Bruce Sterling recently declared that Viridian greens are winning . In a week where John Howard hails climate scientist Tim Flannery as Australian of the Year , he might have a point. In 2007, you're green or you're dead in the water. Which brings us to libertarians.

Greens and libertarians tend to see themselves as natural antagonists. Greens see libertarians as right wing extremists; selfish, corporate shills for the ugliest side of heartless capitalism. Libertarians see greens as nannies finding yet another reason to expand the state towards omni-competence and tyranny.

In the US, the green movement in the seventies emerged in parallel with libertarian reactions to wealth destroying command economy techniques used throughout state and federal governments. A representative clash of those worldviews might be Julian Simon's 1980 bet with Paul Ehrlich on commodity prices. Simon won, but also kind of missed the point, and it showed a telling intellectual naivety on the part of Ehrlich and his colleagues. This instinct of mistrust continues to the present day: the otherwise excellent Reason magazine flogged the climate change denialist horse long after it was dead. (Even last month Ronald Bailey was unable to write an article on the topic without putting the word solution in quotes.)

Though the market is a recognised green tool , in green philosophical terms, libertarians are off the map (PDF) .

This is a shame. There are a number of intersections between greens and libertarian philosophies, and plenty of opportunities for synthesis. Libertarians believe in individual responsibilty, agency and moral conscience, not just as a way of making oneself rich in a narrow sense, but as a better way of living, and this extends to choices about drugs or lifestyle. They believe that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, but that shadow boxing should not be stomped on by the police. They believe that using the state to distribute services or largesse ties citizens to a dead central hand, and impinges on both innovation and liberty. In addition, many libertarians tend to be materialists and empiricists who see their philosophies as hard headed responses to the physical universe and human nature.

Environmental values are not usually cast in these terms, but once you accept the existence of environmental externalities, they are not just comprehensible but useful from a green perspective. In a world where the climate has been changed by industrialisation, your right to swing your carbon ends where my coastline begins. Failing to control that is a failure of stewardship on an individual level. By contrast, relying on the state, or utility monopolies, to provide water and and energy, ties you to their command economy apron strings in a way a more decentralised solution would not. For example, using water tanks in combination with larger reservoirs provides a more robust decentralised solution than relying solely on dams and stormwater drains. The common aesthetic is one of enlightened self-reliance.

Dan Sullivan recognised common aspects of greens and libertarians in a 1994 essay . He ties it back to the moral basis for private property and distinguishing property earned through one's labour from common community assets partitioned amongst individuals. One of the technical names for this position is Geolibertarianism . This is particularly relevant today to air and climate, but it relates to a much older debate about land and land taxation that harks back to Locke, Paine and Jefferson. The usual policy outcome is support for a Land Value Tax. Since we don't have a good way to partition air, or climate variation for that matter, you could recast it in terms of an air or climate services rental fee.

We live in a time of large governments, where legislation structures and directs many aspects of our economic and environmental lives. Now that the political and cultural ground on climate change has shifted, that means government will need to move too: it will be activist and dynamic reorganisation, or a failure. The ten tonne koala leviathan is on the move already, and when government moves, it usually moves power to itself. This week the Howard government proposed taking control of the Murray-Darling river system, without, of course, this being balanced by additional state autonomy in any other area. Soon the 500 tonne gorilla in the east Pacific will be on the move too. Without an environmental sensibility libertarians will be catapulted into further irrelevance. Without a libertarian sensibility green policies will be servants of a brittle, stifling, central state.

Tony Abbot writes , "Rudd's real test won't be how he handles consorting allegations. It will be explaining how it's possible to tear up workplace agreements and halve greenhouse gas emissions without sabotaging the economy." I am with Al Gore on this one, solving global warming is an opportunity to grow an economy.

The standard attack against global warming and the uncertainties of a complex interdependent system is to argue that it will cripple the economy to enact any policy to curb carbon emissions. It is a false choice.

I watched An Inconvenient Truth on the weekend. It didn't really tell me anything new, and the bits inbetween the powerpoint presentation were emotive and designed to tug at my heart strings, but it was presented well and in an empirical fashion with plenty of graphs and photographs.

The important part was in the conclusion. Gore attacked the problem in the standard American manner; it isn't a loss, it isn't a whipping from the environment so that we have to go back to our mud huts and fish by hand - to Gore it was an opportunity. It was a chance for America to take the lead in new technologies, new investment, new solutions, new industries and new ways of living.

