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Climate and environmental concern were dismissed and attacked for decades.

Reading the article it seems that the author is opining on Climate Communication, but that is not his main subject.

They pick a headline from climate activists “famines in Europe in 20 years” as an example of hyperbole, but “Half of the Great Barrier Reef Is Dead” is a headline.

Sure, extreme claims will hurt credibility when they don’t pan out. But does this really matter when solid climate science has already been “debunked” and dismissed by a range of Murdochian talking heads and cranks?

A necessary amount of emotional energy is needed for momentum to shift in stories. Even more energy is needed when someone is manipulating climate change coordination. Large scale communication for a movement is simple and designed for ease of repetition and emotional resonance.

This is what it looks like when you have enough pressure in the pot to counteract suppression.

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> Climate and environmental concern were dismissed and attacked for decades.

Part of the reason is that the "green" movement has a long history of promoting de-industrialization and generally opposing human flourishing, using "nature" as a type of proxy for this anti-human, anti-development sentiment. Some examples:

* rigid opposition to nuclear power, which continues until the present. We could have moved completely off fossil fuels for electricity production if it were not for the green movement.

* the "environmental" regulations pushed through by the green movement were written with the aim of making development more expensive, resulting in the high price of housing as developers are sued into oblivion in disputations over environmental impact reports.

* the green movement is responsible for our disastrous forest management practices, resulting in thousands of deaths and massive ecological destruction by making it prohibitively expensive to harvest timber from federal lands. See, e.g. https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article25495772...

* prominent leaders in the green movement have gone on record wishing for mass culling of humanity in order to "save the planet". The most notorious example would be Prince Phillip, fantasizing that he would be reincarnated as a virus to wipe out millions of people in order to help the environment. See, e.g. https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/308...

* Absurd crusades such as trying to ban plastic straws, plastic grocery bags, or promoting wasteful recycling programs that are not backed by any rational basis and cause more harm than good.

* Opposition to modern agricultural practices such as use of fertilizer, GMO crops, etc, that allow billions of people to eat in the name of a kind of unscientific primitive romanticism.

* The methods of various "pro environment" groups involving tactics such as domestic terrorism (including murder) to blocking highways as privileged activists lie down in public spaces and sob to "save the planet" turn off a lot of people and cause them to discount what environmentalists have to say.

> Sure, extreme claims will hurt credibility when they don’t pan out.

This has already happened. There really doesn't seem to be much in the way of quality control when it comes to wild claims being made, which leads people to discount all the claims.

Is there motive behind this comment other than to smear "the green movement" with a wall of text inherently hard to argue against in its massive entirety?

"The green movement" is in fact a vast multitude of movements, people and ideas, of which several would probably shoot each other on sight if given the chance. The reason it was opposed is certainly not that it is exceedingly bloodthirsty, inhumane or counter-productive.

Like, not so long ago mining companies deemed it appropriate to mount a machine gun on a rail and slowly roll through their workers camp as a response to a worker's strike and the US government god damn firebombed an apartment block to silence two dozens lefties. But somehow, a handful assassinations by individual radicals are responsible for "rightful opposition" of this supposed single green movement? We don't discount Computer Science even though von Neuman was a fanatic intent on nuclear eradication of Japanese civilians, yet we should discount this green movement because a B-promi said idiotioc things in a lifestyle magazine?

"The green movement" might not have the right idea to solve humanities problem and one may reasonably be opposed to some or even most of "their" ideas and plans, sure. But to say that this oppositions rightfully stems from the greens all being mean and dumb is facetious and bad faith.

> Is there motive behind this comment other than to smear "the green movement" with a wall of text inherently hard to argue against in its massive entirety?

This is a strange way of saying "Yes, you make a lot of good points I can't argue against, and you should feel bad for doing that." followed by a no true scottsman fallacy.

Yes, the green movement is not perfectly homogeneous and of course they are not all the radical bomb throwing types, but they protect and defend those radical groups and don't police their own movement to try to deradicalize it or to make it more scientific.

You don't see is greens condemning other greens for being too radical or insufficiently scientific. The condemnation only goes in one direction -- not being radical enough and not supporting unscientific agendas (anti-nuclear, anti-logging, pro-recycling, plastic straw bans, etc).

What a superb strawman museum you assembled here. Let's try and make sure we don't emit too much more greenhouse gases, or it might catch fire ;-)

Yes, these things eliminate people who are sympathetic to the core cause but in no way want to be associated with these actions.

How do the recycling schemes cause more harm than good?

Basically because once you get past recycling scrap metals you start consuming many more resources than you save, which forces municipal governments to subsidize the recycling operations, which becomes so expensive it threatens local budgets. Then the cities start paying China or Africa to take their trash to "recycle" and they end up shipping it overseas, consuming even more real resources when in reality much of that is just thrown away and disposed of in less safe ways than if it were to be put in local landfills in jurisdictions with stricter environmental rules. This is all to make people feel good about saving the planet.

Interestingly, this was already known in the 1990s, and the NYTimes science writer, John Tierney, wrote an article about how recycling is actually harmful for many of the items recycled, and that this has taken on a type of upper middle class religious ritual (https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...). No science article ever published by the times received so many death threats and angry letters as that article.

But things have gotten much worse since then, as demands for recycling increased and city budgets began to be eaten by the costs of subsidizing this. See https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-... for an update in 2015.

Then when China stopped accepting US trash, cities around the country began dumping recycling into landfills as they could no longer afford it. (https://fee.org/articles/america-finally-admits-recycling-do...).