May 21, 2007

BBC : Greens are Stupid....

Via Instapundit
The BBC reports on how overreach pushed the Japanese away from the negotiating table on the whaling ban.

Reagan agreed not to precipitously eliminate Japanese fishing rights in US waters...which because of the myriad of small islands still under our protection at the time was a huge swath of the Pacific.

This would reduce the hardship upon the Japanese fishing fleet associated with the ban of whaling.

.......Again, it seemed that an end to Japanese whaling was in sight. However, the court action continued, the NGOs claiming the administration had no right to make a deal with Japan.

Eventually, in June 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the administration. The deal, apparently, was sealed; in return for keeping its fishing nets full, Japan would hang up its harpoons for good.

The next month, Japan formally withdrew its objection to the whaling moratorium....

Of course the greens then did an end run around this,  making short term common cause with US fishermen, they managed, in a series of court battles, to get the Japanese barred from all US controlled territory...a huge swath of the Pacific.

  This was both an affront to, and an utter betrayal of the Japanese...so it is not entirely surprising they reneged on the whaling agreement. It was the only weapon they had.

   The greens seem,  by and large,  to not be interested in win/win solutions or compromise. Their environmentalism is their religion, those who disagree with them are infidels, and those who council reason and compromise are their heretics...all must be destroyed...or at the least degraded and humiliated.... It seems they can countenance no face saving or non degrading option for those they oppose (who are beneath contempt in their eyes).

I see this attitude in school a lot,  (and, in some ways, even civil society) this is not surprising.Some years ago, I  (an undeclared undergraduate) was explaining to a grad student at school the potential that thermal depolymerization had for waste disposal and energy independence and that buzzword of the 2000s...carbon neutrality. The person in question knew the basics and was very enthusiastic...until...he found out that this did not mean that the oil companies would be put out of business...in fact since the biofuel  product was chemically similar to petroleum they could, in theory, adapt their existing physical plant in some cases to refining biofuel...

This was a terrible heartbreaking disappointment to the guy, who was even more horrified that a Thermal Depolymerization plant had gotten a grant from the Bush administration for basic research.

It was much more important that the oil companies be hurt...be destroyed...have those who worked for the unclean tainted companied cast out....this precipitated a rather scary rant in which he renounced the technology as a "trick" and condemned what he had earlier been quite enthusiastic about...he had had a grasp of how it worked, but the potential for NOT PUTTING THE PEOPLE HE DIDN'T LIKE OUT OF JOBS delegitamised it for him.

Now in fairness this is college and as such well insulated from the realities of day to day life NGOs are in theory (very tenuous. unsupported theory) supposed to be adults who interact outside academia.

They are not of course and in  turning this black and white religiosity into policy proposals they are counterproductive in the extreme.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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