The tyranny of activism—1: Policies that stifle
Any adult who marches in public wearing a dinosaur costume should be certain about the political point he or she wishes to make. Protestors dressed that way while protesting fossil-energy projects indeed behave with unflinching certitude. They know without doubt that climate change poses a threat so dire that nothing less than revolutionizing energy use can suffice as a response. And they know equally well that anyone who disagrees with them must be logically and morally wrong. They're activists.
Their self-assured willingness to appear silly in public and to make costly demands of others evinces sincerity. To them, being sincere is more important than being right.
Dominating energy policy
In the US, in most of Europe, and in much of Canada, activism now dominates the making of energy policy. The US government is hobbling the coal industry and threatening to replicate the endeavor with natural gas. Europe is crushing its energy consumers. Several Canadian provinces are following the European example, and a Liberal national government probably will try to federalize the effort. Yet a majority of Americans didn't vote to run coal companies into bankruptcy and miners into unemployment. Europeans didn't volunteer for punishing electricity bills. And Canadians are just beginning to realize what their governments want to do to them. Activism is doing its work. Eventually, politics will do its work, too.
Activism isn't by nature bad. Indeed, it's essential to democracy. Activism can instigate constructive change. But its excesses can weaken benign institutions. Healthy democracies tolerate activism and even encourage it. But they keep it in check. They do so because unbridled activism becomes tyranny.
By definition, activism exists to counter popular will, to effect change lacking majority support. It achieves its goals with organization, focus, and persistence absent from the unwilling or unaware populations on which it would impose its will. Sometimes, activism wins support through simple persuasion, such as by creating awareness of a legitimate problem or cause previously shielded from public attention. Sometimes, activism becomes coercive.
With climate change, activism tries to frighten people into accepting policy changes certain to raise the costs of using energy and to limit resource development. Advocates of those changes insist the needed adjustments would be moderate and affordable. Those assurances are unpersuasive. The changes to energy consumption and production they demand in fact would be radical, the costs unbearable.
In Europe, changes undertaken for climate remediation once enjoyed popular support. Now that the costs are palpable, that is changing fast. The European example might partly be what keeps Americans in compelling numbers from identifying climate change as a priority of policy-making and their elected representatives from enacting much of the activist program.
Ever persistent, activists have taken the fight to other fronts in the US. They now control regulatory agencies, especially the Environmental Protection Agency. There, in courts, and in the streets, they're assembling an effective framework of obstructionism. Proposals for fossil-energy projects face growing, often endless delays. Existing projects face strangling regulation.
Escapes notice
This characteristic of activism and its full-time practitioners too frequently escapes notice. Activists don't build things. They don't provide services. They don't invent devices that improve human life or create items of artistic beauty that enrich it. Activists stifle activity-pipeline construction, plant operation, oil and gas well drilling-that they consider injurious but that many if not most other people see quite differently.
Certain about their assertions, demanding with their agenda, and intolerant of unaligned viewpoints, activists are setting energy policy by blocking targeted work. They're sincere, yes, but too often wrong. Industry representatives are perhaps busier now than ever responding to policy abominations bred in unprecedented numbers by well-entrenched activism. That effort would benefit from disclosure of activism's distortions of scientific and democratic processes, about which more will appear here in coming weeks.
