Via the Global Warming Policy Foundation
A careful look at the history of environmental activism shows how the movement has been unravelling. Now it seems to be dead in the water.
In 2012, three years into President Barack Obama’s first term, green activists are asking, “What went wrong?” Where are all the new laws and regulations regulating energy use and the natural resource production? Where are the public-private partnerships signalling a new era of enironmentalist problem-solving? Where’s Al Gore? Shouldn’t he be lurking over President Obama’s shoulder, smiling, as the President signs yet another green jobs bill into law?
The question is a good one but one not easily answered. In the decades since the birth of the environmental movement, something’s clearly gone wrong. Other movements pushing for political and social change have altered the national discussion and elected candidates at every level of government.
Look at the Tea Party. Born only in 2009, it’s pushed back against the agenda of Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, forcing Congress to heel and almost sending the federal government into default.
But the environmental movement seems dead in the water.
Environmentalism Fails: Legislation
In late 2010 Al Gore offered three reasons why the U.S. Senate failed to enact into law a cap-and-trade bill: Republican partisanship, the recession, and the influence of special interests. He had a point. Despite endorsements from such Republican senators as John Warner, John McCain and Lindsay Graham, every effort to pass comprehensive climate change legislation during the preceding five years had floundered in the Senate.
In 2007 Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman (Independent) and Virginia Republican John Warner introduced a cap-and trade bill called the Climate Security Act. Their Lieberman-Warner bill was approved by the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) committee and sent to the floor by the committee chairman, Barbara Boxer of California. The bill’s advocates said “prompt, decisive action is critical, since global warming pollutants can persist in the atmosphere for more than a century.”
The Lieberman-Warner bill aimed to cap greenhouse gas emissions, lowering emission levels each year until 2050, when emissions were supposed to be down to 63 percent below 2005 levels. To achieve that goal, the federal government would issue right-to-emit permits to electric utilities and plants in the transportation and manufacturing industries. The bill also provided financial incentives to companies and families to reduce emissions.
The bill was doomed. Full Senate debate took place in the summer of 2008, when the average price of gasoline was well above $4 per gallon. Republican opponents successfully labeled it the biggest tax hike in history, one that imposed an enormous tax and regulatory burden on industries that would pass the cost burden onto consumers already struggling to pay for gasoline at the pump.
Republicans beat the 2007 climate change bill because they argued that it would raise gas and home heating prices, cost jobs and cripple the economy. It didn’t help that 31,000 scientists rejected the notion of man-made global warming in a letter signed and circulated two weeks before the start of the Senate debate.
The next attempt came in the summer of 2009. On June 26, the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, otherwise known as Waxman-Markey after its authors, Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts. For the first time a chamber of Congress passed a law meant to curb carbon emissions linked to climate change. Yet the Senate once again refused to follow through.
The Senate version of Waxman-Markey was shepherded by Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, and Connecticut Independent Joseph Lieberman. (Sen. Warner did not seek reelection in 2008.) Once again, a complex and messy mix of partisan politics, constituent pressures, and special interests combined to thwart passage of the bill.
Even though the Senate was controlled by Democrats, the sponsors of the bill knew they needed Republican votes, which required that certain bill provisions would have to be modified or weakened. But every tweak of the legislation designed to placate a Republican risked losing a Democrat, and every Democrat lost meant finding another Republican.
Kerry, Lieberman and Graham began bargaining with lawmakers. Some Republicans wanted guarantees that the bill would subsidize nuclear power. Lawmakers catering to agricultural interests wanted incentives or offsets for farmers who would be required to purchase emissions-reducing equipment.
Gulf Coast state politicians wanted to protect off-shore oil drilling, and politicians from Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio refused to discuss anything that put restrictions on coal plants, which cap-and-trade does by definition. Every special interest had its own demands. For instance, the powerful Edison Electric Institute, which represents shareholder-owned electric power companies, wanted guarantees that carbon costs would never rise above a certain point. To cushion the blow of higher energy costs, it proposed that through the year 2030 electric power companies receive free emission credits worth billions of dollars.
The White House proposed a “grand bargain”: expand off-shore oil drilling in return for lawmaker support for cap and trade. But the timing couldn’t have been worse. A short time later an oil rig exploded into flames and the Deepwater Horizon well started gushing thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Under pressure from Senate Republican colleagues and his South Carolina constituents and suspicious of White House double-dealing, Senator Graham pulled his name from the bill, which eventually died without coming up for a vote.
Envirionmentalism’s Bright Beginnings Turn Pale
The sputtering of the environmental movement and the ignominious collapse of its signature legislation could not have been predicted. But a careful look at the history of environmental activism shows how the movement has been unravelling.
Like the civil rights and antiwar movements, environmentalism’s origins lay in the 1960’s. In June of 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio burst into flames. Toxic waste had so befouled the water that it ignited.
Only six months earlier the nation witnessed a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, the third largest oil spill in American waters after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills. The imagery of burning rivers and miles of polluted beaches provoked public outrage and photos of dying sea birds covered in oily muck became a staple of nightly news coverage.
Highly visual incidents like the Santa Barbara oil spill and the burning Cuyahoga River didn’t create the modern environmental movement, but they were catalysts that thrust it into public awareness. Earlier, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring had claimed that man-made chemical pesticides like DDT were killing birds and other wildlife, and issues like air pollution and toxic waste aroused public anxiety. Groups like Get Oil Out! (GOO) and the Environmental Defense Center were created in the 1960s, and in 1972 California voters approved a ballot initiative creating the California Coastal Commission with vast powers to regulate economic activities and land use along the state’s coastline.
In April 1970 the first Earth Day was proclaimed by city mayors and celebrated on college campuses. Green activists established radical nonprofits like Friends of the Earth (1969), the Natural Resources Defense Council (1970) and Greenpeace (1971) which challenged older conservation groups to become more aggressive in lobbying politicians and harrassing corporations.
At the federal level President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by executive order in 1970, and in that same year Congress authorized amendments to the Clean Air Act (passed in 1963) that imposed new regulations, the first of their kind, on industrial and mobile sources of air pollutants. The Clean Water Act (1972) and Endangered Species Act (1973) followed.
By the late 1970s environmentalists were trying to maintain their early successes, but the movement was increasingly institutionalized and bureaucratized. Most groups were headquartered in Washington, DC, where they spent their energies in fundraising and adapting to political pressures. The Carter administration created a Department of Energy and mandated corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards to make cars more fuel-efficient. President Carter tried to set an example by wearing sweaters and installing solar panels on the roof of the White House, but most Americans did not like being told to lower their thermostats and buy smaller cars.
In the 1980s and 90s environmentalism began to lose its glamour and popular appeal. Ronald Reagan put energy policy on the back burner when he became president in 1981 and he tried with limited success to emphasize deregulatory policies. Federal agencies were embroiled in constant litigation and controversy whenever they tried to limit environmental rulemaking. A new set of difficult and often unpopular issues-the ozone hole, global warming and population growth-crowded onto the environmentalist agenda.
The War on Terror dominated the public agenda during the presidency of George W. Bush despite efforts by Al Gore and others to focus public attention on global warming. Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and his efforts to attribute Hurricane Katrina, melting ice caps and summer heat waves to man-made climate change failed to generate the crisis atmosphere needed to achieve social and political change.
These days surveys show Americans worry most about the issues of war and the economy. The environment is far down on the list of concerns. In 2010 a Gallup survey reported that 48 percent of respondents believed the threat of global warming is exaggerated.
Public skepticism has been growing steadily since 2006 when the Gallup poll first reported that 30 percent of those surveyed had doubts about global warming. (The figures increased to 33 percent in 2007, 35 percent in 2008 and 41 percent in 2009.) Similar results were recorded in a March 2011 Gallup poll that asked, “How much do you personally worry about global warming?” Only 51 percent said they worried a great deal or a fair amount, a big drop from the 66 percent in 2008 who were troubled by thoughts of melting glaciers and rising sea levels.
