Here's some good news – via Bishop Hill– from America.
A Big Oil company – Chevron – is taking legal action against a group of
environmentalists for fraud and extortion: aka greenmail. The sums involved are
eyewatering: $19 billion. (That's billion, note, not million).
Chevron is suing lawyer Steven
Donziger and a number of activist environmental groups in a civil-racketeering
suit, claiming that his landmark $19 billion award against the oil company in
an Ecuadorean court was the product of a criminal conspiracy.
Ironically, much of the
company’s evidence comes from footage shot for “Crude,” an award-winning
pro-Donziger documentary that premiered with much publicity at the Sundance
Film Festival.
In an eight-year suit in
Ecuador, Donziger and his environmentalist allies argued that the oil company
had wantonly polluted the pristine Ecuadorean rainforest, creating vast areas
of poisoned land and causing huge spikes in cancer and other diseases.
The case drew vast media
coverage, with pieces in The New York Times, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker; a
sympathetic “60 Minutes” piece featured the poor and sickly Ecuadorean
peasants. And celebrities like Daryl Hannah embarked on some cancer tourism,
hugging natives before taking her Chevron-powered jet back to Hollywood.
An Ecuadorean court found
Chevron responsible for massive pollution and awarded the rainforest
communities (and lawyers) $19 billion. It was hailed as one of the most
significant environmental victories in decades.
It's fitting that Phelim McAleer should be reporting this
story because, of course, he visited similar territory in his documentary FrackNation.
Like Crude, Josh Fox's anti-fracking movie Gasland was feted at Sundance and
lauded by the usual Hollywood suspects. The fact that many of the claims made
in Gasland – and exposed by McAleer –were either exaggerated or untrue appeared
to bother the film's many admirers not one jot.
The polite explanation for what's going on here is
"noble cause corruption". We saw some of this in the Climategate
emails too: if you're sincerely of the opinion that the planet is in imminent
danger because of man's selfishness, greed and wanton depletion of scarce
resources then you'll consider any means justified in trying to prevent it.
You'll lie, you'll fiddle with the data, you'll bully, you'll smear, you'll
abandon the scientific method _ not because you're a bad person (or so you
persuade yourself) but because you're a person so good that you're even
prepared to sacrifice even your personal integrity for the higher cause of
saving the world from The Greatest Threat It Has Ever Known.
This is why I wrote Watermelons
– and also my forthcoming book The Little Green Book of Eco Fascism (US version published by Regnery;
UK version by Biteback). I
wanted to answer the question so commonly asked by people of a professedly
neutral persuasion on environmental issues: "But why would Greenpeace/the
scientists/Josh Fox/the WWF/NASA/the CRU/Friends Of The Earth/the British
Antarctic Survey/the BBC/the Guardian make this stuff up?"
What really troubles me about this question is not the
difficulty of answering it (as I show in Watermelons, the question is both easy
and tremendous fun to answer) but the cultural assumptions behind it. For many
decades – certainly since at least my Seventies childhood when I was trained,
as all kids are, to think of the WWF as the lovely panda-saving outfit which
really, really cares about the tigers and the snow leopards and the rest – we
have been brainwashed into accepting that anyone waving the flag for the cause
of "environmentalism" must perforce be on a higher moral plain and
therefore incapable of acting dishonestly or dishonourably.
It troubles me because those few of us who are prepared
to research and speak the truth on these issues face an uphill struggle in
getting our message across. This is why, unfortunately, the usual response of
big business when subjected to greenmail by environmentalist pressure groups is
to cave in and try to buy them off – in much the same way as the Anglo Saxons
did when they tried warding off the Vikings with Danegeld. Big business is risk
averse and can see no point going into battle with the one hand tied behind its
back, even when it has right on its side. Which, after all, is the public
instinctively more likely to trust: a dirty, great Big Oil company or an
apparently grassroots protest organisation comprising principled, skinny,
bearded vegan blokes and cute-looking activist girls who aren't in it for the
money but because they just want to make the world a better place?
What encourages me about the Chevron case – and indeed,
the success of Phelim McAleer's and Ann McIlhenny's pro-fracking movie – is
that the tide appears to be turning. Finally, business is standing up for the
right of business to do business; finally, people are starting to come round to
the idea that maybe all those Green activists out there aren't quite as
representative of our interests as they tell us on their posters and in their
press releases. Since when was it in our interests to have our energy bills
continually driven up by eco-taxes and renewable energy subsidies, not to
mention the legal costs organisations like Chevron have accrued trying to fight
off this $19 billion claim? How exactly is our economic welfare increased by
the $1 billion being squandered every day
combating the largely illusory problem of "climate change"? How, in
God's name, have the people of Brighton benefited in any way from voting Green?
As I note in Watermelons – and it really can't be said
often enough – the Greens (and that includes small "g" greens too)
are not our friends. I'm not saying they are intrinsically bad people; I know
that in many cases that they are motivated by the highest of ideals. The
problem is that the consequences of their noble lies and their warped ideology
invariably involve economic recession, higher prices, constrained freedom,
thwarted aspirations and widespread human suffering. I don't call those results
good. I'd say they're downright evil.
Editor's Note: Some emphasis added by me. RK
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