Wonderful term.
In honor of "Earth Hour" we kept drilling. No riots, no mayhem, just making hole.
Ecochondriacs maybe,
but the major driving motivation is “to matter”.
Their lives are empty, their minds have taken them down the path of materialism (ie, the Carl Sagan religion of Cosmos), and they see nothing, they see nihilism. Their lives don’t matter a bit in this worldview, so “saving the erf” is their way of mattering in the big scheme.
Also, for a lot of leftists, it gives them the sense of superiority they so desperately seek to affirm. They’re “better than you” because they care about the erf and you don’t.