Persistence of Vision

Writing at FOXNews.com, junk science expert Steven Milloy has praise for MPI film Mine Your Own Business--and a few words to the wise about just how far environmental activists are willing to go in their attempts to prevent Third World development:

If anything, “Mine Your Own Business” only scratches the surface of the problem; the film depicts but a microcosm of the tyranny exercised by NGOs over the developing world.

NGOs, for example, have recently acquired the ability to veto third-world development through their influence over first-world banks.

Many banks have signed on to the environmentalist-promoted Equator Principles, which ostensibly are guidelines to ensure that third-world development projects occur in an “eco-friendly” manner. In practice, however, the Equator Principles, serve more as a means for NGOs to stop most economic development projects.

Banking giant Citigroup, for example, has implemented the Equator Principles, much to the detriment of the developing world. According to a 2005 Citigroup report, the bank denied financing to 54 of the 74 projects reviewed according to the Equator Principles – projects worth as much as $75 billion in financing and that are economically sound.

Not only do the Equator Principles deny first-world funding to developing nations, they also drive desperately poor nations to seek financing from alternative (and less desirable) sources like China – which is not known to apply first-world environmental standards to the projects it finances.

In another example, NGOs stopped what would have been the largest-ever sustainable forestry project in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. The Washington state-based timber company Trillium Corporation purchased 800,000 acres in Chile and Argentina in 1993. Although Trillium could have clear-cut the forest at the time, it instead tried to work with NGOs to develop its sustainable forestry project of which it was rightfully proud.

The NGOs spent the next nine years blocking the project. One of Trillium’s key lenders fell into financial difficulty and had to auction the loans that were secured by Trillium’s land, allowing Goldman Sachs to swoop in and buy the notes, foreclose Trillium’s mortgage and then donate the land to the Wildlife Conservation Society – a controversial use of shareholder assets that has been criticized by myself and others.

Needless to say, the Tierra del Fuego land won’t be developed, Chileans won’t be employed and the world was deprived of a much needed example of the ever-elusive “sustainable development.”

Though I have looked, I have yet to find a significant development project anywhere in the world that environmentalists and their NGO allies support as “sustainable.” “Mine Your Own Business” is a terrific effort at documenting that fact.