I've watched in semi-bemused amazement as the bloated federal government created mostly by Democrats in the twentieth century (not liberals, since they are exceedingly illiberal) was captured by their opponents and is now used to further a different flavor of illiberalism. The amazement isn't that this could happen, since it was a certainty that it would happen, but that the Democrats are at least feigning surprise and outrage - and some are truly confused and shocked.

For example:

The facts alone just don't move people.

Why that is would be an excellent subject for sociological study. I'm sure it's complicated. But here's one thought: It is human nature to want -- nay, need -- human enemies. Evil people, who can be demonized. And tortured. And killed. And -- most importantly -- seen. People understand people. That's one reason terrorism has such an iron grip on both domestic and foreign policy, despite the relatively low risk anyone in this country has of being affected by it in any way. It fits easily into the natural human cosmology of territory and territorial threats. It goes straight to our lizard brains, our fight-or-flight instinct.

Global warming doesn't. It's vague, and large, and slow-moving, and the enemy is structural and pervasive, and we're all complicit.

The "terrorists" of the environmental movement and their political fellow travelers have counted on this for decades, used it to punch above their weight and get media attention not commensurate with their quality of their arguments. Terrorism in this broad sense that includes antics of all sorts - everything from monkey wrenching property to staged riots - has been the chief tool used to create that bloated federal government.

No studies are needed since this is common knowledge among activists. When coupled with the rational ignorance of voters in democratic societies, and the irrational ideologies they harbor at almost no cost, it's easy to see why those activists have spent such huge amounts of energy spewing myths about climate change: it's marketing by fear, terrorism in a sense, their time tested tactic for mau-mauing voters.

It's easy and cheap to do terrorism, that's what makes it so attractive to activists of all sorts. It's political jiu-jitsu that uses the good faith and openness of societies against them. It is intellectually, ethically and aesthetically bankrupt - but effective. If you are a sociopath and judge your concerns to be more important than those of others it is irresistible.

The environmental movement has been given some pointed lessons in these truths in recent years. First the machine:

. . . by the end of 2000, Greenpeace, Environmental Defense, et al. were realizing that the government wasn’t a reliable ally anymore. Corporations started to look awfully appealing when the alternative was George W. Bush. Gwen Ruta, director of corporate partnerships at Environmental Defense, claims private initiatives are “the wave of the future,” in part because “we’re in a rather uncertain regulatory period. How aggressive will the government be in the next few years in creating regulations?

We don’t know. And so we’re looking to partner with companies to go beyond regulations.” Unlike in the ’80s, when an adversarial relationship with government simply sparked more grassroots enthusiasm, Bush’s unwillingness to increase environmental regulation seemed contagious.

This is back-asswards: Bush merely reflects the views of his constituents. The anti-environmental revolution happened more than a decade before Bush won election, first in states and then in the federal legislature. It was one of the sturdiest planks in the Republican revolution platform. The machinery of federal government created to oppress a large segment of society was seized and turned against the Democrats and their single issue activist supporters.

Terrorist tactics - from the Unibomber to the OK City bombing, and from the first WTC attacks to its final destruction - were no longer tolerable. Riots - such as those in Seattle - no longer commanded sympathy for "the cause". The whole violent, nihilistic zealot culture and life style was viewed with disdain. And rightly so.

Perhaps worse, just as the federal machinery was captured by those it was designed to attack, the "green" high ground is being captured by those most vulnerable to PR wounds.

BP is first among many companies that have opted to do their environmental penance in the glare of the spotlight. British Petroleum (recently rechristened BP, following KFC’s model in removing unsavory words from its brand name) has been much ballyhooed for its commitment to the environment. Most of the ballyhooing is being done by BP itself.

A gas and oil company with $225 billion in revenue, BP is part of an industry that will keep environmental advocacy groups in business for as long at it exists. Yet these days BP is styling itself “Beyond Petroleum” and declaring that it’s “thinking outside the barrel.” BP’s Environmental Team has crafted an elaborate advertising campaign and rebranding effort, recently expanded to the Web. Its goal: to convince the world that a company that sucks dead dinosaurs out of the earth, turns them into gasoline, and delivers that gas to SUVs can also be environmentally friendly enough to use a green and yellow sunburst (or is it a flower?) as its logo. . .

ExxonMobil has long been a favorite target of environmental activists, especially since the tanker Exxon Valdez sank off the coast of Alaska in 1989, covering all those adorable Arctic animals in oil. Unlike BP, the company publicly opposes the Kyoto Protocols and has done so for years. That isn’t its biggest problem, though. According to Robert L. Bradley Jr., president of the Houston-based Institute for Energy Research, one major reason environmentalists go after ExxonMobil is the company’s history of funding free market groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute (and Bradley’s own organization).

Ironically, Exxon is also one of the biggest investors in clean technology. Their recent safety record is also significantly better than BP’s. . .

But while Exxon spends its money on free market think tanks, BP has chosen more picturesque causes. . .If environmental groups are going to choose someone to target, why not encourage them to choose your competitor? . . .The money BP spends to “partner” with environmental groups might look, from a certain angle, like a bribe to prevent protests. But the bribery goes both ways.

My emphasis. This is important. It's the same pattern that turned unions into social parasites little different from organized crime syndicates. Over time the power positions in environmental groups have been captured by those who seek power. Period. The environment has little or nothing to do with environmental groups or the environmental movement at this point. It's power junkies leading uninformed zealots. As Dan Daggett put's it:

"The Leave-It-Alone assumption . . . has brought us to the absurdity that the actual condition of a piece of land is irrelevant to determining if it is healthy or not."

