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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

OK. What are some ecologically unimportant places in England? Somewhere I could throw up a nuclear power plant without anyone raising a fuss.

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I think here it's worth distinguishing between actually ecologically important, and the ability of campaigners to raise environmental arguments to try to prevent development when their underlying reason is something else (i.e. not wanting a nuclear plant in their back yard). There are definitely ecologically unimportant places in England, but it's almost certain that if you try to put a power station there somebody will raise an environmental concern anyway. This will probably eventually be dismissed, but you can gum up the works procedurally for a pretty long time.

I mean that's my point, if the campaigners are not willing to be honest about ranking the places they actually care about beforehand (and occasionally letting a project happen), I'm not going to listen to anything they do say.

You started here with "associated with the environmental movement". That's not the same as everyone campaigning on a local issue who puts "environmental issues" into their big list of why some local development shouldn't happen: most of those people aren't associated with the environmental movement at all.

I guess my point is that I think the problem is nimbies, not environmentalists, and since I think we need a faster and cheaper planning system in the UK I think it's important to identify the actual problem. Getting the Campaign to Protect Rural England or whoever to produce a ranking of places by importance does nothing if we still have a system where local residents can raise objections about building on locations at the bottom of the ranking and it takes forever to push something through.

Sure, the environmentalism movement has sufficient independent organizations such that each of them can protest some site as environmentally sensitive while the others stay quiet. I'm sure some would conclude that this position of universally banning any human development everywhere is a pure accident and that distributed agreement to do so has no evidence of systematic coordination.

I can believe there is no systematic coordination across these organizations, but if I had to meet someone in San Francisco and I knew nothing about where and there was no way to coordinate, I think we'd both end up in front of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero.

I think the point here is that there are two categories of "environmentalists", one of actual environmentalists who go out on the weekend and plant shrubs and monitor the Lesser Black-Tailed Whatever, and the other of people who don't want you to build something for other reasons but are willing to claim to be environmentalists to stop you. There's overlap between the groups of individuals, but their organisations are different.

The first group are generally willing to say "hey, here's a map of critical Ramsar-protected coastal wetlands and surroundings, we don't want you to put a pipe anywhere BUT if you really have to then this section is regrowth and was drained in the 60s".

The second group are just obstructing you by any means they can and want to push you to a neighbouring town, who will also obstruct you. They'll switch to heritage listing, archaeology, noise complaints, smell, neighbourhood character, the moral character of your workers, or literally anything they can use to shut you down. They're not going to accommodate you by shifting the pipe slightly left because they're generally motivated by not having a pipe near them at all.

Sure, the John Does who make up Climate Action Now CIO say yes through that instrument and will go over the next Tuesday to No Building Ever CIC to say no through that instrument. There is neither any distinction of any significance to the legal structures they use to block things nor is there any value in saying "I'm not going to block this through Company A; I'm going to use Company B". Whether one uses Blue Eyes White Dragon or Exodia The Forbidden One, one is doing the same thing.

Those people certainly exist, but so do actual environmentalists.

As a matter of politics, prevalence matters more than existence. And since the actual environmentalists nonetheless act as rearguard for the others, the distinction is faint.

What do you mean "the distinction is faint"? The distinction is clear and obvious: does this thing have actual ecological value, and does this group suggest viable alternatives?

I mean "since the actual environmentalists nonetheless act as rearguard for the others, the distinction is faint". i.e. it's not interesting to me that person A wears mask M1 and suggests viable alternatives and then puts on mask M2 and opposes them. If they extend this to a system where A wears M1 to suggest alternatives S1 and oppose S2 and B wears M2 to oppose S1 and suggest S2 that doesn't change my evaluation of them.

The fact that A is part of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Environmentalists and B is part of the Environmentalist Church of Latter Day Fundamentalists and that these are entirely different organizations with entirely different objectives does not change the fact that they arrive at the same Schelling point consistently as a co-ordinated multi-prong action.

There is no distinction to me between such players and a single person playing both roles. It's a pretty standard organizational Sybil attack constrained by the number of times they have to visit Companies House. Though I suppose if you are eager to distinguish between them, then that's the point where we must drop the discussion.

If I'm reading you right, you're suggesting that if person A and person B have different proposals that inconvenience you in vaguely similar ways, you believe they are functionally identical people, even if they're fighting each other too.

This seems nuts to me! It's a very conspiratorial way of seeing the world. It seems like it would take a huge amount of coordination for persons A and B to fake their own conflicts.

Slough

Swindon? They do have the magic roundabout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn't fit for humans now

City of London? Does it have much ecology left? Then again I suppose too many people would raise a fuss...

Birmingham?

Can you be more precise? Like an actual area on the map. Because when I look at England's map of greenbelt areas [1] literally everything around Birmingham is protected.

[1] https://www.cpre.org.uk/interactive-map-of-englands-green-be...

I think they were joking. In a literal sense, cities require green spaces for water management. Otherwise you end up like Chicago where they paved everything and flood constantly.

I mean, not really, right? Permeability would help, but the first and second principal components of our flooding situation are the fact that we're built on a flat swamp, so water has no natural place to go, and we're built around an undersized combined sewer system that would be dazzlingly expensive to replace.

Green belt areas mostly are not markers of ecologically important areas. They're a planning tool that largely exists to prevent urban sprawl. A lot of the green belt area is unremarkable commercial agricultural land.

Once you crush the red and blue pills and snort them you can't unsee the environmental damage of agriculture.

Anywhere in London would be good. There's nothing else worthwhile there.

Salford

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