Environmentalists continued to cry wolf when their doom-saying forecasts failed to materialize.

See Getting Overheated by James Huffman, WSJ. Mr. Huffman, dean emeritus of the Lewis & Clark Law School, is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of "Private Property and State Power" and "Private Property and the Constitution." Excerpts:

"Even so, environmentalists continued to cry wolf and were undeterred when their doom-saying forecasts of global famine and ecological ruin failed to materialize. The consensus collapsed, and the public grew skeptical, especially the people bearing the significant and often unintended costs of regulation. The acid-rain and environmental-racism scares, writes Mr. Allitt, "turned out to be evanescent." Yet companies had spent hundreds of millions on regulatory compliance. Many apple farmers were put out of business in 1989 by what proved to be baseless claims that the chemical Alar was causing cancer in schoolchildren. And numerous Northwest communities were devastated in the 1990s by a 90% cut in public-land timber harvests, which crippled the timber industry to save the Northern Spotted Owl.

Scientists later found that the greatest threat to this owl was its cousin, the Barred Owl. The environmental lobby seldom acknowledged its failures—or even its successes. Since 1990, there has been a 90% reduction in automobile emissions (and a 99% reduction since 1960), yet the car remains public enemy No. 1. Despite widespread recognition that ethanol has few if any environmental benefits, subsidies and mandated use persist—and food prices have been driven higher by the diversion of corn from food to fuel production."

"Mr. Allitt's account falls short in two important respects. He misunderstands "free-market environmentalists" and bundles them with the "Sagebrush Rebellion" of the late 1970s and the "Wise Use" movement of the late 1980s."

"Free-market environmentalists urged property-based solutions, spurring tradable emission permits, congestion pricing on roadways, volume-based trash-collection fees, transferable ocean-fisheries quotas, and numerous other market approaches. Even EPA administrators "eventually realized," in Mr. Allitt's words, "that it would be better to allow manufacturers to trade in the right to pollute.""

"Thanks to bipartisan legislation of the 1960s and '70s, which opened the courthouse doors to both sides of the environmental divide, scarcely a timber sale or urban-development plan moves forward without courts being asked to assess whether the developer or the government has properly weighed the pros and cons."