Bishop Hill The long death of environmentalism
Mar 1, 2011 Greens A long, long article by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus looking at where the green movement went wrong.
Yet today, environmental efforts to address climate change and build a green economy lie in ruins. The United States Congress this summer once again rejected climate legislation that even had it succeeded would have had virtually no impact upon U.S. carbon emissions over the coming decade. The magnitude and consequence of this defeat are poorly understood outside of Washington. Greens had the best opportunity in a generation -- a Democratic White House and large Democratic majorities in Congress. But they banked everything on a single bill and walked away with nothing -- or rather worse than nothing, since today environmental credibility with lawmakers of both parties is today at an all-time low.
Meanwhile, green stimulus investments ended up creating very few jobs. Those that it did create were low-wage and temporary custodial jobs -- not the high-wage manufacturing jobs that created the black middle-class after World War II. And today, the clean tech sector-- the darling of high tech VC's at the height of the green bubble-- is in a state of collapse as stimulus funds expire, large public deficits threaten clean energy subsidies both here and abroad, and Wall Street firms short clean tech stocks.
Reader Comments (45)
This seems to disprove the theory that all politicians are stupid
I put this up in another thread, but it fits here better.
House tells IPCC to buzz off
I predict that Shellenberger and Nordhaus will be summarily drummed out of the "Green" movement in a manner similar to that of Lomborg after his writing The Skeptical Environmentalist in which he challenged the veracity of many of the canonical numbers that were being used to support green causes or attacked in the manner that Judith Curry has been attacked at sites like RC for her clarion call to return the climate science community to real science.
The green movement went wrong because it got almost nothing right.
Taken over by the far left, it assumed that scientific fact could be established by a consensus, that spin doctoring (aka propaganda) could change the publics perception of the climate.
Fortunately, the man that tried to take credit for the creation of the internet, failed to appreciate what the internet could do
"In the wake of the crash, [failure at Copenhagen and Cancun to do anything significant] environmentalists pointed their finger at the usual bogeymen. They claimed that the problem has been
Shellenberger and Nordhaus: "..that fossil fuel interests have massively outspent underdog environmental groups, funding skeptics to mislead the public and duping the media into giving too much credence to skeptical views about climate change.
In reality, the environmental lobby massively outspent its opponents. In just the last two years, by our rough estimate environmental organizations and philanthropies spent somewhere north of $1 billion dollars advocating for climate action."
It really is worth reading the whole thing.
Well, I messed it up. the clarification in brackets is mine, Shellenberger & Nordhaus should have been at the top and the paragraph would be accurate without the "... Sorry guys.
I think the green movement achieved most of the sensible things it set out to do, then to justify its existence, it started to demand silly things. At roughly the same time came the collapse of the Iron Curtain and a lot of the oiks who'd supported communism, because they were attached to the idea of totalitarianism, and against capitalism became involved with it, so it became much more of a political cause dressed up as concern for the planet.
The basic problem is that it's become a dogma which is colliding with reality and reality is going to win.
After reading the essay by Shellenberger and Nordhaus I still do not know what they are in favour of. Is it less use of fossil fuels, more manufacturing in the US, more energy, more centralisation and government input, all of the above or simply nuclear power? They clearly are ardent believers in AGW and in psychology, particularly as the latter applies to politics.
The article is an interesting read, but still pathetic. They missed the point even through they actually expressed it:
Yeap, "You can fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time." Abe Lincoln.
A lot of uncomfortable truths in that piece for the green movement. Some stuff I disagree with but a good read nonetheless.
A lot of what Shellenberger and Nordhaus talk about at the end of their piece echoes the comments of the late Herbert Khan and his belief that for humankind to to prosper. we must "learn to do more with less resources."
Environmentalism went from saving the planet to saving environmentalist's souls . . . and when it did this, when it turned into a new earth religion, it lost its way.
The killer was going all in with the global warning thingy . . . that left them open for easy comparison between the dire outcomes forecast by the Warmistas and what has really transpired.
The bigger the gamble, the bigger the loss.
Would lying to people qualify as going wrong in this modern world??
These two guy write the same essay every 3 months and change the title. Big yawn.
"Wall Street firms short clean tech stocks"
Not just wall Street. Anyone can make a killing.
The truth is that the disparate crew of academics and bloggers who make up the skeptic community have toiled in relative obscurity and have been largely ignored by the mainstream media. That skeptics have nonetheless succeeded in raising substantial doubt among many Americans about the reality of global warming suggests, at the very least, that the environmental community has profoundly misframed the issue.
