What's a "green job"? It's not the job that's green, since it's regular old manufacturing and construction that are as "ungreen" as ever -- but building something that is believed will ultimately help reduce human impact on the earth (without our having to give anything up).
If such jobs involve installing electricity-generating plants in, say, delicate ecosystems where even much lighter development is not allowed, they can not be called "green". Environmentalists and conservationists recognize that such construction programs do not justify destroying wildlife habitat or wrecking the landscape. That in fact, destroying the landscape in the name of saving it just doesn't wash.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on the other hand, thinks it has found a powerful cudgel to use against protective regulation: "green jobs"! Like tiresome children, any expression of concern -- for wetlands and birds, bats, habitat degradation and fragmentation, noise, enjoyment of one's property, etc. -- is shouted down with NIMBY! They've even dedicated a web site to chronicle the shameful parade of citizens fighting to protect the land and their health against heedless energy development.
The insult, however, is that so many environmental groups join with the Chamber in their denunciations in service of industry instead of doing the job of defending nature.
And the insult is compounded by politicians who ignore their constituents' concerns -- particularly those whose lives are directly affected by such construction programs -- and hide behind the "green" mantle that industry has so courteously stitched together for them.
Green jobs (everything I support) good! NIMBY (everything you support) bad!
Age of Stupid, indeed.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism
