Meanwhile, despite generalized demands for climate action and narrow advocacy for a few favored green technologies, the environmental movement at both the grassroots and institutional level is gearing up to obstruct critical efforts to fast track the commercialization and build out of critical low carbon technology and infrastructure, with even progressive Democrats in Washington and California forced to tacitly acknowledge that environmentalism has lost its way on key issues critical to the energy transition. And even when environmentalism’s one party political strategy succeeds, it requires its allies in the Democratic Party to reframe the agenda in social and economic terms that much of the movement is at bottom hostile towards.
Protests, school strikes, and extremely online activism have proven no match for even modest upticks in energy prices. Not so much when the cost shows up on utility bills. Ecological politics is fine as long as someone else is paying the bill. The movement has largely abandoned longstanding demands to regulate, cap, or heavily tax carbon emissions. Elite institutions and discourse, whether in the media, the corporate boardroom, or university classrooms, uniformly pay obeisance to environmentalism, parroting both its catastrophism and its certainty that an inevitable transition to renewable energy is already underway.īut in a more important sense it has lost. The Death of Environmentalism hypothesis will no doubt seem counterintuitive to many because contemporary environmentalism has, at one level, so comprehensively won. If it seems like ancient history to many who came of age in the years after the controversy that the Death of Environmentalism sparked, it is a history, and an idea, worth revisiting today. These fights will likely determine whether the United States will be able to deploy the technology and infrastructure necessary to deeply cut emissions in a timely fashion.Īlmost two decades ago, I coauthored an essay called the Death of Environmentalism that foresaw much of this, arguing that modern environmentalism had become a special interest that would prove incapable of advancing effective action to address climate change.
Meanwhile, political battles with environmentalists loom-over environmental permitting reforms in Congress and over nuclear licensing reforms at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In Washington, Congress has passed sweeping legislation directing investment to everything from advanced nuclear energy to carbon capture and removal technologies to clean hydrogen production, with nary a mention of carbon caps, regulations, or pricing, long the North Star of green climate advocacy. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom and the progressive Democratic legislature have reversed plans to close the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, over the monolithic opposition of the state’s powerful environmental community.
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