The Wrong Kind of Green - The Greanville Post

By pretending the broken system can work–and will work, in just a moment, after just one more Democratic win, or another, or another–the big green groups are preventing the appropriate response from concerned citizens, which is fury at the system itself. They are offering placebos to calm us down when they should be conducting and amplifying our anger at this betrayal of our safety by our politicians. The US climate bills are long-term plans: they lock us into a woefully inadequate schedule of carbon cuts all the way to 2050. So when green groups cheer them on, they are giving their approval to a path to destruction–and calling it progress.

Johann Hari | March 4, 2010 | [print_link]

Editor’s NoteWhy 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?Likewise, the Sierra Club was approached in 2008 by the makers of Clorox bleach, who said that if the Club endorsed their new range of “green” household cleaners, they would give it a percentage of the sales. The Club’s Corporate Accountability Committee said the deal created a blatant conflict of interest–but took it anyway. Executive director Carl Pope defended the move in an e-mail to members, in which he claimed that the organization had carried out a serious analysis of the cleaners to see if they were “truly superior.” But it hadn’t. The Club’s Toxics Committee co-chair, Jessica Frohman, said, “We never approved the product line.” Beyond asking a few questions, the committee had done nothing to confirm that the product line was greener than its competitors’ or good for the environment in any way.

For example, in 2009 the EPA moved to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which requires the agency to ensure that the levels of pollutants in the air are “compatible with human safety”–a change the Sierra Club supported. But the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the EPA to take this commitment seriously and do what the climate science says really is “compatible with human safety”: restore us to 350 ppm. Suckling explains, “I was amazed to discover the Sierra Club opposed us bitterly. They said it should not be done. In fact, they said that if we filed a lawsuit to make EPA do it, they would probably intervene on EPA’s side. They threw climate science out the window.” PHOTO: By injecting undiluted corporate values, Peter Seligmann, Conservation International (CI) CEO and a scion to a German-Jewish banking dinasty, has played a highly corrupting role in the environmental movement. His main rival for this dubious honor was the notorious J.D. Hair, head of National Wildlife Federation (NWF). (See note at bottom of article)

The green groups have become “the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, regardless of how pathetic the party’s position is,” Suckling says in despair. “They have no bottom line, no interest in scientifically defensible greenhouse gas emission limitations and no willingness to pressure the White House or Congress.”

If this argument sounds deceptively simple, that’s because it is deceptive. In practice, the REDD program is filled with holes large enough to toss a planet through.

PHOTO: Pig farming under inhumane factory farm conditions. Few people know that factory farms and meat production in general contribute 25% more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all forms of transportation combined.

And the news gets worse. Carbon dioxide pumped out of a coal power station (see left) stays in the atmosphere for millenniums–so to genuinely “offset” it, you have to guarantee that a forest will stand for the same amount of time. This would be like Julius Caesar in 44 BC making commitments about what Barack Obama will do today–and what some unimaginable world leader will do in 6010. In practice, we can’t even guarantee that the forests will still be standing in fifty years, given the very serious risk of runaway warming.

There is a broad rumble of anger across the grassroots environmental movement at this position. “At Copenhagen, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” says Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch, an organization that sides with indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin to preserve their land. “These groups are positioning themselves to be the middlemen in a carbon market. They are helping to set up, in effect, a global system of carbon laundering…that will give the impression of action, but no substance. You have to ask–are these conservation groups at all? They look much more like industry front groups to me.”

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/wrong-kind-green

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See below what one establishmentarian, Nixonite/Reaganite EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus has to say about another of his ilk, Jay Hair, the onetime chief of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), a guy who set records for personal self-indulgence and corruption.

Jay Hair leaves legacy of leadership

By WILLIAM D. RUCKELSHAUS
FORMER EPA ADMINISTRATOR under R. Nixon and Ronald Reagan

November 22, 2002

Last Friday, the nation and world lost a strong advocate for natural resource and environmental protection when Jay Hair left this earth — an earth he had dedicated his life to improving. There are few people about whom it can truly be said that the world is a better place because he lived in it. Jay is one of those. PHOTO: The late Jay Hair. He succumbed to bone marrow cancer in 2002.

Under Jay’s 14 years of stewardship, the National Wildlife Federation became our country’s largest environmental membership organization. He was also president of the World Conservation Union, the world’s leading institution for international conservation organizations. In 1995 Jay left the NWF and moved here with his wife, Leah, a Seattle native. While here, he served as an independent adviser to James Wolfensohn, president of The World Bank. Despite being a citizen of the world, he and Leah spent his last days in Seattle fighting the cancer that for five years had wracked his body but not his spirit.

We should honor Jay’s legacy by trying to learn from the qualities of leadership he possessed. What caused so many to recognize leadership qualities in Jay and move him to the front of their cherished organizations?

Yea, yea. Bla bla bla bla. A suitable obit from a power elite member to another. Too bad these gents did more to sink the ship than to steer it to a safe destination.