Who gives a shit about trees?

I'm sick of greedy idiots pretending that environmentalism is about hippies having sex with trees and not wanting to lose their partners. Maybe it was. But now it's about the planet we live on not getting poisoned so we can't live on it. I know, it's a difficult concept to understand, that actions have consequences and that there's more to personal responsibility than a balance sheet.

I can see how people failed to learn that. Just about anyone in the Western world can see how much capitalism has worked. It has made us rich, and rich, and yielded amazing technology, and made us very rich. Every day we are taught by our experiences that capitalism works.

But, for years capitalism has operated in a fantasy world in which actions had no consequences. Pollution and other neighborhood effects were ignored, the costs passed on to others. Or so they thought. Sick populations spend money on other industries such as healthcare or funerals, not on consuming products that keep factories running and the average worker employed. The short-sighted were destroying their own markets.

To compensate they went overseas to get cheaper labor. This only made things worse as they were under even looser environmental standards and deprived their consumers of even more income. Is it any wonder the American economy is having problems?

Any attempt to adjust cost distributions, to make producers pay for all of what they produce, is decried as socialism or anti-market. There is no market, no effective market at least, if costs are not accurate. All the people crying about free markets and government control and taxes are themselves creating the most anti-market subsidy ever: the passing of all pollution costs on to those who potentially have nothing at all to do with the production, consumption, or distribution of the products producing the pollution. How's that for market manipulation?

So who gives a fuck about trees? I do, because those trees are what keep us from all dying. Maybe there's a free market solution. Maybe we could get people to add up the full cost of a product and see that the one that costs less money is not always the one that is cheaper, and by this they'd switch to 'green' products, the truly cheaper ones. But that's not likely as long as short-sighted, greedy sociopaths misrepresent environmentalism and discourage any education or responsibility.

I wish our children could travel through time so they could come back to now and take revenge on those who are responsible for killing them.