Here's a not very insightful discussion of a quoted passage from Break Through by Shellenberger and Nordhaus, the Death of Environmentalism twins. The passage:

“In America, the political left and political right have conspired to create a culture and politics of victimization, and all the benefits of resentment and cynicism have accrued to the right. That’s because resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse. They are the weapons of the reactionary and the conservative — of people who fear and resist the future. Just as environmentalists believe they can create a great ecological politics out of apocalypse, liberals believe they can create a great progressive politics out of resentment; they cannot. Grievance and victimization make us smaller and less generous and can thus serve only reactionaries and conservatives.”

My emphasis. S&N have been humming this tune for quite a while.

...the stalemate over addressing global warming highlights the failure of neither Blair nor Bush but rather of environmentalism and the politics of limits. Global warming did not have to be, a priori, an “environmental” issue. It was made so by environmentalists who understood global warming originally not so much as an impending global crisis that needed to be addressed by any means necessary but rather as a powerful new argument for restricting activities (e.g., driving cars and burning fossil fuels) that they already wanted to restrict. As such, the solutions to global warming were, from the very start, conceived of as limitations and restrictions -- the approach that lies at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol and virtually every other effort to address global warming.

There are no useful ideas or admirable ideals in the leftist political agenda. There are no useful prescriptions for relieving our threats. There's just the regulation ratchet. Those who are fearful of reality, especially future reality, desperately seek to clamp down on uncertainty. This doesn't work of course, it's a mistaken response from timid souls.

There is something useful in the core principles of those few leftists who are actually thinking about society rather than just emoting about their fears, but those principles are not advanced by leftist politics. They are drowned out by the keening of the fearful, all but lost in the panic to duck and cover, overlaid with moldering resentment.

OTOH

If oil runs out next year, or in the next decade, that will matter less than the rise of competitive sources of energy in the marketplace. Petroleum will go the way of whale oil, which in 1850 was the world’s fifth largest industry, Lovins said. That powerful industry lasted precisely until coal-based oils provided a cheaper alternative to the common lighting fuel. You don’t hear much about whale oil anymore.

“Whalers were astounded,” Lovins said, “when they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales.”

He sees the same irrelevance in global warming, at least as a catalyst to inspire a change in the fuels burned by the world’s economic engine. He sees efforts to persuade federal governments and international bodies to set limits on carbon dioxide as misguided. China, currently the world’s top polluter of greenhouse gases, will persuade itself to go green because it makes economic sense, and provides a competitive advantage . . .

Geeking about limits is dumb. That's not how the world works. It is counterproductive to squander time, energy and resources to force a clumsy solution to a problem that must go away of its own accord. The only way we can fail to cease emissions is to institutionalize them, turn them into a money spinner that impedes progress . . . like Kyoto and similar limits approaches. The only way we will fail to improve the lives of the majority of humanity still struggling to live well is to let ourselves be consumed by resentment toward those who have managed to rise out of the muck.

Progressive politics and ecological politics are not advanced by resentment and apocalypse, the limitation agenda is advanced. It's a simple choice: do we wish to improve our lot, or do we wish to stick it to the man, make those noisy kids pipe down, and stop having so damned much fun! I'd say that improving our lot is the more progressive choice.

Update: World Whinging

The beginning of the struggle to save ourselves from ecological catastrophe has come to an end and we can begin to see the outlines of the next stage of the struggle.

Those of us who've spent our careers advocating a saner approach to the future can be forgiven a few moments of smugness, for these are sweet days.

There are few clearer examples of the failure of environmentalism than this. The ecological politics of apocalypse will not achieve any useful purposes. Some politicians and hangers-on will crassly exploit our concerns, but they won't do any good, won't help the environment. Instead, they hurt the environment by siphoning off energy and resources from useful activities, and create resistance and backlash among those who are in fact sane, and not smug.

Their rhetoric fails to engage reality. Just as capitalism learned to market anti-capitalism to fashion victims, it has also learned to market green. The result is capitalist and non-green. That doesn't mean that the main complaints of anti-capitalists have not been addressed, it means that capitalism is good at that task. And it doesn't mean that environmental preservation and remediation have been impeded, it means that capitalism is good at that too, at least compared to possible alternatives. There are impossible alternatives that seem attractive, but they are impossible.

When you hear world whingers shrieking, remember that this is their business, their trade, and that they are just trying to hustle a buck by exploiting your legitimate concerns and ignorance of useful policies. That would be fine - just another bunch of folks trying to get over and make a buck - except that they make the problems worse. They are parasites on society, like worms in the intestinal tract, stealing energy and weakening society while producing nothing but wastes.

