ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY MAY 20, 2009
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Why environmentalism keeps imploding.
SOMETIME AFTER THE release of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, environmentalism crossed from political movement to cultural moment. Fortune 500 companies pledged to go carbon neutral. Seemingly every magazine in the country, including Sports Illustrated, released a special green issue. Paris dimmed the lights on the Eiffel Tower. Solar investments became hot, even for oil companies. Evangelical ministers preached the gospel of “creation care.” Even archconservative Newt Gingrich published a book demanding action on global warming.
Green had moved beyond politics. Gestures that were once mundane—bringing your own grocery bags to the store, shopping for secondhand clothes, taking the subway—were suddenly infused with grand significance. Actions like screwing in light bulbs, inflating tires, and weatherizing windows gained fresh urgency. A new generation of urban hipsters, led by Colin Beavan, a charismatic writer in Manhattan who had branded himself “No Impact Man,” proselytized the virtues of downscaling—dumpster-diving, thrift-store shopping, and trading in one’s beater car for a beater bike—while suburban matrons proudly clutched copies of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and came to see the purchase of each $4 heirloom tomato at the farmer’s market as an act of virtue.
For those caught up in the moment, the future seemed to promise both apocalypse and transcendence in roughly equal measure. The New York Times and San Francisco magazine ran long feature stories on the uptick of upper-middle- class professionals who worried to their therapists about polar bears or who dug through the trash cans of co-workers to recycle plastic bottles, as though suffering from a kind of eco-OCD. At the same time, folks like Pollan and Beavan provided a vision of green living that seemed to offer not just a smaller carbon footprint but a better life. Amid the fear was the hope that the ecological crisis would bring us together and make us happier.
And then, almost as quickly as it had inflated, the green bubble burst. Between January 2008 and January 2009, the percentage of Americans who told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that the environment was a “top priority” dropped from 56 percent to 41 percent. While surveys have long showed that enthusiasm for all things green is greatest among well-educated liberals, the new polling results were sobering. For the first time in a quarter century, more Americans told Gallup in March that they would prioritize economic growth “even if the environment suffers to some extent” than said they would prioritize environmental protection “even at the risk of curbing economic growth.” Soon thereafter, Shell announced it would halt its investments in solar and wind power.
Policymakers took note. As gas prices continued their upward trajectory, climate legislation to cap carbon emissions garnered less support in the U.S. Senate last summer than it had in 2003 and 2005. Confronted by chants of “Drill, baby, drill,” Senate and House Democrats, led by candidate Barack Obama, embraced offshore oil exploration, reversing nearly a quarter-century of opposition. When it came time to justify stimulus investments in energy efficiency and renewables, the president did so in the name of job creation, not polar bears. And, last month, after floating the idea of forcing cap-and- trade legislation through Congress as part of the budget, the White House quickly backed down in the face of opposition from Senate Democrats, especially those from the hard-hit Midwest.
Today, Beavan and others pitch green lifestyles as thrifty ways to make ends meet in a difficult economy. And, no doubt, many Americans are seeking out some form of (in)voluntary simplicity in response to the financial crisis. But making virtue of necessity is not the same as making necessity of virtue. Whatever romanticized vision of a simpler life that might have existed a year or two ago has largely been replaced by a fearful vision of a life of poverty or, at least, greater insecurity. Today, the Times and other newspapers run stories about how Americans are coping with their economic, not ecological, anxieties.
Of course, environmentalism itself has not disappeared. Earth Day was celebrated last week, magazines and marketers continue to use green to sell to upscale audiences, and legislation to cap carbon emissions, albeit heavily watered-down, could still pass Congress. But the cultural moment marked by the ubiquity of green self-help, apocalypse talk, and cheery utopianism has passed. It is tempting to reduce this retrenchment to economic pressures alone, with concrete short-term concerns trumping more abstract worries about the future. But a closer look at the causes of the green bubble reveals a more complicated story, not just about the nature of environmentalism but about modern American life itself.
THIS ISN'T THE first time an eco-bubble has inflated and then burst. In fact, the modern environmental movement was born in a bubble. In 1969, an industrial pollution fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, generated national publicity and outrage. The first photographs of Earth in its entirety transmitted from outer space were received as signs of a new ecological consciousness. The first Earth Day was held in 1970, and, over the next three years, Congress passed and (a Republican) President Nixon signed into law sweeping environmental statutes.
But, in 1973, soaring oil prices pushed the country into recession. By the time Jimmy Carter suggested, a few years later, that profligate American lifestyles were partly to blame, the public reacted with resentment and ridicule. Three years later, Ronald Reagan was tearing Carter’s solar panels from the White House and blaming trees for pollution.
The second green bubble began to grow in the summer of 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress about the arrival of global warming. Coupled with images of the Amazon in flames and record heat and drought across much of the United States, it was easy for the press to wrap global warming in an end-of-times narrative. The following January, Time magazine eschewed its usual “Man of the Year” profile and declared Earth “Planet of the Year.” In 1990, President Bush signed a Clean Air Act amendment on acid rain, and, two years later, he signed a global-warming treaty at a United Nations meeting in Rio de Janeiro.
But the bubble had already begun to deflate. In 1990, California voters rejected a sweeping environmental initiative by a two-to-one margin. The recession of 1991 and 1992 mostly pushed green issues off the table, and Gore, in a move that would foreshadow his own run for president eight years later, would spend much of his vice-presidential campaign with Bill Clinton downplaying his role as a leading environmental advocate. In 1994, Clinton’s proposed energy-consumption tax played a significant role in costing Democrats control of the House of Representatives, and, three years later, the Senate unanimously rejected the Kyoto treaty before Gore could even fly to Japan to negotiate it.
Much like the most recent episode, each of these past bursts of environmentalism waxed and waned with the rise and fall of the economy. But, perhaps more significantly, the green bubbles inflated during highly polarized periods in American society and politics, often fueled by disastrously violent episodes in foreign policy. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam War motivated student militancy at home, which then combined with the civil rights, feminist, and gay freedom movements to open up a social divide that would last a half century. In the 1980s, Reagan’s confrontations with the Soviets and his proxy wars in Central America split the country, and the old cultural divisions reemerged with a vengeance.
George W. Bush’s administration, much like the Nixon and Reagan years, was a time in which American liberals felt alienated from the White House. But, while the first and second green bubbles were co-opted by the Republican presidents of the time, Bush resisted the third. The war in Iraq, the crackdown on civil liberties at home, and the president’s strident nationalism combined to create a story line in which Big Oil, imperialism, and global capitalism threatened apocalypse well before Gore warned of a “day of reckoning.” The green cultural moment, with its emphasis on redemption, harmony, and healing, was less a response to the fear of future ecological disasters than to present-day social ones.
At the same time that liberal professionals were feeling estranged politically, they were also feeling alienated personally and socially. For perhaps the first time in history, according to New York University sociologist Dalton Conley’s new book, Elsewhere, U.S.A., American elites were working longer hours than the poor. They were making more money, but the price they paid was longer commutes, the commodification of everything (from private schools to bottled water), and less time for themselves, their families, and their friends. Inequality skyrocketed during the 1990s, resulting both in new affluence for the wealthiest 20 percent and in heightened social anxiety. In these conditions, upper-middle-class liberals started questioning and resenting hyper-materialism, even while enjoying the status and comfort it offered.
