Green Tea Party

Looking forward to Tuesday's election? What will the results mean for Mother Earth?
Time to resurrect Friedman's April OpEd called Tea Party With a Difference

Become the Green Tea Party.
I’d be happy to design the T-shirt logo and write the manifesto. The logo is easy. It would show young Americans throwing barrels of oil imported from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia into Boston Harbor.
The manifesto is easy, too: “We, the Green Tea Party, believe that the most effective way to advance America’s national security and economic vitality would be to impose a $10 “Patriot Fee” on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt.”
America now imports about 11 million barrels a day, about 57 percent of our total oil needs — mostly from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. As T. Boone Pickens told Congress the other day: “In January 2010, our trade deficit for the month was $37.3 billion — $27.5 billion of that was money we sent overseas to import oil.”
If we put a Patriot Fee on all of those imported barrels, we would use less, cease enriching bad regimes, strengthen our own dollar, make the air cleaner and the climate more stable, foster the exploitation of domestic and renewable energy sources, promote electric vehicles, help bring down the global price of oil (which hurts Iran and helps poor Africa), and we could use the revenue to shrink the deficit. It’s win, win, win, win, win, win ...
Indeed, the Green Tea Party could say, “We’ve got our own health care plan — a plan to make America healthy by simultaneously promoting energy security, deficit security and environmental security.”

But I still needed more. And then I found...Truth About Green

Truth About Green is a non-partisan, non-profit grassroots group with a common sense approach to environmental issues. Our mission is to support and promote environmental causes supported by scientific data, without slant or skew, to justify the expenditure of taxpayer funds.

Exciting , right? Until you read the names and affiliations of some of their speakers:

Paul Chesser and James Taylor, The Heartland Institute.
Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, international documentarians and producers of the soon-to-be-released “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” a rebuttal film aimed at uncovering the falsehoods presented in Al Gore's documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Steve Milloy, author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, and founder and publisher of www.junkscience.com, a website devoted to defending the truth of science.
Marc Morano, editor of Climate Depot.
Phil Parenti, Americans for Prosperity, Southern Maryland Chapter.

Boy, I think the Earth is in for some fun times after Tuesday's vote.