I've said all this before, but not as well.

The economic, biological and climatological arguments--about global warming, species extinction, pollution, and the like--are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. But the driving force, for a lot of those making those arguments, is the essentially religious belief that natural is good.

As evidence, consider how few in the environmental movement are willing to support nuclear power. Nuclear reactors are the one source of power that provides a plausible alternative to fossil fuels—a way of generating electricity almost anywhere without producing CO2 or consuming fossil fuels, and doing it at a cost not wildly higher than the cost of coal fueled generators. They thus provide at least a partial solution to what environmentalists claim are two of the big problems—depletable resources and global warming.

A few environmentalists accept that argument—most, by casual observation, don’t. The reason is clear. Nuclear reactors are as unnatural as you can get—a symbol of the evils of high technology, used as such for decades by many of the same people pushing environmentalism.

The risks of faith based science.

Friedman's point, made with this and other examples, is that arguments that are "generated by people who knew what conclusion they wanted and were doing their best to fudge up reasons to believe it" aren't compelling to honest thinkers, and often mask errors that compromise the whole agenda.

I quite agree. The decline of the environmental movement is due in large part to the large segment of that activist community that is more concerned with their beliefs than with reasoning from evidence to formulate behaviors and policies that are environmentally wise. The bit of that faith that Friedman focuses on - naturalism - isn't all there is to that faith, and it is arguable that their naturalism is merely naive in any case - a more sophisticated naturalism that is based in evidence contradicts much of what they believe - but he has lucidly encapsulated one of the chief defects.