Could Global Warming Lead to an Environmental Civil War?

[H2FC]

Yes it could and here's why----

This is a very interesting article that raises some serious questions concerning the extent and power the self-serving wealthy fossil fuel polluters have and are willing to expend to silence the truth of MMGW.


The Wrong Kind of Green

By Johann Hari


March 4, 2010


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?

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 [abandon it] six months ago." I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, "The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left."

While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path--one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation

Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair--president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995--was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.

Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world's pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilizing the climate--the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn't make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and in return his organization and others, like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gave them awards for "environmental stewardship."

Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as valuable "reputation insurance": every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with "charitable" donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation. At first, this behavior scandalized the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sellout and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled--so they, too, started to take the checks.

Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for Conservation International in 2006. She told me, "About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organization's media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country.... But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organization, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. You weren't supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were 'helping' us, and that was it."

She soon began to see--as she explains in her whistleblowing book Green Inc.--how this behavior has pervaded almost all the mainstream green organizations. They take money, and in turn they offer praise, even when the money comes from the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, when it was revealed that many of IKEA's dining room sets were made from trees ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund leapt to the company's defense, saying--wrongly--that IKEA "can never guarantee" this won't happen. Is it a coincidence that WWF is a "marketing partner" with IKEA, and takes cash from the company?

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.

The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the behavior of the corporations. But as these stories show, the pressure often flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core. As MacDonald says, "Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them."

It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International's human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous--yet it is now taken for granted.

This pattern was bad enough when it affected only a lousy household cleaning spray, or a single rare forest. But today, the stakes are unimaginably higher. We are living through a brief window of time in which we can still prevent runaway global warming. We have emitted so many warming gases into the atmosphere that the world's climate scientists say we are close to the climate's "point of no return." Up to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, all sorts of terrible things happen--we lose the islands of the South Pacific, we set in train the loss of much of Florida and Bangladesh, terrible drought ravages central Africa--but if we stop the emissions of warming gases, we at least have a fifty-fifty chance of stabilizing the climate at this higher level. This is already an extraordinary gamble with human safety, and many climate scientists say we need to aim considerably lower: 1.5 degrees or less.

Beyond 2 degrees, the chances of any stabilization at the hotter level begin to vanish, because the earth's natural processes begin to break down. The huge amounts of methane stored in the Arctic permafrost are belched into the atmosphere, causing more warming. The moist rainforests begin to dry out and burn down, releasing all the carbon they store into the air, and causing more warming. These are "tipping points": after them, we can't go back to the climate in which civilization evolved.

So in an age of global warming, the old idea of conservation--that you preserve one rolling patch of land, alone and inviolate--makes no sense. If the biosphere is collapsing all around you, you can't ring-fence one lush stretch of greenery and protect it: it too will die.

NOTE...this is only part 1 of a 4 part article......please go here to read the entire story.

[Gerry]

I wont get into an environmental civil war, but the next hottest commodity may be water.

And there are many people who claim that Ted Turner is betting on it.

Ted Turner is buying and has amassed millions of acres in the midwest and continues to do so.

His people say he's just a dedicated rancher and loves nature.

But all these tracts are along and among the underground aquifer.

This has upset many local ranchers and people in this region as they are under the belief that Ted Turner could pretty much control the entire watershed and distribution of the midwest when water starts to run scarce.

[Creature]

I would just like to congratulate h2 on the new sun avatar, that one makes a lot more sense!

[H2FC]

I would just like to congratulate h2 on the new sun avatar, that one makes a lot more sense!

Thank you....I think it adds a more positive outlook to the 'inconvenient' truth of GW.

I hope you read that article. It has some very important and interesting info on the issue whether you believe GW is caused by mankind or not. I think we'll be hearing a lot more about this in the near future, maybe even a movie and a TV documentary.

[south]

I would just like to congratulate h2 on the new sun avatar, that one makes a lot more sense!

Indeed. Quite fitting.

---------- Post added at 08:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:29 PM ----------

I wont get into an environmental civil war, but the next hottest commodity may be water.

.

Yup. Got a few hectares myself. Been expecting it for a while.

[H2FC]

I wont get into an environmental civil war, but the next hottest commodity may be water.

And there are many people who claim that Ted Turner is betting on it.

Ted Turner is buying and has amassed millions of acres in the midwest and continues to do so.

His people say he's just a dedicated rancher and loves nature.

But all these tracts are along and among the underground aquifer.