It isn't, as Abbot suggests, going to kill the economy because we will find new technologies and new ways of supplying energy and being aware of our carbon production. I was at Home Depot a few weeks ago paying a premium for CLF lights bulbs which are %300 more expensive than the old inefficient light bulbs. Some company has worked out how to sell me a light bulb for four times the price I would normally pay? That is an economic opportunity if I ever saw it.

Same with all the other technologies that companies come up with. I will probably pay a premium for them. A few weeks ago my wife looked into buying green power - which we will probably pay more for than we would coal generated power.

I own iPods when I could buy a cheap run of the mill mp3 player which is indicative of consumer behaviour. It will be the same with the new technologies that come out to wean us off carbon based fuels. This will probably be the next spurt of economic growth as companies create disruptive technologies, that can be sold at a premium, and change whole markets.

It is an opportunity to grow jobs, technologies and the economy - it should be stated as such. Abbot is on the wrong tack here.

Roger Scruton is a political philosopher who continues a tradition of common law conservatism going back to Edmund Burke. His A Political Philosophy is a short sketch of that philosophy on various issues of the day - with the bioethical and social thought foregrounded and economic consequences a side effect. It is a book for mainline conservatives, old countryside Tories, a book where settled law and cultural convention carries weight.

It is also an environmentalist book. Scruton has recast the old arguments for conservatism in the language of twenty first century biology. Conservatism, here, is the process of preserving and enriching the social ecology; of defending it from entropy and death; from generation to generation.

With ecology at the heart of his political philosophy, it is now easier for him to break with political capitalism.

[C]onservatism is an exercise in social ecology. Individual freedom is a part of that ecology, since without it social organisms can not adapt. But freedom is not the sole or even the central goal of politics, even if it is the attribute that, at a deep level, makes politics both necessary and possible. Convervatism and conservation are in fact two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources. These resources include the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions; they also include the material capital contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free, but law-governed, economy. The purpose of politics, on this view, is not to rearrange society in the interests of some overarching vision or ideal, such as equality, liberty or fraternity. It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that erode our social and ecological inheritance. The goal is to pass on to future generations - and if possible to enhance - the order and equilibrium of which we are the temporary trustees.

There's plenty of room to disagree with Scruton on policy, but that small-c conservative regard for due process and preservation is something that underlies civilised society, and cuts across political lines. Indeed films - favourites of the left - like Twelve Angry Men or Good Night And Good Luck are basically odes to cautious preservation of the social ecology from those that would rashly attack it.

And this civilised multi-party consensus is environmentalism needs if we are to solve the problems of this century, global warming most of all. Nowadays, we are having the right environmental arguments in the public space; arguing about how best to solve the problems we have, like water, rather than denying they exist. But my sense is, regrettably, the hard heads on the right who should well know the foolishness of running up a big fiscal debt do not yet take seriously the foolishness of running up a big environmental debt.

Common law conservatism rarely appeals to philosophers, and pundits. It is inelegant. You can't understand it all. But I think it is something most Australian and British voters understand quite instinctively, when voting for John Howard or for Kevin Rudd.

This is why Scruton's approach is valuable. It links environmental duty to the civic routines of real people in working democracies.

I swim daily in the gym's pool and needed a replacement for my old pair of speedos. The local sports mega-store at the local mega-mall only had black or blue speedos. I have been out of Australia for a while now, but I recall dark green speedos being part of the standard Auian store catalog.

Then again these days all the swimmers wear s-and-m gear that is a tight fitting coverall. Not quite the same as seeing a bronzen and broad backed male or female swimmer glide through the water.

I would have been up for a pair of dark green pair. Instead I got dark blue ones to keep my budgies safely smuggled.

David Owen argues [pdf] for urban green with himself as a New Yorker as example. He lives in a modest house; has limited consumption because of his small house; does not own a car; and uses his feet, legs or public transport to get around.

Manhatten skyline from kaz7572's photostream

Owen writes that by modern suburban and American national consumption patterns the urban area of Manhatten is exceptionally green and austere;

Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world.

