Prius PreeningIs my hybrid turning my kids into eco-snobs?

Remarks from the Fray:

Worried your kids are getting too pretentious for your Prius? Well, this middle-of-the-middle class, midwestern, minivan-motoring mom is here to help! Why not take 'em down a notch with these Prius Snobbery Offsets.

-No new Abercrombie this year. Buy last year's at the "gently-used" resale shop. Make them wear it.

-Clip coupons. And use them. In front of your kids. They make coupons for soy milk, I've seen them.

-Speaking of shopping, buy the store brand. Of everything. In front of your kids.

-Dress that buggy down with a clever bumper sticker - "I Brake For Garage Sales" comes to mind.

-Two words: Big Lots

-Two more words: State university.

Hope this helps!

--bright_virago

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As long as our consumer society is hung up on identifying itself by its purchases, true responsibility will never be possible. If you cared that much about reducing your carbon footprint, you'd move to a large city like New York or Boston and take the commuter rail and the subway everywhere. You'd go to the farmer's markets in a large urban center, buy local rather than buying organic if local went a shorter distance to get to you, swap out your air conditioner for either a swamp cooler or good old-fashioned toughing out summer...or at the very least keep the A/C thermostat at 75. You'd make real sacrifices rather than "hey look at me" consumer purchases, which only makes you a liberal asshole rather than the H2-driving conservative asshole.

What makes me laugh at all this is that any economic conservative, acting simply to conserve his own financial resources, does more to help the environment than the Shakespearean sound and fury of most liberals. Where lefties talk and make movies and sing songs, the Adam Smith disciples and true capitalists are more likely to take meaningful microeconomic action. Were lefties and watermelons (Green on the outside, Red at their core) truly concerned about the environment, that fact would piss them off a lot more than it seems to in reality.

--MonsterDog

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While I hate eco-snobs, the scene in which the kids are told to hush in the face of people shampooing in a stream made me sad. The kids had a legitimate point, and it feels that the reason to "let them be" was not out of a libertarian ideal but a fear of making a scene. I know because I go through it, too. It used to be a little voice inside of me, and now it is the little voice that are my kids. This reasons, based on a fear of making waves, is what fuels everything bad in our world.

This fear is what allows parents to hit their kids in the supermarket (it's just a small slap), spread racism (it's just a joke), or ruin the environment (I need an SUV).

The "quality of life" campaign in NYC tackled those small crimes, and the entire city cleaned up. Perhaps we should empower our children to confront the wrongs we teach them so that they can save the world we seem unwilling to save for them.

--darling

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It's ironic, but my fundamentalist youth is what the TreeHugger.com sort of environmentalists remind me of more than anything else. Dogmatic, sanctimonious, ascetic, hostile to all forms of pleasure, anti-reason, and bit self-loathing and ashamed to be human even. Those are the vibes I sometimes get from environmentalists. Not always, of course, but the negative experiences stick with you more than the pleasant ones. I fled one brand of religious Puritanism into the arms of the secular world, only to find that world itself to be increasingly dominated by a New Puritan ethic. Puritanism, it seems, just won't die.

The bottom line is that environmental issues are not really moral issues, they are economic issues in disguise. Everyone wants clean air to breathe for themselves, but there is no natural market for clean air. The air is a commons, and suffers from the tragedy of the commons. The answer to this is not to create a new clean air religion, but to fix the underlying economic defect, to create a market for clean air. Or rather, to auction off the rights to emit certain pollutants. This is the most freedom preserving way to address the issue.

This is my dream, at least. Morality free environmentalism. Or, rather, that environmental morality only comes into play when you vote to establish markets for pollutants, but not when you buy things or go about living your life. I want an environmentalism dominated by environmental engineers and economists, by markets working out the most efficient solutions, not by environmental shamans shaking their rattles and checking my piety.

--kolmogorov

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