Well, yes. Or it suggests that the sceptics, quite simply, had the better arguments and have won every round. Warmism's alleged problem, supporting evidence, science, solution, and economics have all been found to be laughably wanting, if not outright fraudulent.
I know I keep banging on about this, but it's not enough merely to observe that the "consensus" may not include a majority of scientists at all. We must also stress that it unquestionably does include a large number of really disgusting criminals. Remind warmists that they are arguing for implementing an Enron idea, that the Mafia, VAT fraudsters, phishing criminals and Osama bin Laden are also in favour of, and they have no retort except to wibble a bit.
Considering that these guys are true believers, this article looks unflinchingly at the green/CAGW movements. The mere acknowledgment by some warmists that the CAGW faction receives and spends vastly more than the skeptic faction is a milestone in itself. They still try to attribute the average citizen's skepticism or resistance to education/indoctrination on climate change to some kind of convoluted psychological response to the need for a radical change in lifestyle. An Occam's razor analysis might find that a significant portion of the public are skeptical because they believe it is simply BS. I will save this one in my archives for ammunition when my CAGW acquaintances trot out the cliched "big oil" finances skepticism canard. While they wouldn't believe me, they might credit warmists.
The wreckage of communism in Eastern Europe proved to be the beginning of the wreckage of environmentalism. The left-wing wackos looked for a new home to push their anti-free enterprise views and found the poor enviro wackos to join. And just as the left-wing eventually destroys everything it touches, it wrecked the enviros by pulling them ever farther to the left until they fell off the cliff together.
13th - Stop assuming you have the right to tell people that they must live the way you expect them to live or else they are morally, ethically, spiritually and intellectually vacuous.
Careful - it's not over yet. There have been previous cycles of similar activism. It is educational to read at least these 4 books:
The Apocalyptics, 1984, by Edith Efron, ISBN 0-671-41743-6 .
The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, 1977, Petr Beckmann, Golem Press. ISBN 0-911762-17-5.
Atlas Shrugged, 1975, Ayn Rand, Penguin, ISBN 978-0-141-18893-5.
"1984", written 1949, George Orwell, ISBN: 0451524934
There might be other, better early classics. At least these four take us through past cycles of activism, from start to finish; although there is seldom a finish, because there is always a remnant core of dissenters who seek power and privilege as free riders. Their cause does not matter so much as the power they seek. The common themes are that the end justifies the means; and that the State is often the enemy.
This is a good time in the Global Warming discussion to read these books because it will help one to recognise the emergence of splinter groups and new causes that will surface - one might just learn how to counter-attack early.
They are true belivers!
In their first point:
"....This is not because the evidence for anthropogenic warming will become weaker. It will in fact become stronger...."
How the heck do they know that! Throughout they are assuming GW is CAGW.
There is a lot of good stuff and a lot of bad stuff in the article. The good news is that the environmental movement will continue to die because its leaders are dogmatists and true believers who, in their own opinion are always right, and are thus incapable of changing their ways in the face of reality.
Well I'm not going to dance on the grave of environmentalism while we have an energy policy in Britain which is predicated on green assumptions, costed according to green calculations and supervised by green zealots. Green politics has gone mainstream here, at least, or so it seems to me. I would be delighted if someone could persuade me that the government was only pretending to take green issues seriously.
Nicholas Hallam - regrettably I share your pessimism regarding the state of 'green issues' amongst the political classes in the UK.
Despite OVERWHEMING evidence to the contrary, the government is still blundering on with 'renewables' (i.e. wind farms and solar) - clearly having learnt nothing from history, or from disastrous forays in this direction in other countries.
Our forbears dumped wind as a power source just as soon as something RELIABLE became available - steam power, followed by diesel and electricity. Wind is fine - if you want a pleasant day on the Solent at the weekend - but energy security..? Not a hope.
I have had extraordinary exchanges of correspondence with the DECC - 'The wind is always blowing somewhere in the British Isles..' Oh, goody. We can all relax then - never mind the odd anticyclone which reduced the contribution of wind to the (record) demand before Christmas, to 0.1%.
Solar farms in Cornwall..? Are you kidding me..? Perhaps the developers will follow the Spanish example - not content with getting the fat 'feed in' tariff during the day (and the sun actually DOES shine in Spain) - but they managed to produce electricity during the night as well - courtesy of diesel generators...
Sadly we do not have enough (if any) engineers in the House of Commons - if we did, they might bring a note of sanity to government policies in this area...
