The future...

As it stands, the future of the environmental "movement" is bleak. Fractured, unable to truly work cooperatively or communicate effectively, and fairly ineffective in the face of huge, game-changing issues, the movement stands to lose in the long run. The sad part is that we have it easy: there is a single, identifiable issue to rally around (climate, duh); the scientific case for this issue is virtually unassailable by sane people; and we have an unprecedented opportunity to relate climate to a variety of disparate and engaging ideas like poverty eradication, global security and health. Unfortunately this ideal situation has been squandered, thus far. Why?

In the wake of Climategate, I think that the environmental movement needs to stop isolating and ridiculing people who disagree with us. Okay, so maybe climate skeptics are stupid, close-minded, and ornery. Maybe their science is fixed, misrepresented, and just plain wrong. But shutting them off and refusing to talk with them just makes matters worse. When left to scheme and simmer together in their collective ignorance, skeptics just get more stupider, more close-minded, and more ornery. I'm aware that the science is clear. The American public doesn't care.

The fact is that we need to add some PIZZAZ to environmentalism! Example: in a climate debate on NPR two years ago, climate skeptics battled climate scientists. Guess who won? That's right, not the people with the unimpeachable data, but the people with charisma, appealing arguments and Michael Crichton on their side. The skeptics made global warming sound fun: new beaches reaching into the midwest, longer summers to lounge around on those new beaches, and the expansion of the wine growing market to England. Instead of telling those losers that the English can't handle wine and that nobody wants to see Midwesterners in bikinis anyway, the environmentalists got flustered and implied that the audience couldn't handle the available information. Really? There are so many amazing reasons to avoid global warming and these guys couldn't come up with one, instead choosing to stutter about the science and isolate the audience. Michael Crichton (RIP. And really. He was a panelist...) said that climate change shouldn't be a priority because development work would suffer. Not one of the climate advocates suggested that climate adaptation and mitigation work can facilitate development. We need to seriously get it together and present appealing, glamorous, and imaginative views of what the world could look like if we made positive enviromental reforms. (It's not that hard, solor panels are very sparkly and pretty, Manhattan as Atlantis...not so much).