Why Are Bush and Cameron Going Green?

President Bush opened the year by confessing that America was “addicted to oil.” It was obviously no throwaway line. He has repeated it, most recently in his speech Monday on renewable fuel sources in which he said that

[T]he prices that people are paying at the gas pumps reflect our addiction to oil.

Meanwhile British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has made a point of moving the Tory Party greenwards, installing a windmill on his London house and buying a Lexus Hybrid. Last week he went to the Arctic to hug a husky. He’s setting up a new

approach to climate change, part of the new green revolution that the Conservative Party is intending to lead.

For starters, he’s going to propose a Carbon Levy on polluters.

If conservative politicians are talking like this then they must be looking at polls and focus group results that tell them to go green or go out of business.

President Bush’s speech “was a sad example of political capitulation by a former Texas oilman who certainly knows better,” writes James K. Glassman He should know that

America is no more addicted to oil than it is addicted to bread, to milk, to paper, to water, to computers or, in the immortal words of the late Robert Palmer, to love.


We use oil -- and other unmentioned but implied addictions like coal and natural gas -- to generate energy that powers our cars, heats our homes, lights our cities, runs our factories. By the standard of what they do for us, fossil fuels are pretty cheap. They provide enormous industrial leverage.

And if fossil fuels one day run out, or if global warming really does melt the glaciers and flood the lowlands—a very big if—then humans will adapt.

So what is going on? Why are conservative politicians capitulating to the watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside, socialists in drag?

The problem is the “mmmmhh” factor. What’s that? It’s the sound that the fifty-something liberal Seattle women were making all around me on December 6, 2005. They were listening to photographer Subhanker Banerjee tell them about the beauties of the Alaskan North Slope at a Seattle Arts and Lectures special event held at Benaroya Hall. And whenever Banerjee would tell them what a shame it would be to spoil the North Slope by drilling for oil in ANWR, several of them would moan “mmmmhh.”

They weren’t speaking in tongues but they were certainly having a religious experience.

The educated elite in the Anglosphere may not believe in God any more, but they do have a religion, and that religion provides them with the universal human need for meaning, for apocalyptic fear, for sacrifice, and for redemption from sin.

And best of all it is a religion with costs, an essential ingredient in a thriving religion according to sociologist Rodney Stark.

You don’t mess with peoples’ religion. Every politician knows that.