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It's doubtful that most environmentalists want to help the environment at all.
If we look at their actual actions and proposals, many are quite harmful to the environment. Therefore, environmentalism is best modeled as an aesthetic movement that prefers naturalistic forms to technological ones, and decay over growth.
There are two different things called "environmentalism" I've seen described as 'Green' and 'Gray'.
Green environmentalism is fighting development to save the forest or save the stream or save the neighborhood. It's judging how much harmony you have with the environment by counting the trees you can see from your front porch. It's "we tread lightly on the earth here". It's this tweet showing an aerial picture of Manhattan with the caption, "reminder that the people lecturing you about Earth Day today live here". It's a conviction that we will only be saved by not doing things.
Gray environmentalism is shutting up and multiplying, and is primarily concerned with climate change. It's judging your environmental impact by calculating your carbon footprint. It might be getting an electric car, but it's even more so moving to a city and getting an electric bike instead. It's heat pumps and rooftop solar and nuclear power if we can ever manage to get costs down. It's living near a park instead of having a huge backyard. It's this tweet, dunking on the above by pointing out that Manhattanites have some of the lowest per-capita carbon emissions in the country. It's a conviction that we will only be saved by doing things.
It would be nice if these groups could get along, but they really don't have that much in common.
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That’s like saying Nazis didn’t really want Germany to succeed. No, it was just an aesthetic movement that preferred jackboots to street wear?
Environmentalists also have the excuse of being a big tent. “Buy organic” doesn’t come from the same philosophy as “fuck coal plants,” but they both get called environmentalism because of that aesthetic overlap.
You should be more specific about which proposals you’ve got in mind.
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Cynically, every movement is just a cover for one of Scott's backscratching clubs.
However, this does not mean that the people in the movement are cynics who just pay lip service to the movement for status gain. The best way to pass for a true believer is to be a true believer. Humans are very capable of believing anything, while their subconsciousness keeps a careful lookout for their self-interest.
I think that most environmentalists want to help the environment, but often do not pick the solutions which offer the most bang for buck, and sometimes may be indeed net-negative given a specific set of goals.
The fact that their goals are actually tractable exposes them to criticism. I mean, nobody is giving the Christians shit about how raising kids is actually a terribly inefficient way to populate heaven, and the utility of running embryo-farms which could produce a baptized soul for a few dollars each would be much higher.
It is always easy to say 'person P took an action X which was not the best action towards goal G, thus by revealed preference P does not care about G', because modelling humans as a single rational actor is a gross oversimplification.
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I think environmentalists want to help the environment, although aesthetics is definitely a major aspect, but they are dumb and don't understand what actually helps the environment. A lot of the people who vote for rent control don't want there to be an under supply of housing; they just don't get how economics work
Some form of JJ's razor applies here; whether it is malice or ignorance in creating the same shitty outcomes is irrelevant, because you still have the shitty outcome. Given that everything is subject to vibes-based politics in 2024, the not do things/do more things dichotomy is actually more useful. Doing nothing is a vibe, desiring green spaces is a vibe, hating litter and people who litter is a vibe, lecturing people who aren't as green is a vibe. Learning about economics is very much not a vibe, or at least less of a vibe than throwing rocks at people in houses going "just stop charging so much for rent".
I used to be strongly in the do-more-things camp, but given that the western world somehow forgot how to make or do things and subcontracted it all to the lowest bidders they could find globally, I don't think they could do anything without fucking it up.
However, there's a particular form of optimism I subscribe to. I think people will do the right thing, after first exhausting every other option. I think we'll eventually science our way out of it, likely just before the whole species is collectively doomed and the surface becomes inhospitable to all life.
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I consider myself mostly a conservationist rather than an environmentalist simply because of my observations of how little most environmentalists understand either about how modern technology works or how the environment works.
On the modern technology side, a lot of what they want would make modern technologies unworkable. You simply cannot power an entire city with wind and solar — both of which are dependent on weather. If they were in favor of nuclear and hydroelectric power it’s plausible, but you need a lot of power to run a city. And the acres of wind turbines or solar panels needed for the task destroy the environment anyway.
On the environment side, most environmentalists I have talked to are urban or suburban dwellers, often quite well off. They don’t spend much time in rural areas or in nature— to the point where many of them didn’t seem to understand that carnivores eat other animals. They don’t understand that rotting things are normal.
I think the way to save the environment is through finding balance between what people need and what nature needs and doing so with technology.
There's definitely a massive disconnect among pretty much everyone between how much they sympathize with and care about any animal they see or hear about, even just in a book or video, and how much meat they eat. I'm not a vegan, but I'll whole heartedly admit to not actually consistently following my principles in real life, and I respect vegans who shape their lives around their beliefs.
I just accept that most people are not very self-aware.
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If they're suburban, they're not paying much attention (which is rather likely). Rotting things are really common (even if most of the rotting animals are roadkill). And literally in my own back yard (in northern New Jersey) I've seen a juvenile hawk take a squirrel, a cat take a chipmunk, and a fox teaching its kit how to hunt using a (presumably just-caught) rabbit as a prop.
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