Little surprise, then, that they would start buying a whole new class of products to demonstrate their ecological concern. Green consumption became what sociologists call “positional consumption”—consumption that distinguishes one as elite—and few things were more ecopositional than the Toyota Prius, whose advantage over other hybrid cars was its distinctive look. A 2007 survey that appeared in The New York Times found that more Prius owners (57 percent) said they bought the car because it “makes a statement about me” than because of its better gas mileage (36 percent), lower emissions (25 percent), or new technology (7 percent). Prius owners, the Times concluded, “want everyone to know they are driving a hybrid.” The status effects were so powerful that, by early 2009, Honda’s new Insight Hybrid had been reshaped to look like the triangular Prius.
Of course, for many greens, healing required more than a new kind of consumption, however virtuous. In The New York Times Magazine’s 2008 Earth Day issue, Michael Pollan argued that climate change was at bottom a crisis of lifestyle and personal character—“the sum of countless little everyday choices”—and suggested that individual actions, such as planting backyard gardens, might ultimately be more important than government action to repair the environment. Pollan half-acknowledged that growing produce in your backyard was ecologically irrelevant, but “there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden,” he wrote. “[Y]ou will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen.”
It’s easy enough to point out the insignificance of planting a garden, buying fewer clothes, or using fluorescent bulbs. After all, we can’t escape the fact that we depend on an infrastructure—roads, buildings, sewage systems, power plants, electrical grids, etc.—that requires huge quantities of fossil fuels. But the ecological irrelevance of these practices was beside the point. What downscalers offered was not a better way to reduce emissions, but rather, a way to reduce guilt. In 2007, we asked environmentalists in focus groups about green consumption. None thought that consuming green would do much of anything to address a huge challenge like global warming. They did it anyway, they said, because it made them feel better.
Utopian environmentalism has, to some extent, always promised to heal the alienation wrought by modernity. But, during bubbles, increasing numbers of Americans become captivated by the twin thoughts that human civilization could soon come crashing down—and that we are on the cusp of a sudden leap forward in consciousness, one that will allow us to heal ourselves, our society, and our planet. Apocalyptic fears meld seamlessly into utopian hopes. The end of the world is near—unless we heal all that divides us.
TO OBSERVE THAT green bubbles are fueled by the discontent of upper-middle- class liberals is not to dismiss environmentalism as elitist. Against nostalgic accounts like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, most social-change movements are started and directed by the relatively affluent and well-educated, from the preacher-led civil rights movement to modern feminism to gay rights. The problem is not that most greens are elites, per se, but rather that too few of them acknowledge the material basis for their ecological concern and that too many reject the modern project of expanding prosperity altogether.
Recall that the inconvenient truth for which Gore named his movie was “that we have to change the way we live our lives”—and nobody could have the impression, after watching the movie, that it would be for the better. No new technology could save us—we would have to live differently. The public got the message. Of the 67 percent of voters who told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in 2006 that it is possible to reduce the effects of global warming, nearly twice as many said it would require major sacrifices than said it could be done with technology. When eminent physicist Freeman Dyson suggested in The New York Review of Books in 2008 that we could deal with global warming by creating carbon-eating trees, he was widely ridiculed. What critics seemed to find most offensive was the idea that a big environmental problem like climate change might be overcome without significantly altering modern life.
There are, to be sure, negative and disorienting aspects of modern life: pollution, alienation, loneliness, inequality, and the proliferation of choices. But the truth is that, while we often talk of our desire for greater community and interconnectedness, we choose ever more privacy, autonomy, and personal freedom. Few of even the most ardent greens could seriously imagine subsuming their individual identities to a pre-agrarian tribe, or abandoning their office jobs for a life of hard agricultural labor. The retreat from older forms of community, and the move toward greater individuation, is universal and largely positive. Colin Beavan and Michael Pollan lament, respectively, the loss of community and the loss of connection between humans and the land. But both choose to live alone with their families in cities, not on agricultural communes, and both express themselves as unique thinkers and writers.
Green anti-modernism brings with it other contradictions. Despite the rhetoric about “one planet,” not all humans have the same interests when it comes to addressing global warming. Greens often note that the changing global climate will have the greatest impact on the world’s poor; they neglect to mention that the poor also have the most to gain from development fueled by cheap fossil fuels like coal. For the poor, the climate is already dangerous. They are already subject to the droughts, floods, hurricanes, and diseases that future warming will intensify. It is their poverty, not rising carbon-dioxide levels, that make them more vulnerable than the rest of us. By contrast, it is the richest humans—those of us who have achieved comfort, prosperity, and economic security for ourselves and for our children—who have the most to lose from the kind of apocalyptic global-warming scenarios that have so often been invoked in recent years. The existential threat so many of us fear is that we might all end up in a kind of global Somalia characterized by failed states, resource scarcity, and chaos. It is more than a little ironic that at the heart of the anti-modern green discourse resides the fear of losing our modernity.
Nonetheless, it has become an article of faith among many greens that the global poor are happier with less and must be shielded from the horrors of overconsumption and economic development—never mind the realities of infant mortality, treatable disease, short life expectancies, and grinding agrarian poverty. The convenient and ancient view among elites that the poor are actually spiritually rich, and the exaggeration of insignificant gestures like recycling and buying new lightbulbs, are both motivated by the cognitive dissonance created by simultaneously believing that not all seven billion humans on earth can “live like we live” and, consciously or unconsciously, knowing that we are unwilling to give up our high standard of living. This is the split “between what you think and what you do” to which Pollan refers, and it should, perhaps, come as no surprise that so many educated liberals, living at the upper end of a social hierarchy that was becoming ever more stratified, should find the remedies that Pollan and Beavan offer so compelling. But, while planting a backyard garden may help heal the eco-anxieties of affluent greens, it will do little to heal the planet or resolve the larger social contradictions that it purports to address.
Even in the United States, different interests help shape different attitudes: Poorer Americans in states more dependent upon cheap coal electricity are far less likely to support policies that would cost jobs or significantly increase energy prices than are wealthier Americans on the coasts, whose energy supply is already much cleaner. Believing that our common interest in halting global warming should bring us together, Al Gore spent some of the $300 million he raised from his movie and rock concerts on magazine and TV ads attempting to overcome partisanship. His ads showed famous people who disagreed—such as Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich—sitting down together on a couch. He called it the “We Campaign.” We might disagree on politics, the ads said, but we can all agree that we need to do something about global warming. But Gingrich recently testified against the climate-change legislation Gore favors.
The idea that a common connection to nature might allow us to overcome our divisions and transcend the essential messiness of politics is an idea that is as old as it is fantastical. Politics will always involve conflict, contradiction, and compromise. Fashioning a way forward will require us to frankly acknowledge our different interests as well as our common interests. While utopianism has a bright side—it is a way of imagining a better world—it also has a dark side characterized by escapism and a disengagement from reality that marks all bubbles, green or financial.
