Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Shortsighted environmentalism endangers humanity

With these two recent posts (here and here), Harrison Price over at Just Politics got me thinking about the damage that environmental groups are clearly responsible for and their knack to weasel out of complicity with skillful deflection when things go terribly wrong. Harrison reminds us of how enviro's in Alaska prevented an oil pipeline to be built overland to carry the oil that had to be shipped out by tanker; shipping oil by tanker is far more riskier than transporting it over pipelines--the Exxon Valdez disaster was ample proof of this.

But this also reminded me of hurricane Katrina. While the media focused on characterizing G.W. Bush as an uncaring bumbling jerk, little was brought to light about why the city of New Orleans flooded as easily as it did. Well, to make a long story short, environmentalists blocked the building of emergency floodgates that would have prevented a Katrina-like storm surge from causing the horrible damage. (Read the L.A. Times article on this here.) But somehow, the environmentalist groups that were responsible for putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in harm's way got little notice. This is a testament to the power of their emotional message while having powerful friends in politics and media.

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