A nice essay (from the editors at the left-centrist The New Republic) on the increasingly sychophantic alliance between the Dems and the Greens — and alliance that TNR argues is destroying the credibility of the environmental “movement”:

To listen to the Democrats — particularly those running for president — is to learn that the environment is in bad shape today and, with the smallest push, could be in disastrous shape tomorrow. In his much-noted Earth Day speech, for example, Al Gore warned, ‘There’s a movement afoot by polluters … to dismantle America’s capacity to limit the releases of dangerous waste products and poisonous emissions, threatening to take us back to the days when America’s rivers and lakes were dying, when skylines were some days not visible because of the smog, and when toxic waste threatened so many communities.’ Fortunately, this alarm is a false one. All forms of pollution in the United States — air, water, and toxic materials — have been declining for decades. Boston Harbor and the Hudson River, along with many other long-polluted bodies of water, show steadily improved quality. Los Angeles has set so many consecutive annual records for air cleanliness that smog has nearly vanished as a pressing political issue in California; toxic and ‘dangerous’ emissions are down by almost half in the last decade alone. Nor is there any serious proposal before Congress or the White House that would substantially undermine the laws responsible for this decline in pollution. Even if industry gets its way on laxer standards for old Midwest power plants (the most important current controversy), the effect would only be a slower reduction of pollution, not an increase. This doesn’t mean there’s no cause for environmental vigilance; but it does mean there’s no cause for hysteria.

And it means that the popular notion that the Bush administration has launched a wide-ranging assault on environmental regulation is simply wrong.

Hear that? Simply wrong.

But wait, there’s more:

Perhaps most importantly, reflexive bashing of Bush’s environmental policies is not only dishonest; it may actually hamper further environmental progress. Consider the Democratic ‘victory’ on ANWR. The nation needs to reduce its dependence on Persian Gulf oil. And while drilling in ANWR is no panacea, it could help, and it would almost certainly cause little environmental damage. Does this mean the Democrats should have supported ANWR drilling? Not necessarily. Rather it means they shouldn’t have let the environmental lobby bully them into making it non-negotiable.

Ah. Fresh air…

(Of course, TNR is backed by the shady Roger Hertog, whom The American Prospect asserts is attempting to give birth to a wide-ranging “velvet conservatism” (he also backs The New York Sun) — so feel free to write all this off as part of the vast “velvet wing conspiracy.” If it makes you feel better, I mean…

[related: James Glassman interviews The Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg for Capitalism Magazine. Link via Bob Ballard]