Two good pieces today: At The American Interest, Walter Russel Mead argues that the environmental movement failed because it became what it once fought: big science.
And today’s Washington Post gives a number of reasons why environmentalism has failed. An excerpt:
But for the green movement, this year’s defeat was more than a loss; it was a reckoning, a signal that it had overestimated its influence.
Even in the hottest year on record, even with a historic oil spill polluting the Gulf of Mexico, even with a Democratic Congress and a friendly White House, it couldn’t win the fight it had picked. In fact, in the Senate it couldn’t even start it.
“The oil industry has tremendous reach and control in the United States Senate,” said David Di Martino, a spokesman for Clean Energy Works, a coalition of more than 60 groups that includes big names such as the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund. “Our mistake was miscalculating . . . how far into the Senate it went.”
Looking back, some environmentalists say their problem was timing; once the economy perks up, their logic goes, prospects will improve. Others blame implacable Republican opposition (though a number of conservative and coal-state Democrats also balked), or a president who they say didn’t push hard enough and focused first on issues such as health care and financial regulation. The White House blames them back, for not winning any Senate Republicans over to support the climate bill.
But some activists from smaller groups say the problem is within environmentalism itself. To them, the Senate defeat showed that green groups don’t have enough of Washington’s two currencies of power: money and angry voters. To them, it’s significant that no senator seems in danger of being voted out of office this November for denying the environmentalists the climate bill they wanted.
It’s always easy to blame the oil industry, but it’s not the oil industry that’s holding up new transmission lines through the California desert to connect cities to solar farms in Nevada nor is it the oil industry that held up wind turbines off of Nantucket for years. We can go on and on with examples, but the point is that there’d be a lot more “green” energy if the “green” movement would just get out of the way.