This has upset many local ranchers and people in this region as they are under the belief that Ted Turner could pretty much control the entire watershed and distribution of the midwest when water starts to run scarce.

I'm convinced TT is in for the money, but he's a business man and why shouldn't he be? Those who have the foresight to see what coming and position themselves to benefit legally earn their profits. I believe Turner is already the largest private landowner in the US.

The way I see it is maybe if we have enough wealth produced from benefitting from a clean green economy it will help to level the playing field and offset the gigantic influence the greedy fossil fuel barons now have. I'm not sure about Ted Turner but I'm thinking more of those like T. Boone Pickens who advocates using windmills for energy and natural gas for big rig trucks and Richard Branson and his Virgin Airlines who has sworn to fight MMGW along with many other billionaries who have also joined the fight. Not sure but I think TT is included in that group.

[Gerry]

Yup. Got a few hectares myself. Been expecting it for a while.

I was born in Waterville, parents from Bangor.

I have not been up that way in many years.

But owe it to myself to get back up there.

---------- Post added at 10:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:49 PM ----------

I'm convinced TT is in for the money, but he's a business man and why shouldn't he be? Those who have the foresight to see what coming and position themselves to benefit legally earn their profits. I believe Turner is already the largest private landowner in the US.

Yes, he is the largest private landowner in the US.

Initially, people thought he just wanted to be a mega-rancher.

I think he has been at it (buying up land over the aquifer) for well over a decade.

Then somebody started to connect the dots (and the plots).

[bobovia]

Houston, I am venting something into space. It's obviously a gas of some sort. It has to be... methane!

[000]

This is a very interesting article that raises some serious questions concerning the extent and power the self-serving wealthy fossil fuel polluters have and are willing to expend to silence the truth of MMGW.

Thanks for the link. No surprise here, ethical shortfalls and corruption stain all areas of human endeavor. Your opening statement suggests that you align with the uncompromising direct action environmental movement, not the branch that accepts fossil fuel money. From your link: "Direct-action protesters have physically blocked coal trains and new airport runways for the past five years--and as a result, airport runway projects that looked certain are falling by the wayside..." More here about anticapitalist protesters and environmental activists against a third runway at Heathrow.

In post #6 you compliment Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson for swearing to fight MMGW. Branson argues in a 30-June-2008 Times guest column that the economic and environmental case for a third runway at Heathrow is overwhelming.

You've given us reason to believe that you support both sides of the Heathrow issue. Please clarify, thanks.

[Creature]

I hope you read that article. It has some very important and interesting info on the issue whether you believe GW is caused by mankind or not

I'm wondering if you've read the article yourself. It's the type of article a skeptic would post to highlight the conflict of interest and the real motives within the alarmist movement......

The article highlights the corruption and profiteering within the Green organizations, where some green campaign groups appear to have morphed into the paid PR arm of global fuel companies. The Greens apparently favor Subnational regulation over the more effective National regulation of rainforest, purely in the interest of profit. The article shows how once again it's really all about the money, Green as in money ('The Wrong Kind Of Green'), profit before planet.

Presumably national regulation and law would stop the destruction of a rainforest (or the building of a runway), and perhaps that can be arranged at government level with the stroke of a pen.

[Creature]

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 [abandon it] six months ago."

So ground level to chimney level is what, 9 feet minimum? Is he saying 'the rising ocean' has risen by at least 9 feet?

[jasdon11]

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 [abandon it] six months ago." I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, "The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left."

The average intellectually challenged mmgw cheerleader, reads something like this and say's to themself (and anyone else that'll listen...) 'yup, that's that mmgw causing that...!'. Anyone with a brain thinks; 'coastlines are constantly changing - always have been, glaciers have been melting for tens of thousands of years, draughts are nothing new, where did all those deserts come from...'.

If the Earth warms up, it warms up - if it cools down, it cools down. There is nadda we can do about it any more than we could stop earthquakes from happening. It's laughable to think we can. All we can do is adapt if neccessary; we are temporary guests here, not masters.

The gist of the article H2, is basically reiterating what some of us have been telling you - follow the money. Seems as though the joke is firmly on you and the rest of the mmgw believers who are in it just for 'the cause'.

[H2FC]

I'm wondering if you've read the article yourself. It's the type of article a skeptic would post to highlight the conflict of interest and the real motives within the alarmist movement......

The article highlights the corruption and profiteering within the Green organizations, where some green campaign groups appear to have morphed into the paid PR arm of global fuel companies. The Greens apparently favor Subnational regulation over the more effective National regulation of rainforest, purely in the interest of profit. The article shows how once again it's really all about the money, Green as in money ('The Wrong Kind Of Green'), profit before planet.

