I see Hanson hasn't come back or deigned to answer my questions / challenge about the necessity of the petrochemical industries to his 'conserventure' business.
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'A handful of superrich donors have created the illusion of a grassroots environmental movement.'
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_2_california-environmentalism.html#.VVyttzr9iyo.twitter
In the fall of 2010, an army of California groups—including blue-collar unions, small businesses, manufacturers, and big energy companies—tried to persuade voters to suspend the state’s rigorous anti-global-warming law, which mandates a rollback of greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels. The advocates for delaying the law argued that, with an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent, California needed to focus on creating jobs and couldn’t afford costly new measures to slash carbon emissions, such as requiring utilities to generate power from renewable sources. But what proponents of the jobs measure, known as Proposition 23, didn’t count on was the financial might of California’s environmentalists. In just months, greens raised three times as much money as the initiative’s supporters. As the Los Angeles Times put it, the environmentalists then “steamrolled” their foes with a $30 million campaign that deployed television ads featuring Hollywood celebrities, millions of mailings, and hundreds of thousands of robo-calls and text messages. One environmentalist described the coalition that crushed Prop. 23—comprising entertainers, hedge-fund honchos, technology billionaires, and the many organizations that they back—as “the new face of the environmental movement.” It wasn’t the face of the movement, though, but its pocketbook that won the battle.
Californians have long had a green reputation. But for many years, interest in the environment expressed itself in modest programs of nature conservation, or in efforts to mitigate pollution problems such as the smog that once choked the state’s cities. Even as they gained political power over the last 15 years or so, however, California greens have moved steadily leftward—touting, for example, zero-growth initiatives that make it crazily expensive to create jobs, housing, and infrastructure. Credit, or blame, for this development should go to a small circle of superrich Californians, who made their fortunes chiefly in so-called clean industries like technology and finance, and who have poured vast sums of money into the green cause. These wealthy individuals bankroll hundreds of environmental organizations and spend massively to pass green ballot initiatives and elect green-friendly pols. So influential are these West Coast players that a recent report from Columbia University’s Journalism School—otherwise sympathetic to environmentalism—described the concentration of green power as “troubling.” Even more disconcerting, these true believers also seem intent on promoting their aggressive form of environmentalism around the country. Call it the Californication of the green movement.
California’s concern for nature has moved far from its origins. Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the state’s extraordinary beauty helped give rise to the antecedents of modern environmentalism. John Muir embodied the conservationist and preservationist spirit of the era. A Scottish immigrant with a deep love for the outdoors, Muir helped to get Congress in 1890 to establish Yosemite National Park in the central eastern part of the state and in 1892 cofounded the Sierra Club as a means for Californians to enjoy—and protect—the magnificent Sierra Nevada mountain range. Several decades later, a young San Francisco resident, Ansel Adams, discovered Yosemite, joined the Sierra Club, and, with a Brownie camera that his father had given him, began photographing the California landscape. Adams’s romantic vistas captured mid-twentieth-century America’s imagination, and he used his artistic influence to reinforce Muir’s appeals to preserve Yosemite.
Struggles over the protection of undeveloped parts of California characterized the green movement for decades, until a new type of environmentalism began to emerge in the 1960s, amid growing concerns about the impact of pollution on air, water, and soil. The recognition that the burning of leaded gasoline generated urban smog prompted Californians—living in a state with the nation’s greatest number of automobiles—to lobby for better air quality. In 1967, Republican governor Ronald Reagan signed a law setting up an agency to pursue that end—the first such state environmental body in the country.
Drawing on new intellectual currents, Reagan’s successor, Democrat Jerry Brown, took office in 1975 proselytizing for a more radical form of environmentalism. In 1973, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss had characterized conservation programs and efforts to limit the harmful effects of pollution as mere “shallow ecology.” Næss instead propounded a sweeping “deep ecology,” which argued that every living thing had a right to its existence and which sought sharply to constrain human activity. That same year, the economist E. F. Schumacher authored the bestseller Small Is Beautiful, a book promoting a “sustainable economics” based on limits to growth. Brown’s governing agenda showed the influence of these ideas, including a reduced pace of government-sponsored infrastructure construction and other development. Some of the consequences of Brown’s left-green enthusiasms proved too much for Californians to swallow, however. In 1980, a Mediterranean fruit-fly infestation threatened the state’s crops, but the governor hesitated to attack the outbreak with pesticides. By the time Brown ordered spraying, the pest had spread so extensively that buyers were threatening to boycott the state’s produce. Brown’s popularity plummeted, short-circuiting his bid to win a U.S. Senate seat in 1982. For the next 16 years, his successors—Republicans George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson—often used their office to check the power of environmentalists, including those working for the government’s environmental bureaucracies, which had proliferated during the 1970s.
Despite forcing this temporary pushback, California’s greens would be emboldened by mutations in the state’s economy. For decades, two largely blue-collar industries—manufacturing and agriculture—had driven the state’s economic growth. But in the early 1960s, advances in semiconductors transformed the area around Stanford University and San Jose—once known as the Valley of the Heart’s Delight because of its agricultural riches—into the center of American technological innovation: Silicon Valley. With this dramatic shift came staggering affluence, not only from the technology being invented but also from burgeoning financial services, which took off in the Valley and nearby San Francisco to help fund the tech boom. A 2013 census report found that the greater San Jose/Santa Clara area, the heart of Silicon Valley, had the nation’s second-highest concentration of wealth, behind only Connecticut’s suburban bedroom communities, filled with high-paid Wall Streeters. The San Francisco peninsula, home to many working in the Valley’s tech industries, ranked as America’s fourth-wealthiest metro area.