Update:

to repeat : "And it doesn't mean that environmental preservation and remediation have been impeded, it means that capitalism is good at that too, at least compared to possible alternatives."

Many environmentalists say they have come to realize that cutting down trees, if done responsibly, is not the worst thing that can happen to a forest, when the alternative is selling the land to people who want to build houses.

Stoltze Land and Lumber, for example, which owns about 36,000 acres near the border of Glacier National Park, has said that the failure of the logging industry would leave the company no option but to sell land into the booming development market.

That prospect chills the blood of people like Anne Dahl, the director of the Swan Valley Ecosystem Center, a conservation and education group.

“I’m a former tree hugger who was opposed to everything, every timber sale,” Ms. Dahl said, “but now I see that the worst thing you can do is lose it all to development.”

I hope these dingbats get a clue about grasslands and grazing too. Make life impossible for graziers and their ranches become real estate. At first it's not so bad, since the parcels are largish. Then they get divided again, and again.

Environmentalists are destroying our forest and grasslands. It isn't only the conversion of land to real estate, it is also degradation of the lands due to mismanagement even when they are not sold off. They have no idea what they are doing, what the consequences of their acts will be.

Update:

Said another way:

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration, tells us what he would do to the tax code:

What’s fair? I’d say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich (earning over $500,000 a year). Plus an annual wealth tax of one half of one percent on net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets....If the Democrats stand for anything, it’s a fair allocation of the responsibility for paying the costs of maintaining this nation.

Realistic optimal tax problems don't usually yield solutions similar to Reich's proposal, even for a social planner who has strong preferences for equality. High tax rates at the top generate a lot of deadweight loss for each dollar of tax revenue. In most standard optimal tax models, a more redistributionist social planner would give more to the poor and impose higher marginal tax rates on everyone, but she would not focus disproportionately on the the very top of the income distribution. And she would not add an extra penalty to capital accumulation, as Reich is proposing.

If you let your demons run, as Reich does, and try to stick it to the man, you harm those you claim to want to help. This is what the leftist political agenda does in every case since it isn't about progress, it's about resentment, revenge, fear and limitation. These are not admirable character traits in any case, and are simply unforgivable in those who claim to be striving for progress and social equity. When emotions trump intellect everyone suffers, but those in greatest need suffer most of all. That's not fair.

Update:

Said another way:

You might think I must be one of those know-nothing naysayers who believes global warming is a liberal plot. On the contrary, I am a biologist and ecologist who has worked on global warming, and been concerned about its effects, since 1968. I've developed the computer model of forest growth that has been used widely to forecast possible effects of global warming on life--I've used the model for that purpose myself, and to forecast likely effects on specific endangered species.

I'm not a naysayer. I'm a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.

The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality. . .

My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.

Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves. . .

At the heart of the matter is how much faith we decide to put in science--even how much faith scientists put in science. Our times have benefited from clear-thinking, science-based rationality. I hope this prevails as we try to deal with our changing climate.

The leftist and environmentalist agenda is not about "those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves". We will spend money unwisely and we will take actions that are counterproductive for the environment and ourselves so long as they advance the political agenda and clamp down on humanity. The environment and suffering humans be damned, just get the power to control society, though the results are contrary to the rhetoric.

Update:

I'm stealing Norm's whole post since he says it so well and I want to have a local, permanent record. Even the title is good. Expecting the worst - and too much

Today George Monbiot enlists Cormac McCarthy's The Road in pressing upon his readers a vision of impending catastrophe. The trouble, if his diagnosis is correct, is that people won't act as if catastrophe is upon them until it either is upon them or very nearly is - until they start to feel its effects. Monbiot writes ruefully:

The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life.

Indeed. For this is what people do. How could they live in the world, most of them, unless they did it? Even before, even without, global warming, the world accommodates so much human anguish, so much suffering, so much in need of urgent attention, that only a saint is able to take it all upon his conscience, and keep it ever-present. We carry on with our lives, doing what we can here or there, some of us less, some of us more, to make things better. Monbiot again:

I sense that... a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble.

On such a basis, civilization has always been in trouble, since human concern for others stretches only so far, and though sometimes also further than that, it is generally - and properly - stronger for intimate others, on whom most people's quite limited time and energies are concentrated.

This is not either an endorsement of complacency or a plea for indifference; I have myself argued for a morality that would demand more of all of us. It is merely the observation that a politics of meliorative action that deals in imminent catastrophe and an expectation of heroic other-directed concern and other-directed effort is likely to find only a limited audience.

My emphasis. It sounds much like S&N's notion that "environmentalists believe they can create a great ecological politics out of apocalypse, liberals believe they can create a great progressive politics out of resentment; they cannot."