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I can't say I've ever seen "save the whales" used pejoratively.
In the 80's and 90's there was strong undercurrent that activism couldn't actually change anything. It was the end of history, all outcomes are and always were inevitable, voting with dollars was the only vote that really matters. Hippy punching was in it's full flower. Environmentalism was seen as self indulgent and meaningless. "Save the whales," was spit out as a sort of, 'go waste someone else's time,' dismissal.
The 4th Dilbert collection from 94' was Shave the Whales, which already struck me as a passe gesture at hippy punching at the time, though I couldn't tell if Scott Adams was engaging in hippy punching or mocking the hippy punchers.
Seeing how Scott Adams seems to have fallen off the deep end of the far right in recent years, I would have to say it's likely the former.
Scott Adams was always weird, but without twitter, people just interpreted his work in a way favorable to themselves. Twitter let the world see an unfiltered version of himself. If you go digging into his recounts of his early life, he was always a smug little boy with a superiority complex.
I definitely did, maybe think of it in context like a sneering "don't you have some whales to save?" kind of way.
Same, similar context to 'bleeding hearts' (edit: just reread the post and saw this was already mentioned)