Populism and Climate Science

What happened to the environmental movement? During this broiling summer, after a catastrophic oil spill, the environmental movement in the US is spectacularly failing to achieve its biggest goal: the regulation of carbon emissions to prevent climate change. Why?

Via George Will, Bard College professor Walter Russell Meade has what I think is the right explanation. Environmentalism gained power in the US as a populist movement. In the 1960s, environmentalists were against Big Business and Big Government and their gigantic projects: dams, nuclear power plants, superhighways. Environmentalists were on the side of the small-scale, the traditional, the natural, the organic. "Split Wood Not Atoms" was the most popular environmentalist slogan. The Whole Earth Catalog was a Bible on how to change your own life in environmentally friendly ways, a do-it-yourself guide to getting back to the earth. Environmentalism was anti-bureaucratic, opposed to top-down mandates from Washington. It was suspicious of science, because science gave us nuclear power, industrial poisons, and the military-industrial complex. It fought for regular people against the powers that be.

The fight over climate changes reverses all of that. Now, environmentalists are basing their crusade on science of the most obscure and technical sort, and they want bureaucrats in Washington to impose policies that will hurt lots of ordinary folks living simple lives. From the perspective of carbon emissions, heating with a wood stove is the absolute worst option, and nuclear power looks pretty good. I don't think environmentalism, defined strictly as care for the natural systems of the planet, has ever had much popular support. It gained power by alliance with rural populism of the old William Jennings Bryan sort, with the fear that chemical and nuclear poisons will make us and our children sick, and with the NIMBYism of people who wanted to keep highways and factories out of their communities.

The breakdown of the environmentalist alliance is clear in the politics of windfarms. Scientists worried about climate change like them because they reduce carbon emissions, but they are big, ugly, and destructive of the landscape, they kill birds, and they are promoted by big power companies with financing from big Wall Street banks, often over the objections of the neighbors. An environmentalism that works in this way will never have much popular support in America.