[ExI] nimbys and corporate environmentalists

[spike]

~.corporate environmentalists and NIMBYs are not "real" environmentalists.

 

 

There are plenty of different and opposing brands of environmentalism.
Discounting for the moment the corporate environmental hired guns and the
NIMBYs, restricting our discussion to bona fide tree sitting bunny hugging
greens, even there we have plenty of opposing camps.  For instance, most of
the green crowd will acknowledge that we as a species really do need to
generate power, lots of it, just to survive in our current configuration.
That immediately fractures the remaining community.  Are they bird huggers
or tortoise huggers?  This would determine if they are in the anti-wind
crowd or the anti-solar crowd, which fight each other.  Perhaps they are in
the minority camp that recognizes nuclear power is relatively clean but does
risk creating an enormous radioactive wildlife preserve.  

 

The courts never ask what the plaintiff proposes as an alternative means of
generating power.

 

Interesting side note: my friend's PV installation in Oregon was put on hold
by the threat of environmentalists seizing a piece of ground he was going to
use as a water holding area, pumping water to there during peak solar,
draining it off at night onto crops.  He argued that wildlife can use the
waterhole while it exists, which would benefit wildlife.  On the contrary,
they argued, the existence of a water hole in the desert would cause certain
migrating foul to get in the habit of stopping by regularly, causing them
perhaps to overbreed, disrupting natural migrations and so forth.  Even if
they grant that there may be *more* birds, every time there is a string of
cloudy days, their waterhole disappears.  So they risk being less
comfortable.  Better the birds are never hatched than to perish of thirst in
a desert.  The be-kind-to-animals subset has stalled the PV effort.  

 

There is a segment of the green crowd which has recognized that all known
forms of power generation are environmentally destructive or risky in some
way, so they propose that we return to some pre-industrial pre technology
existence.  They don't seem to recognize that humanity's current population
is waaay beyond the environmental carrying capacity in many if not most
places on this planet.  When it comes right down to choosing who must die to
create this natural green utopia, these same environmentalists never seem to
select themselves or their own families.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

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