@ Nicholas
Government's stance seems to me to consist of a mix of cowardice and opportunism. The cowardice is not facing up to the fact that we need either new nuclear plants or new coal / gas-fired plants, because they haven't the guts for an argument about either. The opportunism is the fact that envirofascism affords an opportunity to tax air and dress it up as concern for de kidz, when it's no such thing.
As Napoleon said, never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
@ stan
Yes, agree, and it's not a coincidence. In the west in the 1970s and 1980s we had a fifth column arguing that we should disarm ourselves otherwise the Russians would nuke us. CND tried desperately to make out that they were a non-aligned outfit politically, but this naive claim faltered when you looked at who supported them (the left) and who opposed them (the right, and some of the left).
It was abundantly clear that this was a hard-left movement masquerading as something else. Then as now, CND's POV reached a peak of support on the basis of a lot of what amounted to state funding - remember Ken Livingstone declaring London a nuclear free zone? - but the tide turned and they pretty much disappeared when the USSR did. Quelle surprise.
The profile and the trajectory of support, the means of funding, the manner of argument in appealing to dodgy authorities, and the ad hominem attacks on those who disagree with them, all mark out CND and CAGW alarmism as basically the same people pursuing the same thing.
I practice green values wherever I can, I've got nothing against green values, except when they use force and fraud to wed them to fake economics and undermine the basic principles of science. Then I start distrusting the spirituality and the people that cannot tell the difference between open science and closed propaganda / fundamentalist cultism.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus still seem to accept AGW without a blink. Looking at the staff of their Breakthrough Institute, there seems to be a complete absence of scientists, certainly the hands-on, self-taught, check everything, type like Willis.
David, if you think having a solar power subsidy farm in Cornwall is bad!
http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/news/britain-s-first-sun-park-gets-the-green-light
One in Louth is due to open this summer!
"Louth Sun Park"
I've thought for a long time the environmental movement was on a collision course with reality - economic, political, and scientific. Slowly, very slowly, it's being overwhelmed by irresistible forces.
But lets not forget they've already won one enormous victory, one that we can all celebrate. Namely, that we're all environmentalist now, one way or the other. We may not agree about CAGW, but surely we're now all very much aware of, and concerned about, man's impact on the environment.
CAGW is turning out to be a disaster for the environmental movement - but it won't destroy it. Eventually a Phoenix will rise from the ashes of the current moment. This'll be a completely new bird, and not the same old dead duck clothed in new feathers which has "learnt to communicate better".
Very interesting arcticle that deserves to be read. I do like the fact that it celebrates humanity's inventiveness rather than seeing it as a mortal sin.
As for the death on environmentalism Gaia must be the first god to have died of old age.
Paul Boyce
Once a duck always a duck. There will be no Phoenix rising from these environmental ashes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c4uMaJKt_g
Environmentalism is alive and well here in the UK. Furthermore it is deeply embedded in the ruling establishment. Cameron, the PM, says climate change is the biggest problem facing his generation. In last years Strategic Defence and Policy Review, it openly states that failure at Copenhagen (to conclude the treaty) was a "strategic mistake". Deputy PM Clegg is fully on board. Opposition Leader Miliband was the Secretary of State who piloted the Climate Change Act through Parliament where only 5 or 6 MPs voted against it. The UK, its businesses and consumers, are lumbered with countless £billiuons of costs over the next decades to implement this monstrous Act.
This will only change if there is a revolution in thinking by the political class and a change in the leadership of the main political parties. And that will only happen when the voting public says enough is enough.
The entire green movement and the liberal corporate media siold their souls to promote carbon trading for fossil fuel and banking interests.
They have completely lost the plot in the sense that they have forgotten about the environment to concentrate on AGW, a very dubious proposition with trillions of dollars to be made from it in carbon credits and trading.
oldtimer
Britain is the centre of global banking, so we are going to be the guineau piga for the new post industrial western culture. The Conservatives are as criminal as Labour on this.
"Tenth, we are going to have to get over our suspicion of technology, especially nuclear power. There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power. It is the only low carbon technology we have today with the demonstrated capability to generate large quantities of centrally generated electrtic power. It is the low carbon of technology of choice for much of the rest of the world. Even uber-green nations, like Germany and Sweden, have reversed plans to phase out nuclear power as they have begun to reconcile their energy needs with their climate commitments."
Well China got the memo. This nuclear technology is far less expensive, even cheaper than coal.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/china-thorium-power/
"China Takes Lead in Race for Clean Nuclear Power"
"China has officially announced it will launch a program to develop a thorium-fueled molten-salt nuclear reactor, taking a crucial step towards shifting to nuclear power as a primary energy source.
