US
Environmentalists Now Hate All Construction, Even ‘Green’ Projects
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Environmental groups are turning against all new construction, even if it’s for “green” goals, as shown by a California Supreme Court Case published Wednesday.
The case centers around the Center For Biological Diversity (CBD) suing the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to prevent a relatively “green” housing development from being built without an extensive analysis of all potential environmental impacts. The analysis CBD wants would have delayed the project for years and created millions of dollars in costs. The California Supreme Court granted CBD a partial victory.
“Given the glacial pace of litigation, this will easily take years…. [d]elay can become its own reward for [environmentalist] project opponents,” says Ming Chin, a California Supreme Court justice who dissented on the case.
Environmental groups like CBD have a long history of pursuing legal action against even “green” development, like solar farms which encroach on animal habitats and kill tens of thousands of birds.
To reach the scale at which they can make a meaningful contribution to global energy demand, green sources of energy like solar power require enormous amounts of land, according to academic analyses. Such levels of new construction and development will likely be opposed by environmental groups.
Environmentalists are already concerned about how solar panels and the conventional batteries required to “back them up” use materials like cobalt, nickel, molybdenum, or highly purified silicon in their construction. All of these materials must be mined, refined, and manufactured. Additionally, the industrial processes required to build solar panels take a lot of energy as well and has the potential to contaminate the environment.
Environmental groups have a long history of opposing anything new. The best example of this phenomenon is how mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club turned on natural gas.
Natural gas has a much smaller carbon footprint than coal and produces far fewer air pollutants, according to scientists. Sierra Club heavily supported natural gas and accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry between 2007 and 2010. In 2012, The Sierra Club completely changed its position when natural gas suddenly became a viable energy source due to fracking. The organization now vehemently opposes gas and now runs a “Beyond Gas” campaign.
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