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Comment by pm215 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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