The fake morality of Al Gore's convenient lie

Further, while stressing the need for “international collective action”, The Stern Review effectively condones national self-interest by offering the reassurance that, through technological innovation and a complex series of financial incentives, “stabilisation of greenhouse-gas concentration in the atmosphere is feasible and consistent with continued growth”.

Despite all this dialogue and debate, carried out under the constant scrutiny of the public eye, the one possibility that must be considered - altering the seemingly immutable laws of economics themselves, which means curtailing the very excesses we call “freedom” - is never considered. We have no choice, it seems, but to place everything in the service of the ebbs and flows of the global economy.

But before hurling invective at the Federal Government, and accusing it of lacking sincerity in its commitment to environmental issues, one might ask if it is just mirroring our own insincerity.

For many people, it is fine to indulge moderate green sympathies, but only once the effects of climate change touch us directly, and only up to the point that we have to pay some personal cost. George Megalogenis has made a particularly chilling observation regarding such self-serving environmentalism in his book, The Longest Decade:

Even support for the environment, the ultimate expression of altruism, can be traced back to house prices. Labor pollsters Hawker Britton found in early 2004 that concerns for green issues were greater in those suburbs where property was more expensive. In other words, the ordinary Australian who favours protecting the environment can source his or her green values to the selfish calculation that more development in their neighbourhood equals less trees equals poorer views equals lower house prices.

Perhaps even the slick advocacy of Al Gore’s pop environmentalism is, in the end, the convenient lie of our time: a way of baptising lives that are already excessive, self-seeking and idolatrous with a sickly green tinge; of not changing our consumption habits, but feeling much better about them (rather like drinking Diet Coke).

Given the similar function of religion in our culture, maybe Michael Crichton wasn’t too far off the mark when he called environmentalism "the religion of choice for urban atheists".