You are right, what many companies are doing abroad is horrible and people have a right to protest that.
My criticism against environmental organizations are not really direct towards those situations. My criticism is about those same organizations stopping development right here in the West.
When green organizations stop mining operations here in Norway, that means we keep our prestine nature but somebody in a poor country has to suffer environmental destruction.
I think more mining operations should be done here in the West where there is a good oversight. Norway has strong rules to keep mining companies accountable and minimize damage to nature. We have government who cannot be bought off to look the other way. Thus in my view we have a certain obligation to do our part.
So I am with you. I don't want us to outsource our problems to poor countries. But in my view that is what may of these green movements are doing.
They are very strong here in the West which means they stop mining operations, wind turbines, solar panels, recycling operations over here, while poor countries end up doing it instead in a manner which is 10x more polutting because they typically lack the same kind of environmental organizations or those organizations are simply not as strong as over here.
I have argued this point with my brother e.g. many times. He really hates wind turbines. I say we should build them. He rants about how ugly they look, and how they destroy the beautifyl natural landscapes.
My counter point is that we in Norway got to do our part. More power production here means we can power a lot of industry such as aluminium smelting, which does not have to be done in other countries.
Instead we pump up oil offshore which does not affect our beautiful fjords and forests, then we ship that oil to other countries which burn that oil. The emissions from that oil shows up on their climate account, nor ours. We get to wash our hands and keep our beautiful nature and good looking statistics. To me this is cheating and not taking responsibilty.
But you cannot say that over here. The green activists will just shout you down. Their view is so narrow. All they care about is the preservation of nature right here in Norway. They don't get that there is a tradeoff we must all make to save global climate.
When they say "Find another way," that is such a cop out. If I ran an green movement that would be my main thing to push: Make people aware of the simple reality that we cannot do this without hurting some of nature. And if we don't hurt our own nature, then somebody else will have to pay the price. Somebody else will get their nature ruined.
We easily end up in a situation like Calefornia where half the population keeps voting in tax cuts with direct voting while the other half votes in more welfare spending. Hence their deficit balloons. You cannot build systems like that. We must demand some responsibliity. If you increase spending you got to raise taxes, or if you cut taxes, you need to cut spending. Likewise if we are to reduce usage of gas, oil and coal we have to build something that replaces it. And builiding those things will require new factories and mines.
