Yesterday the Canadian Green Party established a new record of futility in that nation by breaking their previous record for accumulating the highest percentage of the popular vote without electing a single representative to the nation’s parliament.

The Greens got 6 percent of the total vote but didn’t win a single seat.

What that means is that the party and the movement behind it have a small core of people spread across the nation but couldn’t get a plurality anywhere.

As Andrew Steele noted in the Globe and Mail, there are immense obstacles in the way of the Greens ever getting a foothold in the parliament:

The Greens are never going to have an easy time turning votes into seats. . . . [B]ecause the Greens lack any kind of regional base, they simply cannot thrive in a first-past-the-post electoral system.

Even the party leader could not truly challenge the incumbent in the riding of her choice, under ideal circumstances, with no Liberal to split the vote, and amid adoring national media coverage.

To make the decision to devote all resources to breaking through in a small band of seats—say in central Ontario—wouldn’t work because the Greens’ fundraising and volunteer base is spread too thin to artificially concentrate like that. And they’re further hampered by an overly narrow ideological base that makes it difficult to attract a broad array of new Canadians, green Tories and progressives. Their national platform in this campaign was resolutely left-wing, and focused on comprehension instead of attracting a diverse coalition.

As a result of these and other problems, Steele writes, the party’s political prospects are quite grim:

Frankly, it’s time to call into question the mission of the Green Party in the long term.

Despite its failure to create a strong political party, the environmental movement has done an excellent job of persuading Americans and Canadians alike to be more conscious of their impact on the planet. However, opinions are cheap, and telling a pollster you care about the environment and will vote your concerns costs nothing, whereas actually pulling the lever starts the money ticker counting.

Once the estimates of what stopping global warming would really cost began to come in, the U.S. public quite predictably and sensibly began to report to pollsters in very strong terms that they’d rather not pay the allegedly necessary costs of reducing carbon output. As a direct result, global warming moved to the very bottom of the list of issues as ranked for level of perceived importance.

The public’s answers to pollsters also began expressing increased skepticism toward the propositions that global warming is largely manmade and constitutes a worldwide crisis. Money talks, and environmentalism walks.

And with a rapidly cooling economy, environmental worries are going to move even farther down the list of priorities, insofar as that is still possible. The housing crisis and apparently imminent recession are sure to divert concerns toward more pressing matters, as they should and already have begun to do.

Thus American attitudes toward greenness and in particular regarding global warming will even more rapidly move toward what the United Kingdom has been experiencing: "Suddenly, being green is not cool any more," as Alice Thomson notes in the Times of London:

Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence.

But the problem for the green lobby isn’t that it has been overrun by “toffs”: it’s the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone.

Whereas the decline of interest in global warming and other green crusades in the United States has been largely a reaction to increasing information about exactly what kind of numbers are involved (meaning: enormous), in the UK a financial crunch was what brought people up short:

According to Andrew Cooper, director of the research company, Populus: “There is a direct correlation between how people perceive the economy and the importance they place on the environment. When times are tough people resent paying more to salve their conscience."

Really, however, the downturn was simply the factor that caused the people of the UN to take a close look at the entire Green agenda. It’s all well and good, after all, to pay out a relatively little something to feel good about one’s efforts to save the environment when the coffers are overflowing, but it’s quite another when it’s a big, current, personal sacrifice being made for an anticipated general good sometime in the future. Thomson notes that as the real costs and benefits of green policies become clear, people don’t like what they’re being forced to do:

It’s not just the economic downturn that has harmed the green order. People have become wary of environmental causes that can turn out to do more harm than good. They don’t want wind turbines marching across Britain’s moors when nuclear power stations can do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They worry that washing and bleaching all those non-disposable nappies may be damaging the ozone layer, that the massive incentives for biofuels have distorted the world food market, and that green taxes are actually stealth taxes.

In addition, as Thomson notes and as has been made clear by common-sense environmentalists in the United States, the developed countries have been cleaning up the environment successfully for four decades now, and the air, water, and land are the cleanest they’ve been since the dawn of industrialization. Yes, we want to do still better, but there’s no need whatever to shut down the economy and go back to the Stone Age in order to save the earth. Economic growth will make it cleaner, not dirtier.

As Thomson points out, the Britons have discovered the joys of such cost-benefit analysis and the sorrows of unintended consequences, now that their pocketbooks have become tight. Americans have understood these things for some time now, and one can see the prospects for a truly draconian green agenda receding further in the rearview mirror as the economy tightens.