Dr Ian McLean, an unsuccessful candidate in the local body elections, asks why neither himself, or the other Green candidate, was successful in being elected to the Tauranga ward seat of the Bay of Plenty Regional Council.
Your sub editor for The Weekend Sun has actually provided Dr McLean with the answer. Dr McLean's letter (Friday, October 25), has the headline ‘Put our environment first'.
It is largely this attitude that guarantees Dr McLean a position in the ‘also-rans'.
Voters will never place ‘the environment' on the pedestal that Dr McLean and his Green colleagues continue to demand. Voters will never bow to Green overstatement and Green fear tactics first.
Voters worldwide are now seeing the established Green positions on the state of the planet have been wildly oversold.
For example, the Green position on global warming/climate change and readers' attitudes to it have been widely discussed on these pages. The Green position on nuclear energy should also be scrutinised.For many decades, Green propaganda presented nuclear power stations as ticking nuclear bombs, ignoring the fact electricity generation by all other means, including hydo and certainly coal mining, killed thousands of people every year.
The contortions and difficulties faced by the Greens over nuclear energy led Mark Lynas, writing for the UK Daily Mail, to say: 'You mustn't believe Green zealots - I was one”. He also added: 'Greenpeace routinely inflates the death toll for the 1986 Chernobyl disaster by a factor of 1000 (the true total is likely to have been less than 50), in order to stoke fears about atomic energy.”
His colleague George Monbiot - a Green activist writing for the UK Guardian then confessed: 'Over the last fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement, to which I once belonged, has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice”.
Rather than express dismay and puzzlement over his non-election, Dr McLean should work within his political organisations to restore public trust and Green credibility Over the top hyperbole and blatant fear tactics have proved to be an impediment for the Green political cause; and Green credibility has plummeted. The once-powerful Green wave continues to recede very rapidly towards irrelevancy.
M Houlding, Ohauiti.