Thursday 26 April 2012

The enviro-fundamentalist Sierra Club wants to stop the American shale gas revolution




The Sierra Club is doing its best in order to prevent Americans from enjoying the benefits of the shale gas revolution - the best thing that has happened to the US economy in decades:



Exporting natural gas from the United States is a "dirty and dangerous" game that puts people at risk, environmental group Sierra Club said.
The Sierra Club said it filed a formal protest to the U.S. Department of Energy challenging a proposal to export natural gas from a facility on Lake Charles in Louisiana.
"Exporting natural gas is dirty and dangerous, and puts American families at risk," Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement. "The Sierra Club's action today follows a series of filings in an ongoing effort to protect families from the natural gas industry's dirty and dangerous operating practices."
Last week, the Sierra Club filed a 51-page protest with the Energy Department following a decision to authorize liquefied natural gas exports from a terminal in Sabine Pass, La.

Read the entire article here

What many people do not know, is that The Sierra Club and other smilar environmentalist groups in reality represent an ideology for the protection of privilege: 



When stripped of its homilies about the beauties of the nature and virtues of a "sustainable" economy, environmentalism is basically an ideology for the protection of privilege. It works in favor of those who feel satisfied with current levels of consumption and against those who are trying to achieve greater levels of prosperity. As Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus expressed it in their landmark essay, "The Death of Environmentalism":
Environmentalists… aim to short-circuit democratic values by establishing Nature… as the ultimate authority that human societies must obey. And they insist that humanity's future is a zero-sum proposition -- that there is only so much prosperity, material comfort and modernity to go around. If too many people desire such things, we will all be ruined. We, of course, meaning those of us who have already achieved prosperity, material comfort and modernity.
Environmentalists make a living going around stirring up local opposition to all manner of development -- drilling for oil, harvesting forests, building power plants. The premise is always that this is the "wrong place" for such development and that whatever needs to be done is better taken care of somewhere else. What never gets noticed is that environmentalists are also doing the same thing in the next valley and the one after that and the sum of all this is that nothing gets done. They urge people to "think globally, act locally," but what this means in practice is professing some grand support for a "sustainable" economy built on "renewable" technologies while opposing the same things at the local level.

Read the entire article here

1 comment:

A K Haart said...

"It works in favor of those who feel satisfied with current levels of consumption and against those who are trying to achieve greater levels of prosperity."

That's a good quote and very true.