Shifting the Boundaries of the Acceptable
By Loomis, in reference to a post at the NYT’s green blog:
After taking Bank of American executives on a helicopter tour of mountaintop removal sites, the NRDC convinced the bank to stop funding such projects. In an atmosphere where Bush is implementing all sorts of new rules allowing for mountaintop removal to expand and dump its soils into rivers and creeks around southern Appalachia, new, aggressive strategies are necessary. This is such a reprehensible practice and the only way it survives is because nobody sees the incredible damage to the landscape it causes. If you can take away the funding for these projects by exposing people in power to these hellish operations, you can go a long ways toward putting a stop to it.
On a slightly different topic, it’s nice to see that the anti-transit ideologues in the Bush administration can no longer strike fear into the hearts of men, thus allowing the Silver Line to go forward:
State and airport officials have been careful to temper their enthusiasm about the project’s chances for approval because it came so close to extinction early in the year. Their caution also reflects the widely held view that politics and ideology played a role in the project’s problems within the Federal Transit Administration and the Department of Transportation. Leaders in Virginia have sought to avoid alienating administration officials who didn’t believe in the value of such an enormous public investment in transit… Moran said the national credit crisis probably helped the project’s chances, because it “dried up” interest among private purchasers who had been eyeing the toll road. “But more importantly,” he said, “the ideologues in the administration have given up.”