Saturday, March 12, 2005
ENVIRONMENTALISM IS DEAD
Professor John Quiggin described me as an “ultra-optimist” after I wrote in 2002 that the environmental movement was fading, and “signs of wonderful green death seem to be appearing all over”. The NYT’s Nick Kristof has now come around to my point of view:
Sadly, it’s true, environmentalism is dead.
When environmentalists are writing tracts like “The Death of Environmentalism,” you know the movement is in deep trouble.
That essay by two young environmentalists has been whirling around the Internet since last fall, provoking a civil war among tree-huggers for its assertion that “modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.” Sadly, the authors, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, are right …
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they’ve lost credibility with the public. Some do great work, but others can be the left’s equivalents of the neocons: brimming with moral clarity and ideological zeal, but empty of nuance. (Industry has also hyped risks with wildly exaggerated warnings that environmental protections will entail a terrible economic cost.)
“The Death of Environmentalism” resonated with me. I was once an environmental groupie, and I still share the movement’s broad aims, but I’m now skeptical of the movement’s “I Have a Nightmare” speeches.
In the 1970’s, the environmental movement was convinced that the Alaska oil pipeline would devastate the Central Arctic caribou herd. Since then, it has quintupled.
When I first began to worry about climate change, global cooling and nuclear winter seemed the main risks. As Newsweek said in 1975: “Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend ... but they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”
This record should teach environmentalists some humility.
Let’s hope not. These people are no fun unless they’re howling about global destruction like Pinky the cat. Ignore Kristof! Remain hilarious!