There was a time, before the baby-boom generation took over, when we took pride in the achievements of our builders, producers, and innovators. There was always great celebration when settler families got a phone, a tractor, a bitumen road, or electric power. An oil strike or a gold discovery made headlines, and people welcomed new businesses, new railways, and new inventions. Science and engineering were revered, and the wealth delivered by these human achievements enabled the builders and their children to live more rewarding lives, with more leisure, more time for culture and crusades, and greater interest in taking better care of their environment.

Many of the genuine conservationists from the original environmental societies were replaced by political extremists who felt lost after the Comrade Societies collapsed and China joined the trading world. These zealots were mainly interested in promoting environmental alarms in order to push a consistent agenda of world control of production, distribution and exchange – a new global utopia run by unelected all-knowing people just like them.

The old Reds became the new Greens.

They used every credible-sounding scare to recruit support – peak resources, acid rain, ozone holes, global cooling, species extinction, food security, Barrier Reef threats, global warming or extreme weather to justify global controls, no-go areas and international taxes to limit all human activities.

However, the public became disenchanted with their politics of denial, and their opposition to human progress, so they have adopted a new tactic – death by delay.

We are not opposed to all development, but we want to ensure all environmental concerns are fully investigated before new developments get approval.

In fact, their goal is to kill projects with costly regulations, investigations and delay. Their technique is to grab control of bureaucratic bodies like the U.S. EPA, which, since 2009, has issued 2,827 new regulations totaling 24,915,000 words.

A current example of death by delay is the Keystone oil pipeline proposal, which would have taken crude oil from Alberta in Canada to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast – far better than sending it by rail tankers.

It was first proposed in 2005, and immediately opposed by the anti-industry, anti-carbon zealots who control the EPA and other arms of the U.S. federal government.

The proposal was studied to death by U.S. officials and green busybodies for nine long years.

This week, the Canadians lost patience and approved an alternative proposal to take a pipeline to the west coast of Canada, allowing more Albertan oil to be exported to Asia.

Jobs and resources that would have benefited Americans will now go to Asia.

Naturally, the Green delayers will also attempt to throttle this proposal.

Over in Europe, shale gas exploration is also being subject to death by delay. In Britain, the pioneering company Caudrilla has been waiting for seven long years for approvals to explore. In France, all such exploration is banned.

No wonder India recently accused Greenpeace and other delayers of being “a threat to national economic security.”