human activity… more of us means more of that” (see below graphic).

In a similar vein, the Australian Conservation Foundation in 2010 called for Australia’s population to be stabilised and nominated human population growth as a “key threatening process” to Australia’s biodiversity.

The reason everybody hates The “Greens” is as plain as the smoking crater of urbanisation where forests used to be on the east coast. They want to make it much, much worse.