Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

A video highlighting the support of New York City public housing leaders for the NESE project illustrates the gap between ordinary New Yorkers and elites.

Too much of environmentalism is pure elitism. It elevates aesthetics above the needs of ordinary human beings for the basic necessities of human life. Look behind any large environmental organization today and you’ll find the richest people on earth funding attacks on the needs of ordinary people for the sake of scenery and the like.

It’s all clothed in the language of cleaning the air, protecting water and cuddling cute threatened animals. Or, it’s about “saving the planet,” as if the planet needed us. Nonetheless, it’s really about protecting the space around elites and promoting their special interests. Nothing so illustrates this as the debate over the Northeast Supply Enhancement or NESE project.

From the beginning of the modern environmental movement, when William Rockefeller bought out a chunk of the Adirondacks to make a wilderness, it’s been a project of creating space for the wealthy at the expense of ordinary folks and their needs. It continues, in fact, as Rockefeller descendants and groups spawned by the family (e.g., NRDC, 350.org) fight the NESE project. Money is thrown, hyperbole is spun and politicians demagogue; all orchestrated by these elites.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers living in public housing fight for heat.

Danny Barber understands what the NESE project is all about; bringing needed natural gas to the neglected parts of New York City—its public housing projects—that are still dealing with old malfunctioning oil boilers. While the multi-million dollar private apartments of the Rockefellers, their man Jay Halfon, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, et al., are all heated with new natural gas boilers, Danny’s friends and relatives wait and depend on extra blankets.

Why? Because there’s not enough gas and they’re low priority, apparently. The City has left them behind. The Governor has been too busy killing fracking and pipelines to appease the NRDC gang. The NRDC gang is more interested in, well, its own interests. That’s what environmentalism is today, the wealthy obsession with aesthetics in the guise of something serious. What’s really serious, though, is keeping your kids warm and that’s why Danny Barber is speaking out and why it’s so important to beat these rich bullies and get the NESE project approved.