Five Minutes with Greenpeace

I have an interview with John Passacantando up over at Campus Progress. He's really good at articulating the conflicts in the environmental movement. He also has some thoughts on the new Shellenberger and Nordhaus book:

I haven’t read the book. But as far as the discussion that it has provoked, it was useful in that it was critical of the mainstream environmental movement. Criticism can always be useful.

I watched Shellenberger and Nordhaus present their thesis at a conference in Middlebury, Vermont. They leveled their criticism at national environmental groups and then at local groups. They pretty much said, “A pox on all your homes,” and, “We don’t really have the answer.” [They believe that] all these [progressive] issues need to be rolled into one—sort of a rainbow coalition of gay rights and anti-war and anti-global warming and jobs.

But that’s not how things work. Historically, people pick an issue and they win on that. They don’t link it to another issue and another and another and another to make it more powerful—that makes it weaker. And so I thought their premise was incorrect. It was rather sloppy.

Read the whole thing here.