Money quote right there. I'd probably be tempted to say this is because simply asking people to reduce their consumption does not work. People ignore you because there's no reward for the price of inconvenience it would introduce into their lives. Like it or not, a dollar more on the pump or an automatic 10% increase in the efficiency of a car or light bulb goes a much longer way than criticizing people's behavior all day. So you can look at this as a moralist's problem, an economist's problem, a scientists's or engineer's problem, but for some reason, the author holds no hope in any...I'm unsure if I agree or not with that defeatist sentiment...The Green Revolution is trumpeted by progressives as having supposedly “fed a billion people” who would otherwise have starved. And maybe it did; but then we had to keep feeding them—or should I say us?—and our children. In the meantime it had been discovered that the pesticides and herbicides were killing off vast swaths of wildlife, and the high-yield monoculture crops were wrecking both the health of the soil and the crop diversity, which in previous centuries had helped prevent the spread of disease and reduced the likelihood of crop failure.
The neo-environmentalists have a great advantage over the old greens, with their threatening talk about limits to growth, behavior change, and other such against-the-grain stuff: they are telling this civilization what it wants to hear. What it wants to hear is that the progress trap in which our civilization is caught can be escaped from by inflating a green tech bubble on which we can sail merrily into the future, happy as gods and equally in control.