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POPSEnvironmental skepticism exposed
The Big Picture... Two factors in the early 90s pushed the environmental movement to center stage. One was the vacuum produced by the disappearance of a favorite right wing bogeyman, the "international communist menace." The other was the growing global environmental movement, most conspicuously on display at the Earth Summit in Rio, 1992. Globalization was well underway and "free-trade" for the CTTs meant trade free of any constraints -- constraints on how workers were treated and paid, how the environment was treated and paid for, how consumers were treated and how much they paid. You can get a glimpse of the power of the moment by watcjomg the show stopping 5 minute performance of 12 year old Severn Suzuki at the 1992 Rio Summit. If you've never seen it, take a look. It represented the kind of developing political and ideological power the Right feared most. In 1992 it wasn't yet feasible to destroy the government mechanism of environmental protection by executive fiat. Reagan t