Whether or not environmental leaders are able to recalibrate their politics for a post-bubble moment, all of us would do well to be suspicious of revulsion at modern life and our longing to transcend it. The low-grade dissatisfaction that almost all of us have felt is not a reason to forsake our modern lives but rather an inescapable consequence of the extraordinary choices, opportunities, and security that envelop us—and of the self-awareness and individualized identities that modernity itself makes possible. As such, the contradictions that drive our dissatisfaction and desire for transcendence are irresolvable. And this we should celebrate.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are the authors of Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists and founders of the Breakthrough Institute. This article appeared in the May 20, 2009 issue of the magazine.
76 comments
Michael and Ted, Wow, please share your telepathic powers. Apparently you know what the 'greens'are about without bothering to listen to them. You might want to look beyond your magical breakthrough dogma, you might realize that there is more to people than you see. Planting a garden might not stop the climate crisis, but it does provide a deeper connection to our consumption habits. Jesse Jenkins talks about solutions and is respected by many of the 'greens' that you all vilify. The two of you, on the other hand, are increasingly irrelevant and boring.
- Tommaso Boggia
May 6, 2009 at 3:35am
This is the most ridiculous and non-factual analysis I have ever seen of the U.S. environmental movement. This interpretation completely ignores the refereed literature on this topic. Why is the New Republic allowing this sort of drivel to appear? Don't you have any fact checkers? Dr. Robert Brulle Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science Drexel University
- Robert J. Brulle
May 6, 2009 at 3:10pm
The Obama administration has embraced much of The Breakthrough Institute's agenda in response to the Great Recession, appointing Chu as Secretary of Energy, investing in basic energy research, development and deployment and budgeting for a national energy education act. If environmentalists are increasingly irrelevant, lets focus on what is relevant.
- Peter Weisberg
May 8, 2009 at 1:38am
As someone who grows my own food, has the right lightbulbs, agonizes about consumer choices and reads Pollan and Beavan, I think that this critique is spot-on. My own environmentalism is a lifestyle. It's meaningless in terms of the larger problem. Shellenberger and Nordhaus are doing important work. They are figuring out what lies beyond the dour Victorian choices (choices I can't seem to stop myself from making) that constitute modern environmentalism.
- Deborah Fisher
May 8, 2009 at 9:29am
That this article will receive the typical harsh response from guilt-driven eco-friends only proves that it provides a well-reasoned assessment of the current environmental movement. Well done! Give credit to The New Republic for publishing a different viewpoint.
- Amused
May 8, 2009 at 10:13am
I think the article is an excellent bit of opinion and judging by the comments a bunch of sacred cows were very properly gored. Iparticularily enjoyed the highlighting of contradictions within self conscious environmental movements.
- Minnesota
May 8, 2009 at 10:29am
Bravo! Some sanity and truth-telling at last. CO2 and the "environment" are to the greens what sex was to the Victorians or what Western society is to the Islamists. Science, much less genuine human needs and desires, are irrelevant. Instead, "environmentalism" has become the provence of wealthy elites who aim to impose their sick sense of "virtue" on others. Until you "environmentalists" give up your mansions and private planes (yes, that includes the Goracle), and trash your cars in favor of public transit to get to the organic grocery store, and actually live the materially barren lifestyle you advocate for everyone else, you really should just STFU.
- R. D. R
May 8, 2009 at 10:57am
Thank you for a dead-on analysis. It's time we spoke truth to the often deeply irrational green movement. Conservation, pollution reduction, renewable resources, and efficiency are all logical premises that the vast majority of people can understand and do strive toward. Unfortunately the green philosophy has been co-opted by blowhards like Al Gore and wealthy urban liberals who think its the epitome of 'green' to drive their Prius an extra 20 miles out of their way to buy organic local produce.
- Mike Peck
May 8, 2009 at 11:13am
A tame if accurate summary of what is going on. The green movement will one day soon be seen as the product of the richer days of the late 20th Century and first years of the 21st. It will be demolished by technological development of the sort that will remove the need for the sort financially induced ruinous withcraft currently practised by the green movement. Among them will be revealing the looming proof that CO2 has no part in global warming but H2O does. None of this is to say that we are pristine guardians of our environment, because we are not. But the alarmists are costing the rest of us an unnecessary fortune that would be much better deployed in improving our much more obvious failings of that guardianship the biggest priority among them being improving the lives of the poorest.
- Ian Campbell
May 8, 2009 at 11:31am
I love the "Planting a garden might not stop the climate crisis, but it does provide a deeper connection to our consumption habits." comment. It sure does provide a deeper connection, a deeper connection to my grocery store. Who wants to spend hours upon hours weeding and maintaining a garden? I sure as hell don't, spent too many hours on it already and it sucks donkey dongles. It's nice that you feel I should be forced to do it though, fascist that you are.
- Eben Flood
May 8, 2009 at 12:07pm
The reason green is down is three fold.
First, people now have a vague idea of how costly the green lifestyle is. Cap and trade doubles their electricity bill. Not drilling drives up the cost of their gasoline. Bankrupting the coal industry will put them on the dole. Wind power means they will brownouts on hot summer days. And, they finally realize that living green means they have an hour a day less free time.
Second, greens have lost their credibility. The disasters that Algore and his priests promised haven't occurred. Fewer hurricanes, not more. Colder temperatures, not higher. James Hansen caught fudging his data. Solar astronomers talking about a Mini Ice Age.
Third, people are beginning to understand that green guarantees the really poor in the world eternity poverty. If America goes green, Americans will drive Honda Fits instead of Honda Accords. If Africa or Asia goes green, Africans and Asians will eat less and get less medical care. More child deaths, shorter life expectancy.
Green is the modern Moloch, a religion that demands its believers sacrifice their present for unlikely benefits in the future.
- John Hines
May 8, 2009 at 12:20pm
Excellent article with one major omission. The writers fail to acknowledge the obvious role of elite secularization in the green movement's yearning for connectedness and meaningful living. Environmentalism is the new religion for a significant portion of these folks - complete with global warming apocolypse visions having become an article of faith.
- John Sopa
May 8, 2009 at 12:37pm
It's an interesting piece, and thought provoking. My thought is that this piece is all about marking the extremes of a swinging pendulum. What's more to the point is the underlying current outside of the extremes. We as a society are becoming more aware of our environment. Media, well before Al Gore, were running lots of shows on the environment, animals etc. Our kids are getting this early and often. It's a cultural shift at different points of progress around the world. In China, they care very much about how the world views them. The Olympics were an excellent example. They don't want to be able to see their air either. So you might say a bubble burst, just as in our tech bubble, but technology is alive and well and so is the green movement.
- Mark - Dallas
May 8, 2009 at 1:27pm
The article has captured the inherent inconsistencies in the environmental movement -- one that is dominated by an extreme that seems to beleive we would all be better off if we abandoned capitalism the accompanying economic development and all lived the simple life of subsistence farmers. Of course, they ignore third world countries where people who really have to provide their own food locally tend to be the absolute worst stewards of the environment. When faced with the choice of clear cutting rainforest to grow crops or letting their family starve, they behave as all of us would in a similiar situation: start the chainsaws.
