Not so much Green, as brown… and dead.

For a few brief months, their star shone bright. Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Sarah Hansen-Young and their band of environmental ideologues basked in the limelight of being junior partner in a coalition of convenience with a desperate minority Labor government.

With their grubby hands finally on the levers of power, the Australian people were treated to a staggering display of ignorance, ineptitude, naiveté, extreme green dogma and ivory-tower logic that was quite the spectacle. In doing so, Labor’s support from its blue collar power base evaporated, allowing Tony Abbott to win government last September in a landslide.

Federal Labor abandoned the extreme left activists ages ago (too late to save their electoral prospects, however), and now the Labor premier in Tasmania is expected to axe the agreement with the Greens as soon as Monday. Not unexpectedly, the knives are out. Union leader Paul Howes yesterday:

“The Greens are a separate, different, independent political force whose views and ideology are contrary to the views and ideology of the labour movement.

“We don’t think it is in the interests of the labour movement to be forming formal allegiances with the Greens.”

Mr Howes said the Tasmanian experience, and the failure of the federal power-sharing agreement between the Greens and the Gillard government struck in 2010, showed the Greens were “not trustworthy”.

He took particular aim at Mr McKim for publicly undermining investment in mining projects in the Tarkine region and the proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill. “Nick McKim has behaved atrociously during his time in that cabinet and hasn’t acted like a normal member of any other cabinet,” Mr Howes said.

I suppose we should be glad that some in the Labor party have come to their senses.

Now, however, we can delight in watching the Greens wither and shrivel as they retreat to the political irrelevancy to which they belong. Theirs is a failed ultra-left agenda which is completely at odds with the views of the vast majority of the Australian people – the exception being inner-city urban trendoids who rarely leave the cosy surroundings of Brunswick or Ultimo and have no understanding of the real environmental issues that the country faces.

And if that weren’t galling enough, on a global scale, the Green movement is losing at every turn. Harsh realities, to which the ivory-tower-bound Greens are oblivious, such as the need to keep the lights on in many European countries, has resulted in a rapid return to cheap, dependable coal, over expensive and unreliable wind and solar, ensuring that emissions will continue to rise. Not only that, but massive expansion in coal production in both India and China over the next few decades will ensure that extremist environmental dogma will slip further into the dustbin of history.

The Australian has a lengthy article on the subject here.

Of course, we should all aim to use finite resources sparingly, avoid despoiling the environment, conserve water – these are all common sense actions any reasonable person would take. However, crippling our economies with pointless “weather taxes”, depriving the world’s poorest of a cheap source of energy, and subsidising inefficient, expensive and unreliable renewables is not what people (or governments, it seems) want.

The Greens are feeling the sharp end of those sentiments right now.