Presumably national regulation and law would stop the destruction of a rainforest (or the building of a runway), and perhaps that can be arranged at government level with the stroke of a pen.

Yes, I have read the article completely and yes, I realize that some skeptics may view it as you describe but I see it from a firm MMGW believer's point of view.

I know greed and corruption is not limited to the fossil fuel barons and thats why I found this article so revealing and interesting. Inspite of greed and corruption on both sides the science that supports the truth of MMGW is still real.

The likelihood of an environmental civil war is very real in my opinion unless the fossil fuel industry yields to the truth of MMGW and supports a clean energy environment. Greed on both sides does not change the truth and the believers will never give up the fight as long as tens of millions tons of co2 is being dumped into our atmosphere daily. When our climates change to the extent that worldwide catastrophes are being seen on a regular basis there will be a strong demand from the great majority to abandon fossil fuels.

When that happens, and I think most of us will see it within our life times, changes will be made or civil wars will begin. The problem is if we wait till then the cost will be so high it could bankrupt the whole world's economy.

---------- Post added at 09:43 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:07 AM ----------

In post #6 you compliment Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson for swearing to fight MMGW. Branson argues in a 30-June-2008 Times guest column that the economic and environmental case for a third runway at Heathrow is overwhelming.

You've given us reason to believe that you support both sides of the Heathrow issue. Please clarify, thanks.

I read the article Branson wrote and I believe he made some very valid points in support of a third runway. However, I don't support all of Branson's actions or opinions but suffice to say I support any efforts he or anyone else makes to combat the ever growing potential climate change castastrophes that are likely from the continued use of fossil fuels for energy.

I really don't know why you've chosen this Branson/Heathrow issue to expand on.

---------- Post added at 09:46 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:43 AM ----------

So ground level to chimney level is what, 9 feet minimum? Is he saying 'the rising ocean' has risen by at least 9 feet?

No, I believe the house was most likely located in a low lying area.

[Gerry]

Branson argues in a 30-June-2008 Times guest column that the economic and environmental case for a third runway at Heathrow is overwhelming.

Is that for his intergalatic flights or does he still have plans on the table for his own terminal for that?

[Creature]

I know greed and corruption is not limited to the fossil fuel barons and thats why I found this article so revealing and interesting. Inspite of greed and corruption on both sides the science that supports the truth of MMGW is still real.

Sadly you might be gradually giving up your freedom to such corruption. The present administration may be well meaning (cough) but who knows what the next lot might do with their various new powers. Even if you genuinely believe in the theory of mmgw, the fact is that it could be used as an excuse to screw you and a few other billion humans

[000]

I really don't know why you've chosen this Branson/Heathrow issue to expand on.

To illustrate a germane specific conflict within the environmental movement and to see if you would take a firm stand on one side or sit on the fence.

Is that for his intergalatic flights or does he still have plans on the table for his own terminal for that?

The 3rd runway at Heathrow would be for conventional traffic, not space flight. Virgin Galactic plans to operate space flights at a new spaceport in New Mexico.

[Gerry]

The 3rd runway at Heathrow would be for conventional traffic, not space flight. Virgin Galactic plans to operate space flights at a new spaceport in New Mexico.

I was aware of that proposed facility. Just curious if he had other plans for other space ports.

I have to hand it to him as being a visionary and a clever promoter...whether promoting himself or a specific product or idea.

[jasdon11]

I was aware of that proposed facility. Just curious if he had other plans for other space ports.

I have to hand it to him as being a visionary and a clever promoter...whether promoting himself or a specific product or idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzuxEyeqri0

[DomainsInc]

If the Earth warms up, it warms up - if it cools down, it cools down. There is nadda we can do about it any more than we could stop earthquakes from happening. It's laughable to think we can. All we can do is adapt if neccessary; we are temporary guests here, not masters.

Regardless if humans are the cause of global warming, if it exists at all or not, we should still be doing everything we possibly can to reduce our impact on this world. That is something everyone should be able to agree on.

[jasdon11]

Regardless if humans are the cause of global warming, if it exists at all or not, we should still be doing everything we possibly can to reduce our impact on this world. That is something everyone should be able to agree on.

We should be doing something, regardless?

Feel free to go and do whtever you like (regardless of whether there is any point as you put it) I'm not stopping you, but don't try and convince others to follow you...especially with an argument like the one you've presented here.