- d m ridd
May 8, 2009 at 4:17pm
Gorebull warming is the greatest farce ever told
- tom
May 8, 2009 at 10:47pm
I've had a vegetable garden all my adult life, mostly because you simply can't get decent commercially grown tomatoes. I can say with a certain amount of assurance that the belief by so called environmentalists that home gardening (on a small scale) is good for the environment is almost surely wrong due to the environmental costs of the tools (rototillers used once a year to turn over a couple hundred square feet anyone), irrigation with treated city water, fencing to keep out the deer and rabbits, etc.
- sully
May 8, 2009 at 10:51pm
The most important comment has already been made, but I wish to reinforce it: environmentalism is the religion of many people who have no other faith. Facts do not matter much to them; they have faith.
- Rob
May 10, 2009 at 2:12am
Two comments -- one minor, one more significant. The first is that Bush did not "sign a global warming treaty in Rio DeJaniero." Rather, he signed Agenda 21 (which while foreshadowing lots of environmental treaties) was not a global warming treaty. Gore did sign this but, as noted, the Clinton/Gore Administration did nothing to seek a ratification of that treaty. The second point is that resource management 9sustainable development, if you will) is more a question of the institutional framework within which that resource - whether energy or groundwater - is administered. Prior to the Progressive Era (roughly 1880), the natural path was for new concerns to emerge and new institutions evolve to better address them. Thus, when energy grew in importance, property rights were extended to sub-surface oil and that resource was (and remains) a sustainable resource. it is well managed and reserves continually expand to meet expanded demand (save when blocked by eco-theocrats). The tragedy is that the Progressive with their belief in the superiority of political over private management blocked that evolutionary process. The result is that as slowly America grew wealthier and environmental concerns grew in importance, only political remedies were entertained. That led to the creation of national parks but the economic preference of most Americans for wealth (smokestacks if you will) blocked the evolution of expanding property rights that might have slowly made it possible for wildlife, clean water and air, and other environmental amenities to be handled in a private, decentralized fashion like values that were integrated into a voluntary, property rights framework. Thus, while environmentalisst have in many ways become eco-theocrats, the failures of modern environmentalism polciy have much deeper roots than Pollin and company. CEI's web site (www.cei.org) contains further comments on the topic of free market (better property rights based) environmentalism.
- Fred Smith
May 12, 2009 at 9:38pm
This will be a bit redundant, but I just cannot resist thanking Nordhaus and Shellenberger for showing me the light. Here I was, just a typical liberal environmentalist, thinking the desperately poor were happy while the rich were wicked. I guess I just haven't really been thinking very deeply or clearly all these years. But these authors have shown me to be a straw man, so easy to send up in flames.
- Paul
May 14, 2009 at 11:58am
Oh brother, what a silly column. First, there have been tremendous successes in the environmental movement over the past several decades, and they continue today. Breathe the air in Beijing, and breathe it in New York City, and tell me that environmental regulations haven't made a difference. Second, little or no mention is made of the tremendous public relations efforts by industry against environmental science. Consider global warming, which now is probably occurring at rates even faster than predicted in the IPCC. The public perception of global warming is dramatically different from the scientific literature, thanks to a well coordinated campaign by pro-carbon forces. Third, the biggest changes in our energy consumption will occur with little or no change in quality of life, and may actually improve it. Electricity consumption has had no growth over the past decade in California despite a steady growth in the economy; there was an improvement in efficiency. That improvement in efficiency is where the future lies. You don't have to be green to own a refrigerator that uses one quarter the energy of an old appliance.
- Randy
May 19, 2009 at 1:03am
with the cold weather the last few years, i find myself firing up the suburban a little earlier than needed just to warm her up. then off to the donut shop drive through. then off to work in the top of the sawmill cutting up trees for algore's new home addition.
- plebis
May 19, 2009 at 6:35am
There is a direct connection between the loss of belief in God and the passion for the only other choice - spatial temporal Earth; there is no hereafter; no hope; no ressurection for the eco-worshippers. Wise use (conservation) has morphed into irrational fear and disuse (preservation) Those who understand the Parable of the 10 Talents and apply it here, know what's wrong. God help the pagan earth worshippers for they either have false gods or no faith.
- Don L
May 19, 2009 at 8:02am
The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. Why do you think Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day?
- John Galt
May 19, 2009 at 10:14am
Great points, made in such a way as to intentionally piss off liberals. Sigh. I guess you've gotta sell magazines. As an environmentalist and global warming freakoutist, I've always rather taken it for granted that the movement has some serious flaws, just like my precious democrats are also full of it, just like my precious Hemingway was probably kind of a jerk, etc. Is it really so surprising that the Green movement (which I believe is here to stay) has its fair share of morons? It doesn't make the movement invalid, nor does it qualify it as a "bubble."
- Adam
May 19, 2009 at 10:18am
The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
- Sam
May 19, 2009 at 10:25am
Your statement that "greens note that climate change will have the greatest impact on the worlds poor, neglecting to mention that the poor have the most to gain from development fueled by fossil fuels" is very skewed. Perhaps the poor do have an economic gain from allowing overseas manufacturing to take place on their soil. They may get jobs, and be forced to migrate to a smoggy city where they will be inhaling the toxic chemicals that go along with coal-fired power plants. The deterioration in health, and rise of new healthcare problems in these poor areas are exactly what the world needs. More people who are chronically ill due to pollution. The increase in coal-fired power will also allow these newly "rich" people to watch their homes be destroyed in hurricanes and floods. I'm not sure how the "greens" you speak of or anyone with a comfortable lifestyle have the most to lose when they are the ones living in an industrialized nation with relatively clean air. It is ludacris to pretend that the poor in America as well as the world are not the ones being affected the most by climate change and pollution.
- amelia
May 19, 2009 at 10:38am
Offshore drilling was inevitable. But it's a stop gap measure at best. And, we aren't going to see oil for years. Everyone in Big Oil better cross their fingers, slaughter a goat, face the offices of National Review and pray 5 times a day, or whatever faith floats them. Cause just one little spill, and the Big Oil party will be over. New CAFE standards are coming, today, and businesses are embracing them. Sad that it took 19 years, but better late than never. Priuses definitely are a status symbol, but anyone with rudimentary math skills and a supposed understanding of economics can analyze hybrid car purchases and see that they make sense economically. Even if one is deluded into believing gas prices will remain low forever, many of them (except for most of GM's mild hybrids) still make financial sense. As plugin hybrids and EVs start appearing in dealer showrooms next year, sit back and watch the line form outside. Some might have paper in pencil in hand, but most have already done the math. Even with a down economy and cheap gas, car sales overall are down but hybrid sales are up. Ford is the only one of the Big Three that's making it, their hybrids completely smash GM's and Chrysler's hybrids, and in the case of the Fusion hybrid it beats it's competition the Camry hybrid. 40% of Fusion sales thus far have been hybrids. So duh, it seems that the Hummerization of America wasn't a sustainable course. There is plenty of greenwashing out there, but CFLs are another economic no brainer. Anyone who uses them, and I have for 9-10 years, knows how much of a payoff they provide. Analyses I've read show ridiculously inflated pricing ($10-$14 a bulb) that isn't close to reality ($2-$3 a bulb). At times, I've paid as little as 50 cents a bulb for CFLs. I have CFLs that are older than my 8 year old. My wife harped on me to grow our own tomatoes. Decades ago, she learned what her grandparents knew that home grown tomatoes beat store bought junk. No questions asked. I just wished I could figure out the secret of growing 'em consistently here in the Great North Wet.