Another indicator of waning public interest in environmental issues is a 2011 Rasmussen poll that asked likely U.S. voters to consider what played a bigger role in global warming: solar activity or human behavior? Sixty percent said it was at least somewhat likely that solar activity plays a role in long-term climate change. Only 22 percent said it was unlikely. This gives no comfort to environmentalists like Al Gore who argue that human activity is the number-one cause.
The Movement Runs Out of Gas
Americans’ interest in taking action against global warming is waning, but environmental groups insist that public opinion plays no role in explaining Congress’s failure to enact comprehensive climate change legislation. Instead, green groups attribute the failure to achieve their goals to the money and power of their opponents. According to their reckoning, environmental groups are stymied by what amounts to a conspiracy of the oil industry, global warming deniers, and the Koch brothers’ vast right-wing network.
In the summer of 2011, Dr. Matthew Nisbet of American University released a pioneering 80-page report, which undermines this argument. Nisbet’s report, “Climate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate,” rejects the argument that the environmental movement has been outspent by right-wing donors like the Koch brothers. It says the data is inconclusive on how much supporters and opponents of a cap-and-trade bill are spending to affect the outcome. For instance, Nisbet compared the budgets of the conservative movement (think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations) to national environmental organizations. He found that in 2009, major conservative outlets took in a total of $907 million in revenue, and spent $787 million. By comparison, green groups took in $1.7 billion that year and spent $1.4 billion. Another $394 million went specifically to climate-change related programs.
Nisbet also looked at lobbying. In the aggregate, conservatives spent a bit more: $272 million vs. $229 million. But in election spending, they far outspent environmentalists in 2010. For instance, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $33 million, the Karl Rove-advised American Crossroads spent $22 million and its affiliated Crossroads GPS spent $17 million in political contributions. By contrast, the League of Conservation Voters spent $5.5 million, Defenders of Wildlife spent $1 million and the Sierra Club only $700,000.
However, state ballot initiatives tell a different story. California’s Proposition 23 is a case in point. The 2010 initiative, heavily funded by Texas-based oil companies, would have halted California regulations on greenhouse gas emissions until there was a decline in the state’s rate of unemployment. Supporters of the measure raised about $10.6 million. But opponents raised $25 million, with significiant sums from environmental groups. The National Wildlife Foundation reported spending $3 million, the National Resources Defense Council $1.67 million, and the League of Conservation Voters $1.1 million.
Nisbet also looked at foundation funding for climate change projects. What he found confirmed a 2007 study, “Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming,” which noted that philanthropists are strategic funders of environmental causes and seek to achieve specific policy goals.
It’s clear that overall, the environmental movement does not have a money problem. So what’s the problem? One prominent environmentalist, Daniel J. Weiss of Center for American Progress Action Fund, argues that the recession has played an outsized role in thwarting environmental goals. “It makes people more sensitive to the argument that various proposals will cost jobs,” says Weiss. “Oil and coal industries have made these arguments every timebut they’re falling on more receptive ears now.”
Tom Borelli, a climate-change skeptic at the National Center for Public Policy Research, agrees that a weak economy explains environmentalism’s downward spiral. “All along they were riding the wealth of our nation,” says Borelli. “Now the whole green bubble is exploding.” He points out that the movement’s energy agenda-the war on fossil fuels and the push for renewable energy-have always been unsustainable. “That’s where they failed.”
No One to Blame But Itself
But there’s yet another reason, one that activists are loathe to acknowledge, and it’s this: Their scare tactics have backfired. Environmental groups have done nothing but create enemies by labeling as “global warming deniers” anyone who dares to ask questions about man-made climate change. Critics like Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who in 2005 called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” remain a minority in Congress.
