Bambi v. Godzilla: A Critique of Pure Ideology
Posted September 8, 2010 in Solving Global Warming
According to George Will the Senate’s failure to pass effective climate legislation this summer can be attributed to environmentalists becoming too powerful. Never mind about oil companies outspending environmental organizations by more than 7 to 1. Never mind about obstructionists in the Senate saying no to just about everything and requiring a supermajority of 60 votes to pass anything. Never mind about the billionaire Koch brothers systematically funding disinformation about global warming science. In fact, never mind about any facts at all. According to Will, environmentalists lost because “Bambi became Godzilla.”
Will’s column is so devoid of logic and fact that it is tempting to simply ignore it, but it is worth reading as an instructive example of the triumph of pure ideology. Heavily quoting a blog post by Walter Russell Meade, Will’s premise is that environmentalists used to be “a small band of skeptics” who took on “’Big Government, Big Science and Experts’” but have now become the “dogmatic establishment.” Being part of the establishment was the kiss of death for global warming legislation this year as the skeptical public turned against experts, science and government according to Will and Meade.
In this ideological world view the environmentalists were the good guys when they were protesting against large government projects, such as dams proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers, and turned bad recently when they started calling for the government to solve problems such as global warming. In those supposedly bygone anti-establishment days environmentalists “were intellectual cousins of economic libertarians who heed the arguments of Friedrich Hayek…”
There are many strains of environmentalism, and I suppose Will could find an example to support his thesis if he looked hard enough (although he doesn’t bother), but this is a strikingly distorted picture of the mainstream environmental movement. Early environmentalists turned to the federal government to protect natural resources by establishing National Parks, now widely recognized as one of America’s best ideas. The landmark environmental laws of the 1970s, far from rejecting experts and science, required the government to do more analysis and rely more on science to set pollution standards. The National Environmental Policy Act requires experts to conduct an Environmental Impact Assessment and examine alternatives before the government can proceed with major projects. The Clean Air Act requires EPA to set science-based ambient air quality standards and, as confirmed by the Supreme Court, regulate newly recognized air pollutants, such as greenhouse gases, if the Administrator determines that they endanger public health or the environment based on a review of the science.
It would be inconvenient for Will to acknowledge this history as the heart of his complaint is that modern environmentalists, unlike their predecessors, are part of a “progressive” juggernaut bent on increasing the power of the federal government:
The essence of progressivism, of which environmentalism has become an appendage, is the faith that all will be well once we have concentrated enough power in Washington and have concentrated enough Washington power in the executive branch and have concentrated enough "experts" in that branch.
For Will and others who approach global warming from the perspective of pure ideology the syllogism is quite simple. If global warming is a real problem the federal government has to regulate carbon pollution. The federal government is bad. Therefore global warming must not be a real problem.
The reality is that the legislation that passed the House and was being promoted in the Senate was built around a market-friendly approach first proposed by a Republican president (the first President Bush). As my colleague David Goldstein has pointed out, environmentalists support solutions to global warming that are fully compatible with genuine conservative values.
In Will’s world of pure ideology there is no place for these pesky facts.
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Comments
O'Susannah — Sep 8 2010 10:29 PM
Will also displays a striking ignorance of the bi-partisan history of the Clean Air Act and its approach to national versus state authorities.
The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which contained the first air pollution cap-and-trade program, was not only signed by President Bush. It passed the House by an overwhelming bi-partisan majority of 401-25 and the Senate by 89-10.
In addition to the groundbreaking acid rain trading program that you mentioned, one of the other structural features of the 1990 law bears special mention to refute Will's view that concentrated federal power in Washington is an ideology run amok among progressives.
Title I of the 1990 CAAA imposed greater prescriptions and proscriptions upon states, and concentrated greater oversight power in the federal EPA, after the 1977 CAA amendments had begun to mark that shift away from the original 1970 law's heavy reliance upon state authorities.
And why did Congress, with overwhelming Republican and Democratic support, impose more extensive and specific strictures and expectations upon the states? Because the air was not being cleaned up and states were consistently and egregiously missing clean air deadlines and requirements. Congress recognized -- with broad state and bi-partisan support -- that national standards, greater expectations and federal oversight were necessary to deliver clean air, to counter local economic arm twisting of state agencies, and to advance beyond nearly two decades of proven shortfalls that resulted from extensive state flexibilities.
So Will's complaints about concentrated federal power may make for punchy political sound bites in 2010, but they show a complete ignorance of the history of the Clean Air Act in this country and the hard lessons that led to better approaches to cleaning up the air, approaches that have delivered tremendous success in the past 20 years.
But we must not let those successes and pesky facts get in the way of Will's ideological rant and his glee that the crisis of climate change is going unaddressed.