- Ken Grubb
May 19, 2009 at 11:41am
What moronity, as the first two posters noted. Michael and Ted's not-so-excellent stereotyping of environmentalists perpetuates half-truths, lumping all enviros in one basket and more, all while ignoring that the current downturn in the importance of environmental issues to the average person, like previous such downturns, IS largely driven by the economy. That said, it's no shock that a mag like TNR, which thrives on "contrarianism for stupidity's sake," would run something like this.
- Power101
May 19, 2009 at 4:07pm
The green movement has hurt itself with its own gross exaggerations. They created alarm by overreacting during paticularly hot spells. Now that there was a particularly cold and long winter, they lost credibility. They also created alarm by stating that we only had ten years to reverse carbon emissions substantially or face disastrous consequences and nobody really believes them, not even the very politicians who are trying to push Cap and Trade down our throats.
- Bob Ennis
May 19, 2009 at 4:24pm
Things I find interesting: The population of the earth is estimated to have been 200 million when Christ was born. The population of the earth is estimated to have been 310 million when Charlemagne was crowned in the year 1000. The population of the earth didnt pass 1 billion until after the year 1800. The population of the earth when I was a kid in 1950 was 2.5 billion. The population of the earch reached 6.1 billion in 2000. The population of the earth reached 6.454 billion in 2005. Total population has more than doubled in my lifetime. There are now more than 2 people walking around for every person I saw when I was 10. They all need food, shelter, education, transportation, jobs etc. In the last five years we have added more population to the total than the entire population of earth in the year 1,000. The idea that we can continue to grow in numbers as we have been and all aspire to an ever higher standard of living is suspect on its face. You don't need to be a scientist or an economist to figure it out. The idea that for the last 250 years we have pumped ever increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere through industrialization and the automobile and that we can continue to do so without any consequences is suspect on its face. The idea that ever more people on this planet can do so is truly suspect on its face. What me worry? I'm old enough that the planet wont get too hot nor will the oil run out for the remainder of my life span.
- toritto
May 19, 2009 at 9:04pm
Many good points have been made. I have a comment for Bob Ennis. Does one cold winter really disprove global warming? I've always understood global warming to mean climate shifts over long periods of time. It can amount to a two steps forward, one step back pattern can it not? I'm not disagreeing with your suggestion that the movement may have hurt itself with exaggerations. I'm merely saying that instances of cooling ought not be enough to discount an overall trend of warming.
- Chris Laybourn
May 19, 2009 at 9:18pm
The only thing shocking about this article is that it has to be said in the first place. Of course environmentalism is an individualistic form of conspicuous consumption with little impact on the (actual) environment. What's rather striking is that millions of semi-intelligent people are able to persuade themselves that their grocery bags MATTER. This is fetishism of the highest order.
- brianX
May 20, 2009 at 1:15am
An argument about nothing. Yes, concern for "the environment" (I hate that term....it should be "our life support system") waxes and wanes with "the economy" (I hate that term as well). But over time we manage to solve a particular problem: rivers that catch fire, acid rain, wetland loss, deforestation, etc., and then move on. CO2 and global warming represent a big problem that is taking us some time to come to grips with. But its not a made up problem. Its a set of verified facts, and sooner or later we will make our adjustments, change our energy use pattern and move on. Holding "the poor" up as an excuse for further inaction is ridiculous, because the people now whining about the poor, i.e. Republicans, are the same ones who have done nothing to alleviate poverty all these years.
- Dean from Oregon
May 20, 2009 at 1:38am
The fact that nuclear power is not even considered as part of a solution to "Global Warming", displays the lack of seriouness to "solving the enerergy crisis"
- John Prairie
May 20, 2009 at 4:21am
This article raises many very interesting points about the green movement, but fails to even hint at one very important point -- that is, the green movement may well be fueled in large part by the 'other green' -- good old money. There are many who have made lucrative careers of being green, and many (who are no more green than the man in the moon) who see exploiting the green movement as a money making opportunity. Most are hypocritical at best. Most importantly, the authors do not address the reality of humankind. We are still -- in the grand scheme of things -- a new species who are still in the early stages of our evolution -- which in our case is social instead of biological. For many, many generations we will still experience the harsh realities of (social) natural selection -- fierce competition for resources, vast inequalities and yes, a dying out of those who are less "fit". Our social engineering has attempted to fool mother nature, but in the end, nature will take it course -- with or without us. It could be hypothesized that what the eco-aware elite truly need is psychotherapy to deal with their misplaced guilt.
- MJ
May 20, 2009 at 5:35am
Dr. Brulle, Professor of Sociology & Environmental Science? I think that nonsensical combination sums it up nicely.
- Michael Coe
May 20, 2009 at 7:37am
A lot of people, including myself, are skeptical about global warming predictions. There are way too many variables and I haven't seen any scientific predictions that have come true or computer models based on past data that accurately predict the future or parts of the past. But the heart of the matter is this. You have a Stuff While People Like condition: Knowing What's Best for Poor People.
- Geoff
May 20, 2009 at 7:37am
What is the purpose of this article? The environmental movement has had an enormous amount of success on BIG issues (acid rain, endangered species, the ozone hole). The Clean Air Act is an incredible success story. What's changed, I think, is that many issues that used to be part of the environmental agenda, and discarded as such, are now accepted by society as a whole. It was nothing a decade ago for a PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE to dismiss Al Gore as "Ozone Al" who's "way out there." That would never happen today, as it would offend too many and such a person would run the risk of being labeled anti-scientific. Even the most environmentally uninformed recycles, buys the right light bulbs, at least considers fuel economy of vehicles, pays attention to the amountof their waste, etc. The environmental movement has already won in many regards, because they've moved the mainstream far closer to the green side.
- Buzz B
May 20, 2009 at 7:49am
I don't think the "Green" movement has anything to fear from a temporary decline in popular sentiment. The worldwide recession is the best thing to ever happen to the environment. People cannot afford to buy things and therefore consumption of everything is way down. When the economy picks up and people have more money the poll numbers will improve for green iniatives. Now if only all the money was wasted on treating people in their last 10 years of life could be redirected to the benefit of the collective we would be getting somewhere. I know when I am old and useless (a net drain cost wise)I will look for an environmentally sensitive way to die. The best thing about national health care is it will force these choices based on finite resources.
- Jack Polis
May 20, 2009 at 7:52am
I don't think the "Green" movement has anything to fear from a temporary decline in popular sentiment. The worldwide recession is the best thing to ever happen to the environment. People cannot afford to buy things and therefore consumption of everything is way down. When the economy picks up and people have more money the poll numbers will improve for green iniatives. Now if only all the money that was wasted on treating people in their last 10 years of life could be redirected to the benefit of the collective we would be getting somewhere. I know when I am old and useless (a net drain cost wise)I will look for an environmentally sensitive way to die. The best thing about national health care is it will force these choices based on finite resources.