Far more typical is Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who in 2009 said, “The scientific aspect that I’m still reserving judgment on is the extent to which it’s manmade or natural.” Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey actually agrees the data is “pretty clear” that there has been an increase in the earth’s surface temperature, but he adds that “the extent to which that has been caused by human activity I think is not clear. I think that is very much disputed and has been debated.”
Extremist rhetoric has badly damaged the environmentalist cause. The Danish environmental writer Bjorn Lomborg and two enlightened environmentalists at the Breakthrough Institute, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, put the blame squarely on the environmental movement. It has no one to blame but itself.
In his latest book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, Lomborg observes that that there are more important scientific problems to tackle than global warming. Activists should work to provide clean water and address public health issues around the world. By calling for government mandates costing billions of dollars in an implausible attempt to lower the earth’s temperature Lomborg says environmental activists are squandering the public’s goodwill and exhausting its patience.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger urged environmentalists to abandon their doomsday fantasies in “The Death of Environmentalism,” a 2004 paper they wrote for the Environmental Grantmakers Association. It made them outcasts in the environmental movement. Last February, in a speech at Yale University, they revisited the paper and concluded that the problems they identified had only worsened in the years since.
Nordhous and Shellenberger said that when Al Gore attacks Republicans for waging a war on science and calls on Americans to “change the way we live our lives,” he is undermining the public’s “need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order” and guaranteeing that millions of Americans will reject his counsel.
Greens reacted to these developments not by toning down their rhetoric or reconsidering their agenda in a manner that might be more palatable to their opponents. Instead, they made ever more apocalyptic claims about global warming claims that were increasingly inconsistent, ironically, with the scientific consensus whose mantle greens claimed.
In 2012, it’s clear that scare tactics and apocalyptic predictions have failed to persuade. The environmental movement is not gaining traction with either legislators or the public. As Tom Borelli puts it, “They’re now going to be playing defense. And they’re not used to that.”
Amanda Carey is a Washington, DC-based journalist and a frequent contributor to Green Watch.
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Geez, imagine that…,
To me there are two purposes for the existence of a Green Movement. One is to clean up the place, which to a large extent has already been very successful. Two is the political wing which are more focused on restrictions to business and industry, and not directly focused on the environment at all.
For the man on the street, he sees the first and is happy. The world is a lot cleaner now than when I was a kid. The man on the street sees on TV, proposals which will cost him money against his will for purposes not directly aimed at cleaning the environment (its already clean; and there are already plenty of laws in place:- they just need to be enforced and what we have will work).
I think it’s the forced costs on the community, the involuntary nature of the proposals, and the fact that most people are happy with how clean it is anyway. The little litter that remains is minor and temporary. All of the significant issues have already been addressed. Get out of my pockets, your just being greedy now.
“Now it [environmental activism] seems to be dead in the water.”
And now we must push it back into the hole from whence it came.
It’s rule and worth has ended.
…..green activists are asking, “What went wrong?” Where are all the new laws and regulations regulating energy use and the natural resource production? Where are the public-private partnerships signalling a new era of enironmentalist problem-solving? Where’s Al Gore? Shouldn’t he be lurking over President Obama’s shoulder, smiling, as the President signs yet another green jobs bill into law?
Answer to Q1, Q2 & Q3. Come to Australia and cry.
The EPA has in the last two years put in place regulations far more costly than in its previous history. Most of these regulations involve power plants, in particular those using coal. The interstate pollution rule, the very recent MACT rule, rules on cooling water, and, in a year and a half, a new rule on ozone. These rules will raise electricity prices in the midwest by around 25%, taking money out of people’s pockets, reducing expenditures and thus increasing employment.
That doesn’t sound like dead in the water to me.
True environmentalism will never be dead, but fake environmentalism assuredly faces natural correction. One possibility is that natural correction will take the form of competition from upstart environmental organizations that are built on superior, honest foundations. For example, a charter explicitly guaranteeing respect for nature (including natural climate variability) might represent a refreshing new option for potential donors who may, for a few examples, love naturally-forested parks & also insist on non-toxic drinking water, but demand absolute guarantees that their donations NOT be spent on climate alarmism (which fundamentally misrepresents nature).
