— George Gobel
The problem with Earth Day, is it’s just not funny.
Do you chuckle when you think about the likes of Ralph Nader or Al Gore? Does the Sierra Club make you guffaw? Do folks sit around the campfire telling funny stories about John Muir?
In a rare comic reference to his 1965 tome about auto safety, and specifically the dangers of the Chevy Corvair, Nader’s staffers would often lament that, Ralph was "unfunny at any speed."
When the recent Academy Award winning ex-Vice-President was in office, the running joke among Washington insiders was: "If Al Gore was in a room with ten secret service agents, how do you which one is the VP?" Answer: "He’s the one who looks stiff!"
Maybe if the environment told jokes or was video game, we might pay more attention. As Groucho Marx was once heard to say: "why should I care about future generations … what have they ever done for me?" My guess is if you query most Americans, they probably feel the same way about he environment.
We could save the planet, but the problem is that most of us are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices. We don’t want to pay the freight. Without our SUV’s, how will we
arrive in style at our next camping trip, let alone to the dry cleaners? But in the end, Mother Nature doesn’t really care about which tax bracket you’re in or what you drive. You can even move to "Green Acres," but like your real mom, when she’s pissed, she’s going to find you.
As the saying goes, "the way to a man’s heart … is through his wallet." With oil topping $118 a barrel, and gasoline prices headed over $4 a gallon, all of sudden, everyone’s an environmentalist. Toyota can’t push enough of its Prius' off the assembly line, while mid-western farmers lining up at the “piggy trough” to get their ethanol subsidies. Even the Hummer’s gone hybrid.
Wall Street gets it. No one is saying that the captains of industry are "tree huggers." Nothing could be farther from the truth. Being the ultimate opportunists, however, they understand the bottom line ... going green is simply good business.
In the 38 years since the first Earth Day, what’s really been accomplished? Other than President Bush, who believes that we can solve the global warming problem by switching from Fahrenheit to Celsius, everyone agrees that climate change is a real threat to the survival of our planet. But as Mark Twain was often quoted as saying, "everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does a thing about it." Sadly, much the same can be said about the genuine progress we have made in protecting our environment.
Whether we’re really willing to admit it or not, all of us make decisions in our own
best interests. Maybe economist Milton Friedman got it right, "corporate responsibility" [read personal] is an outgrowth of economic self-interest and preservation.
It’s no coincidence that Japanese and European cars have historically been more fuel efficient than our own. Since the early seventies, gasoline prices in Europe and Japan have been nearly double what we pay. With limited open space, suburban sprawl, a fixture in our universe, is virtually unknown to these nations. As a result, conservation and resource efficiency are an economic imperative.
Although all of us are feeling the pinch at the pumps and the grocery store, compared to prices in the rest of the industrialized world, Americans still are on easy street. Future Earth Days will come and go, but unless we as Americans decide that the real costs and consequences of our conduct are too high, nothing will ever change. In the words of English philosopher-economist Kenneth Boulding, "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."
Happy Earth Day!
To learn more about my market recommendations, visit my website at:www.globewestfinancial.com.
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