It's not all debating whether Climate Change and Peak Oil are real or not.
What environmental atrocities are bothering you?
What atrocious environmentalists are bothering you?
I'm going to start with two things. First Carbon Credits and trading. I'm not incredibly well informed on this and have heard good things, like analysis that indicates reduction in carbon, and bad, like examples indicating that the reductions aren't real. This strategy is certainly something that big polluters are less resistant to than direct regulation, which makes me think it's a much easier system for them to game.
Things like Making and destroying refrigerants just for the credits, causing and increase in greenhouse gases in exchange for allowing carbon production:
Quote:
European companies have been overpaying Chinese companies more than 70 times the cost to eliminate a potent greenhouse gas — triflouromethane, or hfc 23, a byproduct of manufacturing a refrigerant that has been banned in developed countries and is being phased out in developing ones.
In order to offset their own greenhouse gases, companies and utilities in Europe that are subject to the emission limits of the Kyoto Protocol have been paying vastly inflated prices to Chinese companies to destroy hfc 23, and in the process have been providing the Chinese government with hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to compete against Europe’s own “green” industries.
Quote:
And in an odd twist, the incentives offered through the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) also appear to be stimulating production of an ozone-depleting refrigerant gas that has been landing in the U.S. black market. Investigations by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have led to the conviction of several smugglers who have illegally imported the ozone-depleting refrigerant, hcfc 22, into the U.S. for sale to trucking companies, supermarkets, automotive supply shops, and other large-scale users of refrigerant gases. The illegal refrigerant is significantly cheaper than non-ozone-depleting refrigerants permitted in the U.S., a price discrepancy triggered partially by the large overpayments to Chinese firms that have led to an ample supply of hcfc 22 on the international black market.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/pervers...to_china/2350/
Or things like Timber companies buying land from peasants in Africa to plant and harvest trees, get lots of money in carbon credits, and evicting thousands of people from their homelands.
In Uganda:
Quote:
Over 22,000 peasants with land titles were violently evicted from the Mubende and Kiboga districts in Uganda to make way for the UK-based New Forests Company to plant trees, to earn carbon credits and, ultimately, to sell the timber.
Well, there's a lot more. You should just read the link. Includes carbon slavery. Basically, the developed world, which produces the pollution, giving giant companies incentive to colonize the poorest places in the world as part of a scam which often increases carbon production by forcing 4th worlders and subsistence farmers into slums and refugee camps.
http://www.no-redd-africa.org/index....on-colonialism
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And on another subject
It's nice that we had a clean water act that did things like prevent rivers from continuing to catch fire in the US. Too bad Dick Cheney, former Halliburton executive, Halliburton - the company that invented fracking, inserted into the 2005 energy bill provisions which prevent the EPA from regulating fracking.
Those provisions, The Halliburton Loophole, recently supported again by the Senate.
http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060012514
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Closing with a picture. Sorry it's so big, but it's the biggest industrial project on earth. This is almost twice as big as the city of San Francisco. The Alberta Tar Sands.