Green Stalemate

An environmental expert recently wrote an editorial in a local community paper in my area about the "victories" environmentalists can be thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend. Specifically, he mentioned the delays on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas and on the plan to hydraulically fracture land in the Delaware River basin for natural gas.

Since when are delays of environmentally destructive projects that might end up going through anyway considered victories?

He also wrote that these so-called victories come at a time when the national environmental movement continues to have to be on the defensive because of attempts to deny that climate change is real and attempts to abolish (or at least emaciate) the Environmental Protection Agency. So, when you get right down to it, the anti-environmentalist movement within the American right is on the side that's winning.

What Walter Cronkite said of the American war effort in Vietnam in 1968 sounds like what the environmental movement faces today; environmentalists in this country are mired in stalemate, and to say so seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. Anyone who thinks that American environmentalists are winning the battle need only look and see how many of their countrymen now think that maybe climate change is a hoax after all.