Bill Berkowitz

OAKLAND, USA, May 24 2005 (IPS) — Mainstream U.S. environmental groups, injured by political defeats, public indifference and budget cuts, are weighing alliances with neo-conservatives – improbable rightwing bedfellows in the struggle to rein in global warming who want to reduce U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. In the process, some greens are reconsidering their longstanding opposition to nuclear power.

This realignment comes at a time when environmental-friendly initiatives of the administration of former U.S. President Bill Clinton have been reversed, enforcement of environmental regulations has been stymied, and privatisation of U.S. public lands is proceeding apace.

Further, the administration of President George W. Bush appears to have seized the initiative in the environmental debate with such slogans as ”common sense environmentalism”, ”Healthy Forests”, and ”Clear Skies” to describe its key positions and programmes.

”The Death of Environmentalism,” written by political pollster Ted Nordhaus and public relations consultant Michael Shellenberger and originally released at an October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association of U.S. philanthropies that support green causes, credited the movement with a number of successes. These included enactment of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air and Clean Waters Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

But the assessment said there was ”strikingly little to show” for the ”hundreds of millions of dollars poured into combating global warming,” charged the movement with being out of touch with the public, and challenged it to ”rethink everything” – alliances, strategies, positions, messages – and come up with new, imaginative and public-friendly ways to solve the global warming crisis.

And for all their earlier successes, recent times have brought budget cuts, public indifference, and a string of political defeats. These include legislation opening up parts of the Alaska wilderness to oil exploration and rollbacks on environmental regulations.

All of which has caused consternation.

Several leading environmentalists, including Fred Krupp, executive director of Environmental Defence, Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, and James Gustave Speth, dean of Yale University’s school of forestry and environmental studies, are encouraging research into the economic, safety and security, waste storage, and proliferation issues surrounding nuclear power.

In a piece published this month’s issue of the journal Technology Review, entitled ”Environmental Heresies,” Stewart Brand, the longtime environmentalist who founded the ”Whole Earth Catalogue – a telephone directory-type consumer guide to the goods and services needed to forge an alternative lifestyle – argued that perhaps the only solution to global warming, a reality the Bush administration has not openly embraced, is nuclear power.

Earlier in the year, Robert Bryce, the author of ”Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate”, reported in the online publication Slate on a developing alliance between greens and neo-conservatives. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney, president of the ultra-right Centre for Security Policy, two big-time advocates for President Bush’s war with Iraq, enthusiastically advocate fuel-efficient vehicles as a way of reducing dependence on Middle East oil.

The coupling of such top ”neo-cons” – the architects of the Iraq war – with environmentalists – many of whom have voiced concern about the devastating effects the war has had on the Iraqi environment – materialised sometime late last year when they backed a proposal from the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington-based think tank tracking energy and security issues. The neo-cons are ”going green for geopolitical reasons, not environmental ones,” Bryce concluded.

A bill that would give ”significant financial incentives for the development of three new nuclear technologies,” sponsored by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and Connecticut Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman is being circulated in draft form.

”As the world approaches peak oil and a future of rapidly escalating energy costs, increasing support for nuclear power amongst some environmentalists was predictable,” Scott Silver, executive director of the Oregon-based grassroots environmental group Wild Wilderness, said in an interview.

”The unwritten mission of many organisations is ‘sustainable growth’ which translates into supporting economic growth while minimising associated ecological damage,” Silver told IPS. ”In keeping with this mission, the fight against global warming will not be waged by attempting to decrease the ecological footprint of man or by reducing the demands we put upon this planet, but by growth.

”By tightly framing the issue in terms of ‘too much carbon dioxide’, nuclear power becomes an obvious solution,” Silver added. ”For industry and the neo-cons, the problem has nothing to do with climate. For the neo-cons, the problem is one of sustaining economic growth during a period of energy scarcity.”

In a May 16 Pacific News Service commentary entitled ”Why I Am Not an Environmentalist,” Orson Aguilar brought the contentious issue of ”economic development” to the table.

Aguilar, associate executive director of The Greenlining Institute, which works to persuade banks and other financial institutions to invest in low-income and minority communities, especially in inner cities, said that for far too long, top-tier environmental groups neglected urban concerns.

Aguilar, who grew up in East Los Angeles, said that his community worried more about ”the lack of good housing and jobs, scraping together money for groceries, failing schools and all-too-common police brutality,” than about ”air pollution” or ”the smells coming from the incinerator directly south of our housing complex.”

Environmentalists, Aguilar charged, were preoccupied with ”preserving places most of us will never see.” When the movement finally became conscious of the toxic nightmare plaguing the inner cities in America, he added, it ”avoided addressing my community’s desperate need for economic development.”

In the late 1990s, Aguilar’s organisation was deeply involved in trying secure legislation aimed at making it easier to revitalise inner city ”brownfields,” or polluted plots of land. They met opposition from major environmental groups including the Sierra Club, he recalled.

By contrast, the idea of making it easier to revitalise brownfields had been kicking around at right-wing think tanks for several years, and it became a central theme of Bush’s environmental agenda -albeit primarily because it meant enabling corporations to sidestep environmental regulations.

So, Aguilar said, he is not dismayed by the ”death of environmentalism”; he sees it as an opportunity: ”While there are many who feel sadness and anger that environmentalism is dead, I am optimistic that in dying, environmentalism might give birth to a new politics that offers a better future to both my community and the planet. Those environmentalists who are ready to evolve will find many new allies like me ready to join them in building a new and more expansive movement on the other side.”

Silver was not so quick to rhapsodise. This campaign ”appears to have been invented for the purpose of killing off traditional, naturally-evolved, grassroots-based environmentalism and replacing it with a synthetic, pro-development, focus-group tested collaborative partnership between ‘new environmentalists,’ industry, and those who hope to collect crumbs thrown off from unfettered growth,” he said.