As noted recently in Captivating, and many previous posts as well, the politics of limits and empty symbolic gestures is a loser since reality can only be ignored and denied for so long before it is obvious to even the dimmest that the emperor is buck nekid.

As the election enters its endgame, Democrats and their environmental allies face a political challenge they could hardly have imagined just a few months ago. America's growing dependence on fossil fuels, once viewed as a Democratic trump card held alongside the Iraq war and the deflating economy, has become a lodestone instead. . .

Democrats and greens ended up in this predicament because they believed their own press clippings -- or, perhaps more accurately, Al Gore's. After the release of the documentary film and book "An Inconvenient Truth," greens convinced themselves that U.S. public opinion on climate change had shifted dramatically, despite having no empirical evidence that was the case. . .

This summer, elite opinion ran headlong into American popular opinion. The train wreck happened in the Senate and went by the name of the Climate Security Act. That bill to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would have, by all accounts (even the authors'), increased gasoline and energy prices. Despite clear evidence that energy-price anxiety was rising, Democrats brought the bill to the Senate floor in June when gas prices were well over $4 a gallon in most of the country. . .

In a tacit acknowledgment of their defeat, some green leaders, such as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope, have endorsed the Democrats' pro-drilling strategy. But few of them seem to realize the political implications. The most influential environmental groups in Washington -- the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund -- are continuing to bet the farm on a strategy that relies on emissions limits and other regulations aimed at making fossil fuels more expensive in order to encourage conservation, efficiency and renewable energy. But with an economic recession likely, and energy prices sure to remain high for years to come thanks to expanding demand in China and other developing countries, any strategy predicated centrally on making fossil fuels more expensive is doomed to failure.

This is another half bright Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger article. They have framed the issue as Democrats being out maneuvered by those dastardly Republicans, but that's just silly. Democrats punked themselves and continue to do so because their policies are idiotic. The fact that energy prices were on a long term rise due to expanding population and exploding development isn't news but it makes the politics of hunkering down and breathing shallowly simply absurd. Democrats have just had their fingers in their ears while they chanted loudly to avoid hearing any truth, convenient or not.

But Nordhaus and Shellenberger are still Democrats and so they have a different idiotic proposal.

A better approach is to make clean energy cheap through technology innovation funded directly by the federal government. In contrast to raising energy prices, investing somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion annually in technology R&D, infrastructure and transmission lines to bring power from windy and sunny places to cities is overwhelmingly popular with voters. Instead of embracing this big investment, greens and Democrats push instead for tiny tax credits for renewable energy -- nothing approaching the national commitment that's needed.

Energy R&D, or any R&D for that matter, is always a good investment. But it doesn't work to throw mountains of cash at a specific problem expecting some paradigm changing breakthrough. All it does is establish a fat bureaucracy and legions of rent seekers working to bleed off as much of the loose mountain of cash as they can for as little effort as possible. Mostly they shuffle papers around and talk until the cash is gone. This is just the next Democrat self punking. It's a bad idea that will be exposed as such in the end.

With just six weeks before the election, the bursting of the green bubble is a wake-up call for Democrats. Environmental groups, perpetually certain that a new ecological age is about to dawn in America, have serially overestimated their strength and misread public opinion. Democrats must break once and for all from green orthodoxy that focuses primarily on making dirty energy more expensive and instead embrace a strategy to make clean energy cheap.

By continuing to hew to the green agenda, Democrats have not only put in jeopardy their chance of taking back the White House and growing their majority in Congress, they also have set back the prospects of establishing policies that might effectively address the climate and energy crises.

That much is true. But the real error is in politicizing technological issues and creating social conflict where there would otherwise be strong consensus. It has taken decades for the colossal error, which began with Gaylord Nelson cynically trying to tie environmental concern to Democrat politics to support the dicey candidacy of John Kennedy, to come a cropper. It made something that was not merely bipartisan but apolitical into a typically brain dead political contest.

Environmental groups need to purge themselves of Democrats and work for true environmental preservation and remediation rather than just gotcha politics and quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo. I don't mean that they won't still have political preferences as individuals, but they need to grasp that letting those preferences warp their work achieves results contrary to their stated objectives. Every time their reveal themselves as enemies of a large portion of society they doom their projects to failure. Every time they pursue projects that harm a large portion of society they set themselves up for backlash and so make things worse rather than better.

Maturity is required. One must do honest, clear eyed analysis of socio-environmental issues and pursue strategies that address the interests of all. Anything less will fail.