Maybe Mayor Hickenlooper should have thought twice before challenging the 2008 Democratic Convention to “make this the greenest convention in the history of the planet.” While visions of happy bunnies having tickle fights in 100% organically-grown clover fields and magical recycling bins carried on the backs of zero-emissions unicorns filled his head, the reality of the challenge turned out to be far less picturesque.

Now, Denver’s troubles in finding, for example, fanny packs that are both made from organic material AND made with union labor right here in the U.S. of A., has garnered national snickering. Even the Wall Street Journal subtly poked fun at Hickenlooper and Andrea Robinson, the Convention’s “Director of Greening” (yes, that’s her real title) for biting off far more than they can chew.

In fact, the whole episode seems like a sitcom devised by and for Republicans. No doubt the Karl-Rove-is-my-hero crowd is sitting back in their Barcaloungers with tubs of popcorn resting on their corpulent bellies, laughing and drooling on themselves as Dems throw themselves headlong into complex, nearly Talmudic discussions on whether biodegradable spoons and forks are still eco-friendly if they have to be shipped all the way from China on diesel-guzzling cargo ships.

The punch line of the joke, of course, is that any convention with the scale and scope of the DNC is going to produce waste – thousands of tons of it – and any effort to stanch the flow of garbage is going to be laughably ineffective compared to the environmental benefits gained by not having such a unnecessarily gargantuan event at all. As Fred L. Smith, Jr., chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, a truly “green” convention would be entirely virtual, with delegates casting their votes online.

Still, appearances must be kept up and genuflections to the green gods made. Thus, we can expect a summer of hand wringing over organic fanny-packs and niggling over the costs and benefits of compostable balloons. In the end, what we’ll have is an enormously expensive party, a mountain of garbage, and eco-opportunists congratulating themselves for having turned the lights off when it was all over.