that activists often feel they need to start from a diminished, already-compromised position and level of expectation in order to accomplish anything. When you start out already defeated in spirit, it's pretty much inevitable you'll be defeated in action. how does the adage go, "most battles are won before they're fought"?

The results are then ordained - an anodyne rearguard action which at best delays the defeat, but which has already implicitly conceded it.

I just got an e-mail from the Sierra Club advertising a collaboration between Carl Pope and Boone Pickens trumpeting Boone's natural gas scam.
http://action.pickensplan.com/rally

That's a good example - they're so grateful that someone, anyone who's an erstwhile enemy nabob has paid any kind of lip service to renewables that they'll collaborate in the greenwash, that Boone really cares about wind and about the fatuous "energy independence" notion, and that the absurd idea we're going to keep the "happy motoring utopia"(Kunstler) going on compressed natural gas is anything more than a utopian haze itself, really intended to accomplish nothing but big profits for a few bigshots.

(Although, even as Pope hails Boone as a born-again activist, Boone's investors are evidently having second thoughts:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&refer ...

According to this, 15% of the investors in Boone's hedge fund may want their money back.

If the point of the Boone gambit is to capitalize on the meme that America is on the verge of a natural gas production renaissance on account of shale gas, then perhaps the reason investors are getting nervous is that cracks are appearing in this cornucopian projection, as discussed here:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46776)