Facts? Environmental groups couldn't care less. Neither do their opponents. It's all spin, hustle and grift, the unspeakable locked in mortal combat with their shadow selves. When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you¹. Politics is stupid.

Daggett's central point, no news to those who have been paying the least bit of attention for the past few decades, is that the Edenic myth is broken. What he calls the "Leave-It-Alone assumption" is better known by scientists as the natural progression hypothesis, the idea that systems tend toward some natural state and that if they are abandoned, once disturbed, they will return to that state. It isn't so except in some special cases and minor disturbances. Systems are attracted to new states, the adjacent possible as some call it, rather than their presumed natural climax. As William deBuys puts it:

Perhaps we need to conceive a new Eden whose occupants, having bitten the apple, must forever tend the tree. And in this Eden, the tree would be forever growing and forever changing, and the Adam and Eve who tend it would understand that, while they can prune a little here and trim a little there, what they most need to do is to grow, change, and learn in harmony with the tree.

It is being called adaptive management lately.

Although such management, known as adaptive management, has been discussed by land managers and touted by public lands scholars for at least 20 years, the concept has been more talked about than implemented. . .

Instead of having a static land management plan, adaptive management calls for continual science-based monitoring of natural resources in order to adjust management activities as situations change. Traditional land management develops a plan and implements it without explicitly incorporating mechanisms for ongoing assessment and readjustment of the management scheme.

Adaptive management also calls for conducting ongoing experiments on-site to determine how various environmental conditions or management activities affect the natural resources in question, with an eye to incorporating the scientific findings into management activities.

As Daggett notes too, this is unlikely to work unless the management reflects the desires of locals with vested interests.

"Adaptive environmental management means there is a commitment to have on-going local community involvement in making and assessing environmental policy," said Daniel Bronstein, professor of community, agriculture, recreation and resource studies at Michigan State University. "It's a hot topic right now, but the question has always been whether the government can implement the monitoring that is needed to make it work." . .

"The idea of adaptive environmental management is to get greater local acceptability as the policies are being created," Bronstein explained. "Then, after the policies are implemented, federal monitors continue to assess the ecosystem and public reaction. Management strategies can then be changed as necessary."

Actually, Daggett goes further and advocates that the managers be local residents. He's right, but there is little chance of this at present since those who have seized power will not give it up until there is no more juice to be wrung from the fruit.

Still, it is worth saying, even if few listen or care. Politics is not the way. The bloated federal government is the problem not the solution. Any concentration of power will attract those who seek power and in the end be corrupted by them. There's no help. It isn't someone else's problem. We each must accept personal responsibility and do what we can, but there are ways to engage society. Carrots work better than sticks.

Private groups are offering big cash prizes to anyone who can solve a range of daunting problems.

In October 2004 SpaceShipOne roared into space (twice) - the first privately funded spacecraft ever to reach suborbit, nearly 70 miles above Earth. A year later, "Stanley," a Volkswagen Touareg modified by Stanford University students, rumbled across some 130 miles of desert without a human driver, navigating the rough terrain guided by computer programs and sensors.

Chalk up two new technological accomplishments for the 21st century. In both cases, the designers were motivated to be the first to do something - and to win a cash prize. . .

Using "grand challenges" to stimulate scientific progress isn't new. In 1714 the British government offered the equivalent of about $12 million to answer a vexing question: How could His Majesty's ships calculate their longitude - how far they were east or west of home - to avoid shipwrecks and other disasters? Great scientists of the day attacked the problem, but it was solved by John Harrison, a self-taught watchmaker.

The sticks approach, terrorizing society and demanding changes, works far less well.

In the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Greenpeace threatened a campaign against companies (at the time sponsoring a “green” Olympic village) that failed to invest in new refrigerant technology. Greenpeace advocated propane as an alternative coolant, but “we didn’t agree with their solution,” says Langert, mostly because propane is “flammable, explosive. And we’re not taking any safety risks.” McDonald’s partnered with Coca-Cola and other suppliers to develop a carbon dioxide–based cooling system. Then it built its prototype in Denmark.

As it turns out, the Denmark store uses a lot less energy—17 percent less—than a regular McDonald’s. The hardware costs are higher, since McDonald’s had to design many units from scratch, but the energy savings are incentive enough to keep working on the technology because of the long-term savings it provides.

Imagine if greenpeas had used some intelligence and offered a prize rather than squandering funds on political activism, and getting the technology wrong besides. But their goal isn't environmental improvement, it is power. The world is increasingly ignoring them and the environmental movement in general because there are better ways to make progress on the issues, and these ways don't lead to sick organizations.

Two of the most critical environmental and energy science challenges of the twenty-first century are being addressed in a system biology program funded by the W.R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) , a National User facility managed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the Department of Energy (DOE). This program features an elaborate international collaboration involving six university laboratories and ten national laboratory groups. The challenges are carbon sequestration and hydrogen production. The organisms that could provide answers are cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). . .

To unravel the mystery, Pakrasi and his collaborators are growing Cyanothece cells in photobioreactors, testing cells every hour to try to understand the cycles at different times of the day. With the combined diverse expertise of 16 different laboratories, the Grand Challenge scientists and engineers are examining numerous biological aspects of the organism. The results of this Grand Challenge project will provide the first comprehensive systems level understanding of how environmental conditions influence key carbon fixation processes at the gene-mRNA-protein levels in an organism.

That was a long ramble from "The facts alone just don't move people". In short, so what? Why would any sane person want to "move people"? That's not a useful way to make progress on the problems we face, it's merely a way for power seekers to gain employment. Let them get honest jobs.

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¹"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you." - Fredrich Wilhelm Nietzsche