Green Weenie of the Week: The Climate Campaign (Again)

The steady, relentless collapse of the climate campaign proceeds apace, notwithstanding the sugar high climate campaigners enjoyed after Hurricane Sandy and Obama’s re-election.  Obama promises that a price on carbon is a main objective of his second term, but given that it is an Obama promise, climate campaigners should understand they’ve just been given the kiss of death.

The media is slowly starting to give up on the whole game.  The New York Times has decided to break up its entire environmental unit and reassign reporters to other beats.  A lot of climateers are striking their best Kevin Bacon “All-is-well” poses (from Animal House), but this looks to me just like what happened around the time of 9/11, when urban affairs reporters who couldn’t stop churning our five-part features on how suburban sprawl was ruining St. Louis (or plug in your own local metropolis) were reassigned to other beats.  I went from getting two or three calls a month from reporters working on sprawl to none almost overnight.  Andy Revkin, one of the better Times reporters, is trying to be upbeat but is concerned.

James Delingpole can’t resist a beatdown, in “Now Even Pravda Admits the Global Warming Jig Is Up”:

Rumours that the entire environment team, headed by Andy Revkin, have volunteered to be recycled into compost and spread on the lawn of the new billion dollar home Al Gore bought with the proceeds of his sale of Current TV to Middle Eastern oil interests are as yet unconfirmed. What we do know is that it’s very, very sad and that all over the Arctic baby polar bears are weeping bitter tears of regret.

A spokesman for the New York Times, quoted in the Guardian, has reaffirmed the paper’s commitment to environmental issues.

“We devote a lot of resources to it, now more than ever. We have not lost any desire for environmental coverage. This is purely a structural matter.”

Absolutely. It’s what newspapers always do when they’re committed to a particular field: close down the entire department responsible for covering it.

Not to be left behind, Reuters has decided that it may as well switch sides completely, with a feature today that “Climate Change Doesn’t Have To Be All Bad.”  Reuters’ Zacharay Karabell writes:

But what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but instead one more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and creativity as well as demand ever more resilience? What if it ultimately improves life as we know it?

Keep writing like that and Reuters will be attacked for joining the “S” (skeptic) team. Expect more of these kind of “contrarian” news articles to appear as the media covers up the fact that it is saying, “Never mind.”

And if the climate campaign wasn’t already in denial about being abandoned by The One, their media allies, and new carbon riches baron Al Gorezeera, a new report coming out this week from Harvard’s Theta Skocpol should really harsh their mellow.  Skocpol, a prominent liberal political scientist, argues that environmentalists deserve most of the blame for the defeat of their agenda.  (Hmmm, they could have saved themselves a lot of time and trouble by just reading Power Line.)  Here’s some of Skocpol’s assessment:

Meanwhile, political consultants and public relations wordsmiths urged environmentalists to redouble euphemistic locutions already deployed during the cap and trade battle – to talk about “green jobs,” “threats to public health,” and the need to “reduce dependence on foreign oil to bolster national defense,” anything but the threat of global warming and catastrophic climate upheavals. Such advice tailed off during the record heat-waves of the summer of 2012; and after Hurricane Sandy devastated the East Coast shortly before the November elections, the New York media openly connected global warming to the unusual late autumn mega- storm. Some environmentalists declared that politicians are now bound to take up the issue.

This almost certainly overstates the likelihood of sustained official attention.

It’s that last sentence that really hurts.  Just how many Green Weenie Awards can these guys win?  I’m sure this won’t be the last.

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