“thepompousgit says:
January 6, 2012 at 5:01 pm”
Well, The Iron Lady did have some help from Arthur.
Think of a rubber band. You can stretch it and stretch it until it suddenly breaks and rebounds. The same goes for apocalyptic predictions and the political movements driving them.
James Hansen got the AGW ball rolling in the late ’80s and it culminated with Al Gore’s Oscar-winning feature length horror movie in 2006; both stretched the rubber band of truth. The Greens and Progressives got behind AGW early on because they recognized it was perfect Trojan Horse to effect their political goals.
The lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen UN conference marked the high water mark of the AGW political movement as well as its Waterloo.
The lead-up to the conference stretched the rubber band even further with outrageous claims AGW caused everything from impotence to acne. Its Waterloo was the release of the Climategate emails that torpedoed the expected conference treaties and binding obligations. The Greens and Progressives, outraged having come so close and thwarted, redoubled their efforts stretching the rubber band.
A breaking rubber band is a discontinuity. Until it breaks, it follows an expected linear elongation versus tensile force relationship. When it breaks, all work invested and previous history is wiped out in a snap.
Substitute the public’s credulity for the rubber band. The public believes in scientists and their pronouncements. They believe the pronouncements even as each becomes more outrageous and stretches the rubber band further. It has a cumulative effect.
People’s credulity only stretches so far and then it breaks like a snapped rubber band. When it breaks, the polar attitude changes from “I believe you” to “I don’t believe a word you are saying”. It is an abrupt discontinuity and I think we are there now. It will take a long time before scientists are respected again; you cannot mend a broken rubber band.
There are a few key points that Carey misses. The first is that the public is firmly on board with environmental causes when it’s about real, visible and toxic pollution. After all, rivers should not be catching on fire from paper mill waste. But the more abstract and theoretical the environmental cause becomes, the more detached from it the public becomes. And global warming is about as abstract as you can get.
Second, the environmentalists are after a severe limit on our access to energy. This means inevitably an accompanying severe reduction in our standard of living. And it runs entirely contrary to our social beliefs, namely that our successors will be better off than we are. It doesn’t take very much for people to understand that following the prescriptions of radical environmentalism means that everyone is worse off, personally, financially. Increased costs are tough to sell in very good economic times. During a drawn out recession, it’s as dead as Marley’s Ghost. As long as the environmentalist message has increased poverty at its roots, they’re going nowhere on hyperdrive.
On 9/11, when congress was informed there was another plane in the air headed for Washington, you saw the politicians running for cover. The threat was real.
When the Hansens et al scream the end is near, 10,000 believers hop on fuel thirsty jets, head for Copenhagen and Durban and party. Al Gore, with his ill gotten millions, took a private jet. And let’s not forget his $10,000 electric bill to heat his pool.
How can these people be believed?
In Europe, the Green movement is not dead. It has wielded much power in Germany and still influences policy in the UK.
However, the public perception of the Green movement will take a hit, the more the Green movement alligns itself with AGW and the more ADW becomes discredited. The press are beginning to publish more stories about useless windfarms and these stories will damage the Green movement. Today, the press ran 3 different stories on windfarms. The First sgowed pictures of a couple of turbines that had their rotars blown off in the strong winds that the UK is experiencing. The second, dealt with how windfarms have had to ve closed down due to strong wind and are therefore not producing elecrity. On top of that, windfarms are being paid not to produce electrity even though they cannot produce any because it is unsafe to operate the turbines in the strong wind! This type of story really ridiocules windfarms. It shows how stupid the subsidy programme is, ie., to pay someone for not doing something which they are incapable of doing. It shows why electricity bills are increasing. The third story is about a windfarm operator being licences to kill eagles which are a protected species. That is really anti-green. It makes the RSPCB (Royal Socciety for the Protection of Birds) look extremely silly since they are promoting renewables such as windfarms even though windfarms kill a lot of birds and even though at least one operator has been given a licence to cull a protected species.