- Jack Polis
May 20, 2009 at 8:01am
I'm not exactly clear what the picture of the Whole Foods store at the top of the article has to do with any of this. At our nearest store in North Carolina, business has been booming, and defies all cultural and socioeconomic stereotypes, least of all, Chicken-Littles showing off their Priuses.
-
May 20, 2009 at 9:47am
Professor Brulle, Those referring the journals you refer to are the exact sorts of people the authors of this piece are talking about. The provincialism of academia blinds you to this fact.
- Max Colby
May 20, 2009 at 11:10am
To Chris Laybourn. I did not mean to imply that one coled winter negates concern. My point was that if that is so, then one hot summer does not prove that we have a crisis. There is general agreement that there is a long term warming trend. The disagreement is about how much is attributable to anthropogenic CO2 emissions and what can be done about it.
- Bob Ennis
May 20, 2009 at 12:48pm
Irrelevant, myopic and sotto voce dramatic, with a tone of weary condescention that attempts to dress this boring mess in the robes of a sobering truth. The popularity of "green" has slipped? Who cares - please, bust the Bubble. We have work to do. Climate change is a fact, not a cultural artifact. Next?
- James Boley
May 20, 2009 at 4:23pm
Co2 is not a poison or a pollutant. Nor is it a relevance in larger quantities than at present in the atmosphere and if we stop NOW all CO2 production there will still be 97% wafting around courtesy of Mother Nature. All the Green hysteria about 'tipping points' is utter fantasy. A fantasy that the USA will pay for in huge tax rises. Congratulations on allowing President Obama to appoint the most politico/scientific posts to retards. Please don't quote the IPCC doomsayings as being accurate. Also garbage in/out computer modeling is never going to convince anyone except Al Gore, who is on another planet anyway and has another agenda which is to rob both rich and poor alike using carbon trading lies as truth.
- Brian Johnson -UK CO2 lover.
May 21, 2009 at 7:23am
To James Boley: Since when has climate ever not changed? Its like claiming that tidal erosion is a fact not a cultural artifact.
- Not Again
May 21, 2009 at 8:04am
This was a very insightful article for me. I now have a better understanding of why so many of the folks in Hollywood go around telling us how green they are. They have the greatest need to validate themselves after taking so much money for their artistic gifts. This gives me an idea for a new Cap and Trade scam. If I were the Governator I would pass a law that every greenie in Hollywood after a cap of $1M per year, must trade their guilt by living in a hut in a developing country for 1 week for every excess million, and pay that excess to the poor. That should shut them up about being green and caring for the poor.
- John Z
May 21, 2009 at 9:56am
Head of nail squarely hit. Environmentalism jumped the tracks from a focus on improving known, measurable threats to human health and the environment in the 60's - 80's to a religious ideology that blames humans, human activities, and the human quest for comfort and security from 90's to current, the movement loses credibility with intelligent people who understand something about risk, cost/benefit analysis, and recognize fear mongering and hyperbole when they see it.
- Carbonicus
May 21, 2009 at 12:47pm
Hopefully the fever has finally broken. Wouldn't it be encouraging if we could finally get folks to stop their fascination with the extreme and get some things fixed in this country. I consider myself a social centrist, slightly left of center, and an economic moderate, slightly right of center. I wish there was a viable center in this country. We must first address the economic vitality and sustainability of this country, without which we will not be able to solve all of the other problems we face. This article was encouraging.
- Roger F
May 21, 2009 at 7:45pm
There is not much I can add except my "having been there and done that". I grew up on a farm in Germany in the 50's. Close to the land? Oh yes, including eating dust behind a team of horses plowing fields. It convinced me to study hard and to join the elite in the city. Whenever I felt sorry for myself for working insane hours to get ahead in this world I thought about my grandparents on that farm. And I felt better right away. My grandparents would believe that I lost my mind if I were to advocate returning to those good old days. And a word to Jack Polis: to "not waste money on people in their last 10 years and to redirect it to the benefit of the collective" is something you are free to apply to yourself. But beyond that it is merely a recycling of policies of Nazi Germany . It is indeed a slippery slope to tyranny.
- Albrecht Muller
May 22, 2009 at 11:44am
There was never a climate crisis. Now don't you feel silly.
- JohnGalt2012
May 22, 2009 at 1:18pm
Randy (#20): "Breathe the air in Beijing, and breathe it in New York City, and tell me that environmental regulations haven't made a difference." So it's the regulations, is it? Try this: institute all the regulations there are in New York City in Beijing. Would Beijing's air change to be like New York City's? I don't think so. Why? Because they can't afford it! It's our wealth, built on relatively free markets, not the regulatory state, which has made it so we can afford to clean up.
- Howard
May 22, 2009 at 8:21pm
A very accurate article. For confirmation of when, why, and how the green movement went off the rails , after its excellent early achievements, google Patrick Moore's "greenspirit" site , and take note of why one of the founding members of greenpeace distanced himself. He grew.They didn't.
- ian hilliar [aussie]
May 22, 2009 at 8:31pm
This article is complete nonsense because the Green/Red movement in USA is only getting started, it is in its' infancy!
- nofreewind
May 23, 2009 at 9:16am
An excellent article. Today's hysteria from the greens is truly their last throw of the dice, and with a sycophantic news media, and a sympathetic President they may win. If they do their victory will be phyrric. The planet is cooling, ongoing science is uncovering their fraud (seeWuWT) and their corruption and they will be ridiculed. Kia kaha from New Zealand.
- Mike H.
May 23, 2009 at 6:34pm
Absolutely no reason to publish this. Why not spend your time writing about real problems? Why not spend your vast knowledge of the English language and grammer and figure out a way to do some good? What comes from sewing doubt and delegitimizing things? More backlash! I'm going to dig a News Republic out of the trash and wipe myself with it next time I go to the bathroom.
- Chris
May 25, 2009 at 2:30am
You must be living on another planet! The time from 55 to 2006 was the school, now its happening for real. I guess the green revolutions dialectical complexity is just too hard to comprehend for most people who fear that the structures they profited of in the past may disappear. But anyway, who cares about them..
- Sebastian
May 25, 2009 at 5:57am
Over the past 100 years, which has had a more negative impact on the human race, self-righteous elitists inflicting their narrow world views on larger populations, or human induced climate change. The latter can not even be shown to exist with any significance or accuracy. The former has produced the likes of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, William Ruckelhouse and countless others who used misguided 'noble causes' to excuse their cruel tyrannies. Global warming alarmism is deadly to the Third World citizen. Elitists in this country should be forced to sacrifice (murder) one or two of their children for their ideology, for that is the outcome they are inflicting upon the Third World. President Obama, which of your pretty daughters would you sacrifice for the 'noble cause' of 'climate stasis'?
