The myth of the environag

By John Bennett

July 21, 2008

Some of my fellow citizens have written letters to the editor of the Savannah Morning News complaining about high gasoline prices. The vast majority of these advocate offshore drilling and/or cracking down on shadowy speculators, who are allegedly driving up the price of oil. The beauty of both these suggestions that they conveniently allow us to blame others for the fix we’re in. Even folks who are big on bootstraps and personal responsibility are happy to shift into helpless victim mode when it comes to our dependence on oil.

From one of the recent letters to the editor, I learned a new term: environag.

Then I wondered if I am one.

Is it nagging to push for policies that reward responsible behavior? Is it nagging to oppose policies that subsidize or encourage wasteful or destructive practices? Is it nagging to point out that our quest for cheaper oil will ultimately put us in a much more dangerous place than our current predicament? Here’s a snip from Tom Freidman’s recent column, published in a newspaper popular with environags:

“When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.

Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives.

We shouldn’t waste our time complaining about being nagged, when the real problem is our untreated addiction. Unless the true goal is to distract ourselves from the reality of our situation.

Tip of the hat to The Wash Cycle for “The Myth of the Scofflaw Cyclist.“

Posted in Conservation, Global Warming, Government, Transportation