Being green is usually confused with wilderness romanticism. This is why a photograph of a recently logged forest is emotionally powerful. However Greeness is about efficiency as much as anything else and urban centers are exceptionally efficient in comparison to suburban and exurban areas. Much of that efficiency is structural and based on scale; however, the urban areas do offer benefits in this time of increasing fossil fuel costs. Owen continues:

New York City is one of the most thoroughly altered landscapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in which the terrain's primeval contours have long since been obliterated and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on side streets, the rocks in Central Park) are essentially decorations.

Ecology-minded discussions of New York City often have a hopeless tone, and focus on ways in which the city might be made to seem somewhat less oppressively man-made: by increasing the area devoted to parks and greenery, by incorporating vegetation into buildings themselves, by reducing traffic congestion, by easing the intensity of development, by creating open space around structures.

But most such changes would actually undermine the city's extraordinary energy efficiency, which arises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic.

Owens is arguing for an acceptance of urban town planning as efficiency which contributes to being Green.

I am not sure why suburbia cops so much in the way of hostility. I grew up in Sydney's north western suburbs, and other than a stint in Coogee/Maroubra, the rest of my time in Australia and the United States has been in suburban environments. Even now I am living in suburbia. I like it.

Normally the stereotypes of suburbia are thrown up, such as the row upon row of aesthetically similar houses, townhomes and condos. Like in the picture above which is a new suburb in Nth Virginia. What isn't seen in that picture is that those townhomes back onto a town-squarish type of mall.

The other arguments against suburbia are that it is boring, looks too similar, lacks culture, people are fleeing back to the urban environments because of gas prices, houses use too much gas/electricity, roads and petrol consumption, etc. While urban environments achieve green economies of scale the impact from suburbs is not that great. Most of our fossil fuel emissions are from stationary energy sources, not road transportation. Same with water consumption, agriculture is the biggest user of fresh water, not residential (urban or surburban).

There has been an exit from suburbia recently - as in the last two decades - as young people seek more cultural lives in the town squares of cities and the increasing cost of suburban housing followed by the foreclosures - have placed pressure on the suburbs. Historically there has been an ebb and flow from the urban and suburban centers. This is nothing really new. The urban-scapes will most likely one day become unpalatable for a multitude of reasons and the suburbs will grow again.

The other issue is that as technologies decentralise, whether it be transport of the 1950s, telecommunications of the 80s and 90s, or maybe solar technology of the future. The large land areas of the suburbs will most likely come to the fore as productive areas again. A roof is a large solar collector for instance, more than a condominium balcony can offer.

Gated Communities are a localized and decentralized response to the security issue, real or imagined, that civil and social order is failing and that the state does not have sufficient reach or budget to protect life, limb and property uniformly.

They were decried to an extent as the rich locking themselves away, and in truth it was probably not necessary in countries with functioning governments such as the US or Australia; however in places like Brazil where economic inequality is much more violent, it probably was an essential entrepreneurial response to a weak state.

Ecocuidad, MVRDV + GRAS

I don't see how the eco-green utopias like the Logrono Montecorvo Eco City project are any different to the principles of the gated communities. This is a localized and decentralized response by entrepreneurs, the state and designers to the issue of energy security.

It may be cooler to have a carbon neutral urban node, it may be more ethical to live in a green community; but it is a mechanism to 'design out' through energy isolation; the arbitrary, volatile and potentially destructive possibilities of catastrophic energy failure.

I consider both, gated communities and energy communities, as perfectly valid lifestyle and economic choices. It is an interesting organizational pattern.

An interesting report [pdf] by a UK government group has turned up some interesting information about first time electric vehicle owners.

[T]here is no significant individual journey length or daily mileage per vehicle change over the first three months of usage, showing users made little or no change to their daily driving habits after switching from conventional to low carbon vehicles. ...

Range anxiety: Prior to the trial 100% of drivers said they were concerned about reaching their destination with an EV than they would with their normal car. After three months this dropped significantly, by 35%.

The drop in range anxiety is in part due to the increased understanding of vehicle capabilities, driving techniques and journey planning. Charging data also shows users gained more confidence in their journey distance over the three months, with eight per cent increase in users allowing their batteries to drop below 50% before plugging in.

Media programs like Top Gear have added to this perception of electric cars not having enough range with their Tesla segment where they pushed the car into a garage deceptively. This Top Gear season has another segment where they deliberately go over an electric car's range and take forever to charge it. These are known issues but for most drivers, their daily usage is under 40 miles. Which makes these programs dramatic and entertaining, but ultimately not really relevant to most daily car usage.