None of this is good publicity for the Greens.
This analysis missed out the real turning point on the demise of the warming frenzy.
It was the release of the infamous Climategate emails. The Copenhagen conference was a sure bet, not only to force the Kyoto non-signers into the fold, but to establish a new world order mandating the transfer of wealth from the productive nations to the corrupt beggar regimes of the world. But the publicity surrounding the devastating content on the emails, put a rapid halt to the proceedings. The untypical freezing and snowy weather there was like an excalmation point that put a literal chill on the entire affair. Al Gore, who had planned to sell and autograph his books for hundreds of dollars a pop, slinked off avoiding any contact with the press.
Copenhagen was the Waterloo of the warmist movement. Whoever obtained the emails and leaked them is the greatest hero of the 21st century.
Corky Boyd said:
January 6, 2012 at 10:01 pm
“Whoever obtained the emails and leaked them is the greatest hero of the 21st century.”
——————————–
Agreed! They should take algore’s Nobel prize away from him and give it to FOIA.org
Corky Boyd – don’t forget the M’s, and Anthony (and some others) as saviours of the modern world.
Just wanted to pop in and mention how much I have enjoyed all of these thoughtful comments
Robert Sykes says: January 6, 2012 at 10:45 am
Well stated, thank you.
The song Tomorrow Belongs to Me from the movie Cabaret.
The ‘environmental’ movement is inextricably bound to an ideology as are many government targetted & funded ‘youth’ programs and policies which began well before the e-mental movement.
Let’s hope that the tipping point of environmentalism has been passed. In Europe their fallacies about CAGW and nuclear power are still strong.
Skeptic talking points must be clear to laymen as environmentalists are professionals in propaganda. Feelings and repetitions are important part of good propaganda.
1. Warming is not a bad thing – mankind has prospered during the warm periods
2. Watch your wallet – this will cost a lot
3. Warming is small and natural
4. Look out of the window – no catastrophes of their prophesies have occured
5. They don’t believe in CAGW themselves, they just try to pocket your tax money
6. Solutions like windmills, cap and trade, .. don’t work
7. This is science and that is not
Cherry Pick says:
January 6, 2012 at 11:13 pm
“Let’s hope that the tipping point of environmentalism has been passed. In Europe their fallacies about CAGW and nuclear power are still strong.”
VERY well said…particularly because you are great at marketing…since you know how to drive traffic to your website…which is all in Finnish…except your 7 points…very good!
Seven can sometimes be a lucky number…except when it’s not…
Edit note: “Nordhous and Shellenberger said that when Al Gore” — Nordhaus
____
Because when it comes to Organizing and Taking Over, they’re babes in the woods. From Patrick Moore on out, they were simply overwhelmed and snookered. Up against people who live to subvert any organization that purports to be “for the public good”. Few or none have escaped.
Jessie’s post, above, has an unclosed bold tag. (tag inserted here: ►) Don’t know if this will help.
Don’t forget Ontario, the “Heartland”. It’s still ruled by the most clue-deprived government NE of California. It’s paying the price, but the Money Momentum is still there, and hard to stop. Once you’ve committed to thousands of windmills, you’re kinda stuck with them …
Don’t you buy that for a second. Anarchism is a temporary tool in the hands of statists who want to precipitate crises that force turnover of power to themselves. Google and read about the Cloward-Piven strategy: overload the ‘entitlement’ mandates and programs, cause collapse, demonized the system, replace it with a Progressive one.
typo:
demonizeddemonizeIn a way, it’s a bit saddening, like the history of what happened to left wing politics. If you take the trouble to research the appalling conditions Marx found in Victorian factories, you’ll have difficulty not agreeing with him that things were very, very bad for the workers who powered the new industrial system, and that something needed doing. (You’ll also realise that his opinion was that a system which treated its workers like this would necessarily collapse of its own accord – not, as latter-day Marxists made a matter of faith, that the system must be torn down and a new system imposed in its place; that was supposed to happen naturally.) The original analysis was reasonable enough; but was subsequently corrupted into the vile top-down, over-regulated systems which US right-wingers, in particular, rightly rail against. But socialism, underneath the hijack, is no more than a declaration that one believes in treating other people with respect. We are social animals, after all. Who’d want to be an ‘antisocialist’?