The project was unveiled at the annual Chinese Academy of Sciences conference in Shanghai last week, and reported in the Wen Hui Bao newspaper (Google English translation here).
If the reactor works as planned, China may fulfill a long-delayed dream of clean nuclear energy. The United States could conceivably become dependent on China for next-generation nuclear technology. At the least, the United States could fall dramatically behind in developing green energy."
Just watched it. Johnny Ball versus two political idiots. Johnny got his message across OK.
Hammond even tried to say that onshore wind gets no subsidy. The politicians have really been conned or are liars or are idiots.
Well done Johnny; pity he didn't have more time. As usual, his message was considered by the BBC to be less importanrt than important subjects like street parties.
Oops, posted on wrong thread. Should be Johnny Ball
Adam Gallon - thanks for that - as I write, I'm scannning the net for a nice deal, so that I can spend my summer holidays in Louth - must be a real magnet for sun-seekers..!
Clearly Hammond has mispoken in claiming onshore wind is not subsidised.
The construction of onshore wind turbine power stations are not subsidised, however the electricity generated by wind turbines are indirectly subsidised thru schemes such as the Renewables Obligation (ROCs), as administered by OFGEM, and the Climate Change Levy (HR Revenue and Customs).
Without such schemes in place no one in the UK would be generating electricity thru wind power, it would be far to expensive.
Mac
Never ceases to amaze me how many people have bought into the 'onshore wind not subsidised' lie created under New Labour. Never.
The Green Movement seems to not know the story of the Little Boy who cried "Wolf!". The Greens have been crying "Wolf" at least since the first Earth Day, and somehow the Wolf has not yet come to our door. So now when they cry "Big, Bad Wolf Coming!," nobody believes them.
As someone who's been in the environmental industry for 23 years and knows something about what we really should be worried about (and its converse), all I can say is that this is what they get for being driven by ideology instead of risk-based, cost/benefit-justified, politically blind science.
If this is what it takes to get the modern environmental movement back to focusing on that which creates the greatest problems/risks/impacts to human health and the environment, so be it. Long overdue and shame on them for wasting time and resources on hyperbolic no-crises b.s.
The shame of it is that the U.S. government wasted $99 BILLION on "global warming" research/policy in the last 10 years. For anyone who thinks that figure comes from the American Petroleum Institute, the Koch brothers, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, think again. It comes from the Obama administration's Congressional Budget Office.
As a 20+ year practitioner in the industry, I have to ask all of you....what good could have been done for the lot of humanity and the environment with that $99 BILLION? And what exactly did we get for that $99 BILLION? (other than paying for NASA "scientist" (read; propagandist) James Hansen rallying UK citizens to damage a coal-fired power plant in England).
It's not that the Greens got anything worng.
It's the naughty climate which just won't do what they tell it to do.
Gandhi again:
First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you
Then you win
Mr Shellenberger and Mr Nordhaus sound like they are sidling up to stage four.
Although the authors of the article make some truly amazing admissions considering they are staunchly entrained on the Political Left, they seem to have missed a central point. They remain blind to the AGW's achilles heel, namely: They have never proven any causal connection between CO2 and global warming or climate change as they now have curiously re-labeled their Marxist movement. Additionally, they assumed (as the Left is prone to do) that all intelligence resides in the political left and that skepticm towards their AGW theory would never translate into sound scientific research which would show their whole theory to be highly problematical. It seems that they are struggling with the reality that the whole global warming theory is not going to resurrect their outdated and discredited socialist theories.
I just wrote this in the Guardian, so I will repeat it here.
Anyone who follows George Monbiot will understand he is on the anti capitalist extreme right like his upper class environmentalist pals with their connections to the fascist Goldsmith family. Environmentalism is a creature of the right. It was identified with left wing academics in America, but they aren't really political in the sense that they have no idea what left and right are. Erlich and Hansen are classic examples. Both on the extreme right while claiming to be left.
Any socialists here ?
Prince Charles, Prince Philip (Nazi), Prince Bernhardt (Nazi), Viscount Porrtt, Lord Melchitt, Oliver Tickell, Zak Goldsmith, David de Rothschild, Paul Kingsnorth, James Lovelock, Edward Goldsmith , John Aspinall. Lord Lucan. In America, the Pews, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, James Hansen, Henry Kissinger, Dave Foreman, Henry Paulson,.