This week President Obama handed down what may prove to be one
of the most fateful decisions of his entire administration when he
rejected the plan to build the Keystone XL Pipeline carrying oil
from the tar sands of Canada to the refineries of Houston. The
decision did not win him one new vote but was crucial in protecting
his environmental flank. The movie stars and Sierra Club
contributors were getting restless and had drawn the line in the
sand.
In turning down Keystone, however, the President has
uncovered an ugly little secret that has always lurked beneath the
surface of environmentalism. Its basic appeal is to the affluent.
Despite all the professions of being “liberal” and “against big
business,” environmentalism’s main appeal is that it promises to
slow the progress of industrial progress. People who are already
comfortable with the present state of affairs — who are
established in the environment, so to speak — are happy to go
along with this. It is not that they have any greater insight into
the mysteries and workings of nature. They are happier with the way
things are. In fact, environmentalism works to their
advantage. The main danger to the affluent is not
that they will be denied from improving their estate but that too
many other people will achieve what they already have. As the
Forest Service used to say, the person who built his mountain cabin
last year is an environmentalist. The person who wants to build one
this year is a developer.
Environmentalism has spent three decades trying to hide
this simple truth. How can environmentalists be motivated by
self-interest when they are anti-business? Doesn’t that align them
with the working classes? Well, not quite. You can be anti-business
as a union member trying to claim higher wages but you can also be
anti-business as a member of the aristocracy who believes “trade”
and “commercialism” are crass and not attuned to the higher things
in life. Environmentalism is born from the latter, not the former.
It has spent decades trying to pretend it has common cause with the
working people. With the defeat of the Keystone Pipeline, this is
no longer possible. Too many blue-collar and middle-class jobs have
been sacrificed on the altar of carbon emissions and global
warming.
In 1977, I wrote a cover story for Harper’s
called “Environmentalism and the Leisure Class,” my first story for
a national magazine. Environmentalism was very young at the time —
born supposedly on Earth Day in 1970 — but had already achieved a
seat in the upper echelons of the Carter Administration. These
freshly appointed bureaucrats began canceling dams, preaching the
sins of fossil fuels, and raising obstacles to nuclear power. In
its place they promised distant, over-the-horizon technologies of
wind and solar energy. I remember one iconic photograph of Andrew
Young, Carter’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, holding
a pyramid over his head on Earth Day in the fashionable
superstition that pyramids had mysterious powers to concentrate the
sun’s rays.
My story in Harper’s was built around the
devastating 1977 New York City blackout (the subject of the book
The Bronx is Burning) and the almost forgotten fact that
Con Edison had been trying for 15 years to construct an upstate
power plant designed to prevent blackouts. The Storm King Mountain
facility was a pumped storage plant 40 miles up the Hudson that
stored power overnight by pumping water uphill and then releasing
it the next day to generate hydroelectricity. The idea was to avoid
building more coal plants in New York City. As an added attraction,
the utility never failed to mention, the floodgates could be opened
in an instant to provide power in the event of an emergency, while
ordinary generators took the better part of an hour to get up to
speed.
Pumped storage was considered an engineering marvel of the
time and many were built. There are now about 30 around the
country. In the Hudson Highlands, however, Con Ed had unwittingly
disturbed a nest of New York aristocrats who had escaped from the
city in the 19th century. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who now lives
in the area) would write 30 years later without a trace of
irony:
The committee [the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference]
quickly found support among the well-heeled residents of the Hudson
Highlands. Many of its founding members were the children and
grandchildren of the Osborns, Stillmans, and Harrimans, the robber
barons who had laid out great estates amid the Highlands’
spectacular scenery and whose descendants had fought fiercely since
the turn of the century to preserve the views for themselves and
the public. [John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The
Riverkeepers,Scribner, 1997.]
Well-connected both in New York society and the editorial
pages of the New York Times, Scenic Hudson began an
opposition campaign that eventually engulfed the entire city. The
battle to “Save Storm King” was the nation’s first great
environmental crusade, becoming a legal landmark when the Federal
District Court allowed Scenic Hudson to intervene on environmental
grounds for the first time in history. The case is still cited.
Several Scenic Hudson members went on to found the Natural
Resources Defense Council.
Throughout the campaign Scenic Hudson insisted they were
not opposed to electricity but only this particular way of
generating it. There were plenty of alternatives — fuel cells,
mine-mouth coal generation, gas turbines and even nuclear power,
which they supported briefly before turning against it. What became
obvious, however, was that at bottom they were opposed to
everything. Industrial progress itself was the enemy. This was a
useless undertaking that only tore at the fabric of nature in order
to produce “common kilowatts.” The attitude was fairly new at that
time in America.
What finally focused my attention on the aristocratic
roots of environmentalism, however, was a chapter in Thorstein
Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Although the book is
justly famous for coining “conspicuous consumption” and
“conspicuous waste,” there is a lesser-known chapter entitled
“Industrial Exemption” that perfectly describes the environmental
zeitgeist. Veblen posed the question, why is it that people who are
the greatest beneficiaries of industrial society are often the most
passionate in condemning it? He provided a simple answer. People in
the leisure class have become so accustomed affluence as the
natural state of things that they no longer feel compelled to
embrace any further industrial progress:
The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the
stress of those economic exigencies which prevail in any modern,
highly organized industrial community.… [A]s a consequence of this
privileged position we should expect to find it one of the least
responsive of the classes of society to the demands which the
situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a
readjustment to an altered industrial situation. The leisure class
is the conservative class.
My article generated 150 letters, including a response
from a member of the Federal Power Commission who said that
construction of new power plants wasn’t necessary. I was often
criticized, however, for claiming only affluent people are
concerned about the environment. The one response I ever got from
the press was in the middle of Three Mile Island when National
Public Radio called to ask, “What do you say about all those
farmers worried about radiation? They’re not aristocrats, are
they?”
But that was not the point. It is not that the average
person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the
balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only
the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the
environment to the exclusion of everything
else. Most people see the benefits of pipelines and
power plants and admit they have to be built somewhere. Only in the
highest echelons do we hear people say, “We don’t need to build any
pipelines. We’ve already got enough energy. We can all sit around
awaiting the day we live off wind and sunshine.”
Environmentalists have spent decades trying to disguise
these aristocratic roots, even from themselves. They work
desperately to form alliances with labor unions and cast themselves
as purveyors of “green jobs.” But the Keystone Pipeline has brought
all this into focus. As Joel Kotkin
writes in Forbes, Keystone is the dividing line of the
“two Americas,” the knowledge-based elites of the East and West
Coasts in their media, non-profit and academic homelands (where
Obama learned his environmentalism) and the blue-collar workers of
the Great In- Between laboring in agriculture, mining,
manufacturing, power production and the exigencies of material
life.
It’s going to be very difficult to erase that line during
the election.
