‘Nose-ringed Just Stop Oil pests’ hurt environmental movement with mainstream voters
A liberal journalist who worked at the Washington Post and Time and who wrote a book urging people to fight climate change by eating less meat now says climate change activists are “exaggerating.”
Michael Grunwald, author of the 2025 book We Are Eating the Earth and also of an entire book praising Vice President Joe Biden for his “clean-energy transition” leadership of President Obama’s $800 billion in stimulus spending, makes the accusation in an article in the spring issue of Liberties. That journal is edited by Leon Wieseltier, who had a long run at The New Republic.
“[S]ome climate activists have an annoying habit of exaggerating how badly things are going,” Grunwald writes in the Liberties article, “Climate Change and the Primacy of Politics.” “Global warming is making droughts and floods worse, but it is not making them happen. In fact, global warming does not always make everything worse; tropical hurricanes, for example, do not seem to be getting more frequent, defying a lot of shrill eco-catastrophism. Apocalyptic rhetoric about how it’s game over for the climate if we do not cut greenhouse emissions 43% by 2030 is not only annoying but wrong. There’s no such thing as game over for the climate. … there is no inflection point where we all suddenly die or are all doomed. There is only better and worse.”
The bulk of the article is about how “very bad” President Trump is. “For the sake of the whales, the country, and the climate that envelops the whole world, what matters most is beating him and his enablers,” Grunwald writes.
Along the way of the predictable Trump-bashing, though, is some entertaining and surprising criticism of Grunwald’s colleagues in the environmental movement. Grunwald says their extremism is counterproductive both on the substance and for the way it alienates mainstream voters.
“Climate issues are more complicated than the nose-ringed Just Stop Oil pests who glue themselves to museums or the contemptuous Bluesky in-crowd that snarks about insufficiently radical Democrats would have you believe,” he writes. “The climate left is often clueless about politics, and sometimes also about climate; the knee-jerk naysayers who fight zero-emissions nuclear plants, solar panels in tortoise habitats, and the transmission lines necessary to distribute renewable power to metropolitan areas are not doing the environment any favors.”
He also notes some potential areas of bipartisan cooperation. “[T]here is bipartisan enthusiasm for geothermal projects that transform underground heat into clean round-the-clock energy. The same is increasingly true for nuclear power.”
Grunwald adds that “the center-left writer Matthew Yglesias was right to argue not long ago in the New York Times that American fossil energy is usually cleaner than foreign fossil energy, even though the climate movement’s hall monitors absurdly denounced him as a denier.” And he adds that “blocking all natural gas is definitely counterproductive, especially now that the rush to build AI-driven data centers is creating a rush to build new power plants to meet projected spikes in electricity demand; electrification is vital for decarbonization, and gas-fired electricity is much cleaner than coal, even if it isn’t [as] clean as wind or solar.”
The politics of this all are challenging. “Polls suggest that climate is an extremely low priority for most American voters, largely because they associate it with environmental sacrifices that create higher prices. … Just Stop Oil is a terribly unpopular message,” he writes. “A few extra degrees of warmth by 2100 doesn’t sound so horrific, especially to people who will not be alive in 2100.”
He suggests, “green groups should stop pressuring Democratic candidates in states such as Texas and Ohio to embrace Green New Deal talking points about a hundred-percent renewable grid or climate justice for minorities, and give them a pass to take more moderate positions that enhance their electability. Ivory Soap environmentalism that rejects 99.44 percent pure as a sellout to Big Oil — such as the activists who held a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office and gave Joe Biden’s absurdly ambitious $1.7 trillion climate proposal an F-minus grade — does not seem like a realistic path to electoral majorities.”
Grunwald writes that he suspects “deprioritizing climate issues will make Democrats more popular, but I am a climate obsessive, so I hope I’m wrong.”
I pinged Grunwald, who was my colleague on a student newspaper in college and who I’ve stayed in friendly if distant touch with over the years (he lives in Florida), to ask if he had anything to add. He emphasized that he thinks Trump is a bigger problem for the environment than the “climate left.” He wrote back to me, “Eco-catastrophism is bad but if the world followed Trump’s lead we would have a real eco-catastrophe! I don’t think conservatives should support his Stalinist efforts to prop up the obsolete coal industry either.” He also noted that by climate movement standards he’s center-left and known already in those circles for opposing “degrowth,” the Sunrise Movement, and the Green New Deal as stalking horses for socialism.
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