Cycloptichorn wrote:[
When energy companies are biased, it leads to their own personal profit.
When those after environmental cleanliness are biased, it leads to profit for every single person on the planet.
I can readily understand (and forecast) the motives of a corporation interested in advancing or protecting its own economic welfare. The motives of advocacy groups of all kinds, particularly including environmental groups are often much harder to divine.
A great leap of faith is required to assume that the 'biases' of environmental groups will nesessarily benefit all of mankind. There are clear winners and losers in this game, and a good deal of 'environmental advocacy' is merely a mask for other less laudable motives. (Did you ever wonder why the San Francisco Metrorail system, BART, was never extended to Marin County or Palo Alto?).
The Sierra Club, through a stubborn and very clever campaign of legal intervention, prevented the dredging and deepening of the port of Oakland for almost twenty years because of the supposed effects of the PCB and metal contaminated sediments there. (the planned dumping site was a 7000' deep former Navy weapons dumping area 20 miles offshore.) Oakland had huge advantages as a port because (1) the great circle distance from Japan & South Asia is a good deal less, and (2) it already had ample pier and cargo staging space as well as direct rail access to all three rail lines -- both significant advantages over Los Angeles. During that 20 year delay Los Angeles invested $3.5 billion dollars in a series of huge construction projects to create a similarly efficient artificial port to capture the trade in new deep-draft container ships, reducing Oakland's market share from over 50 % to less than 15%. Now that the infrastructure is there, most ships continue to sail the greater distance to Los Angeles - even though they burn more fuel in getting there.
After the game was lost, the Sierra Club settled its lawsuits, agreeing to place the supposedly "dangerous" dredge spoils in new artificial wetlands in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay. (The 'contamination' levels in the spoils were only about 25% higher that the average levels throughout the Bay, hardly significant at all).
About four years ago the Environmental Protection Agency in a much publicized action ruled to compel the General Electric Company to dredge major sections of the Hudson River to remove PCB contaminated sediments that were the result of prior GE use of PCBs in fire-resistent oils for transformers and other like devices. (At the time Federal safety regulations REQUIRED the use of these fire resistent oils). The attendant controversy focused on the facts that (1) the removal action (dredging) would actually raise the average PCB levels in the river for the next 40 or so years, and (2) that the PCB levels were naturally decreasing due to a combination of chemical breakdown and gradual leeching into the flowing river. The ecological risk assessment established that (1) the human health risk from the PCBs in the river was negligable (a risk equivalent to that of eating two pieces of toast per week), and (2) the multi billion dollar cleanup program wouldn't significantly reduce the risk anyway.
Despite these arguments the EPA ruled that the cleanup must proceed. An interesting part of the Superfund Law is that EPA is empowered to levy fines attendant to these decisions, fines that are used by the Agency to fund its own operations. Guess what - most of the bureaucrats involved in the decision making occupied positions that were paid for by these very fines. Somehow I don't think that their interests were identical to those of all mankind.
Venality, greed and the desire for power are human conditions. They are not confined to corporations.
Sometimes Spendy I do believe you have a sense of humour. 