- JIm Clarke
May 25, 2009 at 11:50am
So, do we agree that we are treating the earth like it should be treated? Do enough of us understand such basic things like resources are limited, and there is no such thing as "away" in "throw away"? Do we even entertain the thought that over-consumption and our current lifestyles in the USA is a huge contributor to the current state of our environmental condition? I think not. Could there be an even slight possibility that the "quality of life" can be improved not by more technology, gadgets and consumption but by considering the closed system (earth) that we live in and changing our lifestyle? That, in effect is what the core of Creation Care or the Green Movement is. I myself am a bit sad that a lot of this movement has been co-opted by Madison Avenue advertising and "greenwashing" which has only given consumers the opportunity to "think that they are doing what should be done." Like most modern changes of thinking, the Green Movement is going through its early phases. At some point in time (perhaps after some environmental or resource-related event that radically effects our lifestyle), the movement will move from its current state as a trend to a real life-style change. Life for everybody on this planet -- even those in so-called third world countries -- can be improved and we all can live higher quality lives if we understand a bit more about what the earth can give us and how to live with nature and the earth -- not against it. I ask -- what other option do we have? Last time I checked, I and my grandchildren have nowhere else to go.
- Fredric G
May 25, 2009 at 10:38pm
To 'Not Again:" Yes, the climate has always fluctuated - but not in the way that it has in the past 50 years. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its 4th Assessment Report in 2007 (IPCC-4AR). National and international responses to climate change generally regard the UN climate panel as authoritative. IPCC received the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing it with VP Al Gore. You can look all this up on Wikipedia, or at Green Facts: www.greenfacts.org/en/climate-change-ar4/index.htm#1 How has the climate changed? 4AR summary from Green Facts: 1. The warming of global climate is now unequivocal. There are many observations of increasing air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising sea levels. More specifically, eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the 12 warmest years ever recorded since global surface temperatures are measured (1850). Over the last 100 years (1906–2005), global temperature has increased by 0.74°C. Global sea level has risen by 17 cm during the 20th century, in part because of the melting of snow and ice from many mountains and in the polar regions. More regional changes have also been observed, including changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, ocean salinity, wind patterns, droughts, precipitations, frequency of heat waves and intensity of tropical cyclones. 2. The temperatures of the last half century are unusual in comparison with those of at least the previous 1300 years. The last time that the polar regions remained significantly warmer than now for a very extended period (125,000 years ago), the sea level rose by 4 to 6 meters. 3. Most of the increase in global temperature observed over the past fifty years is very likely due to human emissions of greenhouse gases. Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years. The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land-use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture. Aren't these "known, measurable threats to human health," Carbonicus? The scientists who made these reports are credible, "intelligent people" averse to "fear mongering and hyperbole" - they like data. Yes, "Not Again," both climate change and tidal erosion are naturally variable events with natural results. But not equal. Try comparing tidal erosion to the effects of Hurricane Katrina - different scales. This TNR article is trivial an irrelevant because it glosses over what's important, and treats a fluctuation in "Green" popularity as if it were a significant indicator of a possible end of environmentalism. Sustainability and environmentalism aren't extreme. The staggering costs of adapting to climate change - caused by allowing free and unregulated dumping of CO2 and other GHG's into our atmosphere - that's extreme. We are all responsible for it - that electricity runs my house too. Consider: 49% of US electricity is produced by burning coal, the most efficient way to generate. There is more coal under Illinois (where I live) than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. Burning one ton of coal dumps 3.7 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. With viable CO2 sequestration estimated at 20 years off and expected to add 20-30% to the cost of generating power, we need alternatives. Now. Building new nukes is worse, they take 20-25 years. Environmentalism isn't fringe or a quasi-religious ideology of "blaming humans," it's taking responsibility for who we are and building on what we've created - irresponsible is ignoring climate change. Roger F, environmentalism isn't the extreme, it is fast becoming the norm, the "viable center in this country", and the foundation of "the economic vitality and sustainability of this country, without which we will not be able to solve all of the other problems we face." We are not viable without it.
- James Boley
May 26, 2009 at 3:19pm
I have only been in the environmental field for about 20 years, and even in this short time frame have seen episodes of ups and downs in terms of public support. This time, though, I do think you might be wrong, and that a paradigm shift in society has happened. You see, it is not just relationships between people and nature that the average person now seems to have a reasonable idea of. It is the relationship between us and others around the globe. I think America is finally heading into the age of "systems-thinking", a conceptual framework that makes it harder not to acknowledge that the enviornment produces all of our goods and services, and that we place excessive impacts on the environment. In part, scarcity is making systems-thinking necessary. But also, with all the information about this that and the other, we need different ways of framing problems, and that includes a general consciousness that the environment system is part of the human system.
- Megan
May 27, 2009 at 7:49am
I usually hate adding my voice to the cacophony of the comments section, but what the heck. Though I sincerely appreciate your willingness to point out the many contradictory and irrelevant beliefs and actions that get shoved under the enormously broad umbrella of environmentalism, I believe your argument itself borders on irrelevancy. Yes, some aspects of what has been passed off as the environmental movement have become overblown and detached from reality in recent years (like just about any other public discourse in America). Thankfully, there are people who understand the urgency and importance of working towards environmental sustainability in every corner of the country and the world; they are entrepreneurs working to make green energy breakthroughs financially viable, or architects and engineers helping new and old buildings to consume less energy and increase their inhabitants’ standard of living, or farmers and scientists developing more drought resistant crops that require the use of less chemical pesticide and fertilizer. It may take more work than simply scanning the cable news channels to find them, but they're out there. The internet became more than we could have ever imagined after the burst of the dot com bubble thanks to technological advances and other innovations, and contrary to the tone and scope of your article, most "greens" (your preferred, though crude, nomenclature?) would like to see and contribute to the innovation and advancement in technology that will allow those of us in the US to maintain a high quality and sustainable way of life, and will allow those of us in developing countries better alternatives to development than the ones in your article (namely, burn coal and plunder natural resources, or don't do anything). But as we've seen from the meltdown of our financial institutions, innovations (in securities, in mortgage lending...) are not always solutions, and often bring new and unforeseen problems. We are simply being impractical if we assume that "technology will save us" and that we don't need to rely on common sense and thought in our day to day decisions. Your argument seems akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater: as someone who is hopefully still long for this earth, I plan to see the movement for green, sustainable solutions to the most pressing environmental crises blossom and bear fruit - whether in someone's well-intentioned backyard garden, or in our energy technologies and policies, or in myriad new and exciting ways we have yet to imagine…
- Heidi
May 27, 2009 at 9:14am
Great article, whose overall thrust is exemplified by the section on motivations of the majority of Prius owners, which is not Save the Earth, but rather Look at MEEEE!!!!!!!! And yes--evangelical greenism is a bubble. As with any emerging "cool" trend, by the time such trend is embraced by Wal-Mart or appears in the Sears catalog, the cool, Look-at-Me folks will for the most part declare "green" commercialism to be irrelevant and move on to the next elitist Thing.
- leishman
May 28, 2009 at 6:56am
Howard #52 - China can't afford to clean it's air? I mean, they can afford the $767 billion in American debt that they own. Side note, funny how so many literate folks can agree with a flimsy article like this. I guess stubborn and dumb is still quite popular.
- John
May 28, 2009 at 10:31am
The Greens have obviously done a bad job at communicating their message as I read the comments posted. The deep attachment from some readers to their SUV(the Suburban guy) or their God-given right to consume is pervasive throughout as a deep-rooted consumerism nostalgia and fear of losing their ability to buy a 4th flat screen TV! Green bashing seems to feel good to some. We are in the midst of a Triple-E crisis: Economic-Energy-Environment and Energy AND Environmental issues will resurface after this recession has ended.We will all increasingly feel the hardship associated with 4,5,6 ...$9 a gallon for gas and the green-bashers will look for fuel efficient SUVs just like some people look for a low-calorie Big Mac.
