Environmentalists as Battered Spouses

[Valin]

The American:

Greens keep returning to their abuser after another promise to do good, but nothing in President Obama’s oil spill speech should offer them any hope that the administration is really going to change.
Steven F. Hayward
6/17/10

For a long while now, I’ve thought the environmental establishment was the political equivalent of a cheap date for Democrats. Like the civil rights movement and the black vote, Democrats could count on environmentalists to side with them no matter how much benign neglect Democrats showed their agenda when in power.
Now I’m starting to think “cheap date” isn’t a strong enough simile. Environmentalists are much more like battered spouses, returning again and again to their abuser based on another promise to do good. And nothing in President Obama’s June 15 oil spill and energy speech should offer environmentalists any hope that this is going to change.

Word around town before the oil spill was that environmentalists were ready to swallow additional offshore drilling and new nuclear power subsidies to gain Republican votes for the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill. They had been told by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to shut up and fall in line, you green mother-earth frog-lovers—or something close to that. There’s no way environmentalists would have accepted this deal had Bush been president or a Republican Congress proposed the compromise package. In fact, during the Bush years environmentalists said they would oppose any cap-and-trade scheme that allocated the emission permits for free, demanding instead (and quite soundly I might add) that most or all be auctioned instead. But when the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill gave away 90 percent of the initial emissions allowances for free, the environmental establishment (with a few notable exceptions such as Greenpeace) said. . . nothing.

Eric Pooley’s new book, The Climate War (currently excerpted on Slate.com) offers even more evidence that environmentalists can be pushed around by Democrats with virtual impunity. As Pooley reports, from the earliest days of the Obama presidency, White House support for a cap on carbon emissions “has been all talk—and even the talk tends to get watered down.” Pooley quotes an unnamed White House insider: “You had this incredible green Cabinet of really committed people, but the only thing that really matters is what the president says—so everyone was trying to get words into his mouth. And Rahm was trying to keep the words out of his mouth. It was just a chronic pattern of infighting.”

(Snip)