There is a fundamental contradiction in the philosophy of
President Obama that he is going to have to resolve before the
electorate hangs him out to dry in the coming presidential
campaign.
As the first African-American President, Barack Obama has come
to embody the hopes of other groups that felt excluded from
American society — Hispanics, women, gays and lesbians, the
handicapped and so on. There is an openly articulated strategy
among his supporters that these out-groups can be forged into some
grand coalition — along with young people, pensioners and
government employees — to outvote the only group that does not
seem to respond to the President’s ministrations — white men
employed in the private sector.
But there is a problem with this strategy. In climbing through
the ranks of academia and the liberal political world, the
President has found himself welcomed at every level by people who
saw in him the qualities of leadership that could represent their
case. But in making this ascent through academia, he has imbibed
the reigning ideology of this world — environmentalism. Although
the President may not recognize it, environmentalism works in
direct opposition to the groups he purports to sponsor — the poor,
the disenfranchised, the unemployed, and so forth.
When stripped of its homilies about the beauties of the nature
and virtues of a “sustainable” economy, environmentalism is
basically an ideology for the protection of privilege. It works in
favor of those who feel satisfied with current levels of
consumption and against those who are trying to achieve greater
levels of prosperity. As Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
expressed it in their landmark essay, “The Death of
Environmentalism”:
Environmentalists… aim to short-circuit democratic values by
establishing Nature… as the ultimate authority that human societies
must obey. And they insist that humanity’s future is a zero-sum
proposition — that there is only so much prosperity, material
comfort and modernity to go around. If too many people desire such
things, we will all be ruined. We, of course, meaning those of us
who have already achieved prosperity, material comfort and
modernity.
Environmentalists make a living going around stirring up local
opposition to all manner of development — drilling for oil,
harvesting forests, building power plants. The premise is always
that this is the “wrong place” for such development and that
whatever needs to be done is better taken care of somewhere else.
What never gets noticed is that environmentalists are also doing
the same thing in the next valley and the one after that and the
sum of all this is that nothing gets
done. They urge people to “think
globally, act locally,” but what this means in practice is
professing some grand support for a “sustainable” economy built on
“renewable” technologies while opposing the same things at the
local level.
The Sierra Club, for instance, constantly opposes all manner of
conventional electrical generation on the premise that it is
supports “renewable” forms of energy. Hydroelectricity is
considered a form of “renewable energy,” but this means building
dams and the Sierra Club is opposed to all forms of dams. For years
it has been carrying on a quixotic campaign to tear down the
Hetch-Hetchy Dam in the Yosemite Valley, built in 1921, that
provides San Francisco with one-third of its electricity and most
of its drinking water. “Oh, but we don’t mean big dams,” they
respond. “We’re in favor of small dams.” Yet when Free Flow Power,
a Boston company, announced plans to try to build a 3 megawatt dam
near Bellingham, Washington in January 2011, the Sierra Club
announced its opposition the next day.
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups all profess to be
in favor of wind and solar energy as “clean, green and
sustainable.” But these energy sources are extremely dilute and
involve covering huge amounts of landscape. On the east coast the
best place to put them is on mountaintops, which always generates
opposition. In California, however, there is always the possibility
of the desert. Yet when the Los Angeles Department of Water and
Power proposed in 2005 to build the Green Path North, a
transmission line designed to bring wind and solar power from the
Mojave Desert to Los Angeles, the project was opposed by the Sierra
Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, the California Desert
Coalition, The Redlands Conservancy, Friends of Big Morongo Canyon
Preserve, Stop Green Path North and every municipal government in
its path. After six years of fighting opponents, the LADWP finally
gave up on the project last year.
The truth is, when it comes right down to it, environmentalists
don’t want much of anything. They are happy with the way things
are. In fact they wouldn’t mind going back a bit to a time when
there weren’t so many cars, so many power plants and — let’s face
it — so many people around all clamoring for a piece of
the pie. This philosophy may work for those comfortably ensconced
in a mountain hideaway but it hardly speaks to the vast majority
seeking some improvement in their lot.
President Obama has not yet grasped this contradiction. He
thinks he wants economic prosperity but he wants to please his
friends in the environmental movement as well. As a result, he
finds himself in ridiculously contorted positions such as traveling
to Oklahoma to celebrate the construction of a pipeline that he is
preventing from being built or responding to criticisms about high
gas prices by asking Congress to revoke the oil industry’s modest
tax breaks, which can only drive prices even higher, or bragging
about the production of American oil when he has achieved the
lowest rates of production in recent history from federal
lands.
This problem is not going to go away. There is no limit to what
the President’s environmental supporters will demand in terms of
thwarting prosperity. The talk this week is that even if we have
discovered much greater oil and gas resources than previously
recognized, we should not develop them for fear of falling into the
trap of “resource poverty” that supposedly afflicts states like
Nigeria and Indonesia. Someone should tell this to the Canadians
who are buying second homes by the drove in Arizona or the Russians
who the New York Times tells us are snapping up
million-dollar apartments in Manhattan, all because Canada and
Russia have decided to develop their own resources.
Everyone is an environmentalist when it comes to answering a
pollster or buying a Sierra Club calendar. But when the economy is
visibly wounded by efforts to make oil a “fuel of the past” and
replace it with immature and flawed technologies — or nothing at
all — the electorate is eventually going to rebel. If the
President doesn’t figure this out soon — and it doesn’t seem
likely he will — he is likely to face a huge backlash in
November.