- J.Luc Marcoux
May 28, 2009 at 10:49am
Why talk of booms and busts? The process of social change (environmental or otherwise) is a process of what Thomas Kuhn and many scholars called "punctuated equilibrium" -- chaotic and rapid shifts in norms followed by periods of more stable equilibrium. It must be this way. The public just can't hold its attention on one issue endlessly. It is moved by salience and it's attention gets diverted as other, more salient, issues rearrange priorities (read, the financial crisis). I could ask a starving person what his highest priority is, and he will say food. I may then put a gun to his head and ask the same question. His priorities will have shifted to avoiding being shot, even though food remains important. What S&N see as burst bubbles is really just the punctuated process of social change. The world that follows the subsided bubble is different from the world that existed before the bubble began. This is as true today as it was for each of the other two punctuated periods S&N point out. They do not signal the death of environmentalism.
- Andy Hoffman
May 31, 2009 at 3:04pm
"The Greens"- divisive. I find myself paring back from materialism as stress relief from debt laden lifestyle that "The Browns" promoted. Your hatred for the rich vain left makes you blind. I always found the Eco cars ugly and would be embarrassed to drive the "look at how cool I am" symbols. But I, like many who are simply cheap, embrace the economy with lack luster small cars of our own. And "Green Bubbles"? The popularity of the theme rises and falls but the lessons and actions taken become part of the mainstream. Evolutionary everyday lifestyle changes. I doubt the authors are painting their homes with lead based paint or insulating their attics with asbestos. Yet they eloquently argue that the continuous education and adjustments we make as a result of our better understanding of the impact of our culture on ourselves and the world is just plain silly. Wasted my time on a cheap fossil fuel promo front.
- ScottB
June 4, 2009 at 3:03pm
I was enjoying the article until I came to the part about "the crackdown on civil liberties at home" during the George W. Bush years. For chrissakes, what crackdown on civil liberties? And no, saying "the Patriot Act" is not an answer; can you identify a civil liberty that was eroded? Your right to have unmonitored conversations with overseas al Qaeda members, perhaps?
- mattman26
June 4, 2009 at 3:56pm
I'm not an economist, but my understanding is that there are two basic ways to end up with more money in your pocket: make more or spend less on the things you need. As noted in one of the posts above, most of the push for greener ways of living is coming from folks who aren't that keen on paying $30 at the gas station twice a week, would rather pay $10/month to run their fridge than $40, and probably actually don't mind replacing light bulbs once every decade vs. twice a year. Blame it on elite, fascist, fashion-statement, radical greenies if you must, but it's regular folks looking to save a buck that are driving this revolution and will continue to.
- bemused
June 4, 2009 at 9:05pm
It's interesting to see a comment from a "Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science". You'll never see a Professor of Sociology and Physics, or a Professor of Sociology and Chemistry. Indeed, environmental studies are far more sociology than science, including at universities and in the "refereed literature".
- A physics professor
June 5, 2009 at 11:46am
John Galt wrote: "The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. Why do you think Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day?" I can't resist. J.G., you can repeat that until you're blue in the face. It still won't become true.
- Chris Winter
June 6, 2009 at 3:37pm
Is it guilt that drives some people to buy smaller cars? Probably so: the guilt felt over needlessly contributing to the degradation of the environment. Similarly, is it guilt that drives other people to buy large cars or SUVs? I doubt it not; but in this case it's the guilt that would arise from inadequately protecting their families against traffic accidents. Both are worthy goals (if contradictory to some degree) even if done out of guilt. My point is merely that guilt is part of human character to a greater or lesser degree depending on the individual. Singling it out as chief motivator of "living green" provides little new information. What's more, portraying the ebb and flow of environmental action as faddish "green bubbles" that have no lasting importance is exactly analogous to Denialists claiming that global warming is just a sequence of hot spells, and no long-term trend.
- Chris Winter
June 6, 2009 at 4:21pm
brianX wrote: "The only thing shocking about this article is that it has to be said in the first place. Of course environmentalism is an individualistic form of conspicuous consumption with little impact on the (actual) environment. What's rather striking is that millions of semi-intelligent people are able to persuade themselves that their grocery bags MATTER. This is fetishism of the highest order." The grocery stores (at least around here) also think grocery bags matter. Are they fooling themselves too? Brian: If every household in this country (about 85 million, I think) reduced their energy consumption by 5 percent, you don't think that would be a worthwhile aggregate contribution to saving fossil fuels and cutting CO2 emissions?
- Chris Winter
June 6, 2009 at 5:42pm
In all seriousness, why is TNR so in love with Nordhaus and Shellenberger? They're both political hacks, not scientists. Why they've received so much attention when pontificating about the environment, I have no idea.
- Douglas Moran
June 7, 2009 at 1:22am
If these authors sound familiar, it’s probably because of a similar piece they wrote in 2004 entitled “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World.” Of course, that piece came out right before environmental politics roared back from the “death” they had just finished exaggerating. Consider this quote from their earlier article: “From the battles over higher fuel efficiency for cars and trucks to the attempts to reduce carbon emissions through international treaties, environmental groups repeatedly have tried and failed to win national legislation that would reduce the threat of global warming. As a result, people in the environmental movement today find themselves politically less powerful than we were one and a half decades ago.” Or not. Since the “death” of environmentalism, Congress has passed two major (if flawed) pieces of energy legislation, which include fuel efficiency increases, increases in energy R&D, biofuels mandates, tighter efficiency standards for appliances, and a raft of other specific steps. America elected a new President who strongly supports climate legislation. And the EPA is on track to start regulating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As former activists turned PR consultants, Nordhaus and Shellenberger must have felt a bit embarrassed as they watched all of these developments mock their attempts at prophecy. Now the so-called “bad boys of environmentalism” have found another opportunity to attract attention (and perhaps some new clients) by announcing the demise of environmentalism. And they have a point---the collapses of the housing market, the financial system, and the auto industry have pushed green issues out of the limelight in recent months. But the more important question is whether this is a short-term or a long-term shift. Once we work our way out of the current recession, income growth and GHG emissions will resume, oil prices will rise again, and the challenge of climate change will be waiting for us. The drumbeat of growing demand for environmental improvement will continue. We will find that the extensive media coverage of climate issues since An Inconvenient Truth has educated the public on climate change, and permanently raised the level of public discourse. We will realize that the shift toward sustainable enterprise is still underway and is not going to be reversed. The speed of that transition will vary over time in response to economic conditions, as it should. But the “implosion of environmentalism”? It is an exaggeration, just like its “death” a few years ago.
- Tom Lyon
June 8, 2009 at 9:50pm
i have to poke around to check out what the cavemen are doing from time to time, you all would probably still use stone tools if it were an option! whew, back to reality! you all can do what you want...seriously, dont care. its all going to happen whether you like it or not. there are far too many smart, loud, connected, rich and stubborn people out there for this sort of drivel to stick around much longer. for those of you who have had your head in the sand for sometime now...its 2009, welcome.
- reason
June 10, 2009 at 7:23pm