Conservation Groups Align with World’s Worst Polluters

“Major environmental groups are coming under criticism from within their own ranks for taking positions that some say are antithetical to their stated missions of saving the planet. In the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the British journalist Johann Hari writes, “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…In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate.”

(From Democracy Now)  There is money in any issue in Washington, and global warming is no exception.  No wonder climate change legislation has morphed into “green jobs and energy” legislation.  John Kerry and others are working hard to pass a bill that will (likely) allow coal use to thrive and new oil to be drilled and lots of natural gas to be extracted and burned, at a very toxic cost.  Our Congress just doesn’t get it.  There should be a moratorium on taking any money from any fossil fuel industries, given what we are facing with global warming.  (Yet Nancy Pelosi herself is a big investor in natural gas, for example).  Climate change and global warming are the biggest issues humanity has ever faced, and governments are dropping the ball.  However, it’s not just governments being corrupted by corporate cash — it’s also the very “Green” groups we depend on for climate action and Congressional pressure!

Consider what we are facing already, according to Johann Hari, a columnist who wrote for The Nation — ‘The Wrong Kind of Green’:

“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.”

Flooding in Bangladesh

People don’t realize that flooding and other effects of climate change are already happening. That’s because the narrative, and the media, is focusing on human errors made in a few emails about some bad scientific practices at a little, obscure university that no one depends on for climate data anyway. We have other places where climate data is stored and gathered, including NASA, NOAA and places in Japan and Canada.  Who needs East Anglia.  The IPCC is now reviewing its practices of collecting data).  The real Climategate is that big fossil fuel companies continues to foul the process of coming up with [...]