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The new conservative: my greening begins.

Article Excerpt
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To be perfectly honest, I've never been much more than an armchair environmentalist. Sure, I had some tree-hugging inclinations in college, when I participated in a protest to block the removal of some oaks on the University of Texas at Austin campus (mainly as a way to meet girls, actually). I've sent checks to some pompously named organizations like Save the Planet USA now and then, and I've been known to have had a barroom argument or two on the subject. But for most of my life, the environment was a comfortable abstraction.

It's not just that marriage, a career, and the inevitable political ennui of middle age dampened my verve for green. It was also the rhetoric. Take global warming: Though I had a vague sense living in Dallas that there might be something to it (it's hard to ignore forty-odd 100-degree days in one summer), for every article I read on the subject that said ying, there was another that said yang. Like many people, I figured the real truth would just never be known--a topic relegated to debates by Al Gore and others--or that the planet was supposed to self-destruct on a particular schedule,...

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