The Wrong Kind of Green

. more: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hari


Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

Democracy Now : Nation writer Johann Hari discusses his recent article in which conservation groups have sided with big-time polluters instead of real science.

Johann Hari: How conservation groups are bargaining away our future.

..At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.

I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, "Do you see that chimney sticking up? That's where my house was... I had to six months ago." I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea.

Corporations buy off government, preventing any meaningful environmental legislation or regulation. Government espouses the line that corporations function best when policing themselves, following the dictates of free market fundamentalism.

NGOs like CI TNC become de facto regulatory authorities in the absence of any meaningful governmental oversight.

Corporations buy off NGOs.

Very few people are happy with these big environmental NGOs. They need new leaders with new visions.

When describing myself, as the whole "environmental" movement has been watered down and bee taken over by Corporations and various government agencies.

The EPA has entire rooms full of policies that are designed to discourage and make illegal those Americans who are formulating their own brew of environmentally safe fuels.

If you're a Corporation and you decide to throw a noxious carcinogen like MTBE into gasoline, that will get approved. But be some little car enthusiast who is burning two day old donuts into a clean alcohol to ride around in, and the EPA will be hauling you off to jail.