More than once in this space I have mentioned New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s 2007 column smacking the environmental movement for squandering its moral authority and social capital by its relentless doom-mongering for dooms that never came:
Environmentalists have an awful track record, so they’ve lost credibility with the public. . . I was once an environmental groupie, and I still share the movement’s broad aims, but I’m now skeptical of the movement’s “I Have a Nightmare” speeches. . . [E]nvironmental alarms have been screeching for so long that, like car alarms, they are now just an irritating background noise.
Environmental activists responded to Kristof with a perfectly Orwellian two minutes of hate for his heresy.
On Sunday the Times Sunday Review section carried a feature on “Environmentalists Get Down to Earth,” including this tidbit:
At a fall retreat, board members of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental advocacy group, listened as a political consultant gave a critique of the green movement.
Think of the public as a consumer in a grocery aisle passing a box of brownie mix, the consultant said. The brownie on the front is so delectable that she can imagine the taste and the smell. So delicious, in fact, that she pays no attention to the back of the box listing the ruinous fat and calorie content.
Environmentalists, the consultant said, were always yammering to consumers about the back of the box. And, guess what? Nobody wants to listen.
I suspect they probably paid the unnamed political consultant for this brilliant insight, but we’d have been happy to tell them for free. One thing about losers; they never change up. I suspect we’ll get more cowbell, or a louder car alarm.
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