Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, Bush’s former chief speechwriter, has spent most of the year devoting his columns to bashing Barack Obama. The good news is, he’s been shaking up his subject list. The bad news is, his columns are still awful.
A few weeks ago, Gerson mixed things up by bashing Senate candidate Al Franken. Today, he argues that environmentalists are bothersome and have inept political skills.
After blasting Al Gore for “partisan, conspiratorial anger,” which Gerson finds “annoying,” the WaPo columnist argues:
Any legislation ambitious enough to cut carbon emissions significantly and encourage new energy technologies will require a broad political and social consensus. Nothing this complex and expensive gets done on a party-line vote. Yet many environmental leaders seem unpracticed at coalition-building. They tend to be conventionally, if not radically, liberal. They sometimes express a deep distrust for capitalism and hostility to the extractive industries. Their political strategy consists mainly of the election of Democrats. Most Republican environmental efforts are quickly pronounced “too little, too late.”
And to bolster this criticism, Gerson points to … nothing in particular. The problem isn’t that environmentalists are wrong, it’s that some of them strike Gerson as kind of nutty.
As for “Republican environmental efforts,” I suspect they’d be taken more seriously if a) they worked; and b) they existed.
Gerson went on to argue that environmentalists don’t like people, either.
Even worse, a disturbing minority of the environmental movement seems to view an excess of human beings, not an excess of carbon emissions, as the world’s main problem. In two recent settings, I have heard China’s one-child policy praised as an answer to the environmental crisis — a kind of totalitarianism involving coerced birth control or abortion. I have no objection to responsible family planning. But no movement will succeed with this argument: Because we in the West have emitted so much carbon, there needs to be fewer people who don’t look like us.
Human beings are not the enemy of sound environmental policy; they are the primary reason sound environmental policy is necessary.
If the movement to confront climate change is perceived as partisan, anti-capitalist and hostile to human life, it is likely to fail, causing suffering for many, including the ice bears. And so the question arises: Will the environment survive the environmentalists?
Reading this, publius concludes, “I think it’s fairly clear that Michael Gerson is the worst op-ed writer in the United States. He’s certainly the most insufferable.”
It’s steep competition — Bill Kristol is, after all, an op-ed writer — but Gerson is certainly proving himself to be near the top of the list.