And so it is with environmentalism. No-one can deny that too many times, where there was profit to be made by doing it and no ‘inconvenient’ regulations applied, corporations have cheerfully trashed local environments and destroyed the lives of local peoples in the name of their cash profit. Look at what Shell has done to great swathes of Nigeria if you doubt that. Again, what started as a reasonable, human response of compassion for those who suffer needlessly, and outrage at industrial scale pollution, has been co-opted and corrupted into – guess what – a movement dedicated to vile top-down, heavily-regulated systems allowing the ‘enlightened ones’ to dictate to everyone else. Yet most of us – and I don’t just mean WUWTers – would acknowledge that we should treat our environment non-destructively. We social animals like a pleasant place to relax in. Who’d want to support trashing their environment?
Well, state ‘Marxism’ isn’t doing too well these days. Happily, people realised that iron control from above is simply not an efficient way of running things and that, for all the problems formerly authoritarian states now face, there are alternatives to that iron control. If corrupt environmentalism is also collapsing, part at least of the reason must be that more and more people are realising that the ‘solution’ being proposed for the ‘problem’ is the same top-down iron control, and are rightly rejecting it. It’s telling, and worrying, that residents of former Soviet states have expressed concern over what they see happening in the West. That the corruption of environmentalism has also done serious damage to the popular image of science in general is bad, but not, we may hope, irreversible; facts have a way of sitting there looking at you until you acknowledge them.
What we need to be continually on the alert for is that any basically reasonable idea, be it treating the people working for you with respect, treating the environment you live in with respect or whatever, has been hijacked by authoritarian extremists pumping out the powerful message that if we ‘just’ give them absolute power they’ll solve all our problems. Well, we all know what absolute power does, and it ain’t problem solving. It’s probably too late for either Marxism or environmentalism now, at least until later revisions of history conclude that both were originally founded on reasonable enough ideas. We need, meanwhile, to keep our sociopolitical antennae highly sensitised to the eternal lust for power exhibited by a small minority of people, and more quickly reject any movement which declares that it ‘only’ needs total control over us to create nirvana as defined (and disguised so as to sound good) by them.
As a socialist, I’m quite happy to see the corrupt authoritarianism which hijacked the originally reasonable idea die. As an environmentalist, I’m quite happy to see the corrupt authoritarianism which hijacked the originally reasonable idea die. Good riddance to both. I only hope that more of us wake up to the ever-present menace of authoritarianism taking over whatever reasonable idea turns up next, and find a way to stop it in its tracks once and for all. That’s why your lovely environmentalism died, Amanda: it lay down with dogs and became terminally infested with power-hungry fleas.
Check out how British wind turbines really perform when the wind blows…
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3986055/165mph-storm-wrecks-a-wind-turbine.html
richard verney says:
January 6, 2012 at 9:51 pm
“It shows how stupid the subsidy programme is, ie., to pay someone for not doing something which they are incapable of doing. ”
EU commission style economy. Barroso, Heedegard, and van Rompuy AND Merkel and Sarkozy KNOW NO BETTER. Like the epicycles of the CAGW theory, the economic disturbances of the Green Economy will continue to destabilize Europes economy.
We spend 10% of our GDP on energy in undisturbed conditions, so with all the capital misallocation, the politicians can easily leverage that up to 20 or 30%. The collapse of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland has a lot to do with the Green energy schemes.
A lot of nonperforming credits – but our media only says “housing bubble” and is done with explaining that; when in fact many billions of credit have been used to erect wind turbines and plaster landscapes in Spain with solar panels.
Green tech eats economies whole like gangrene.