On Justice Movements: Why They Fail the Environment and the Poor
... Demands for climate justice too often ignore basic practicalities of energy, poverty, and climate change, directing our gaze away from the issues that really matter to the future prospects of both the global poor and the planet and toward issues that don’t.

Huge swaths of the world have been developing over the last three decades at an unprecedented pace and scale. That remarkable transformation has come not from the forced redistribution of global wealth or renewable energy but instead from the rapid growth of the global economy fueled by cheap fossil energy. China, India, and Brazil have become the manufacturers, farmers, and phone centers to the world, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the process.

Contemporary demands for climate justice have been, at best, indifferent to these rather remarkable developments and, at worst, openly hostile. Some activists reject development and modernization altogether, lauding poor indigenous communities for living a simpler, more virtuous life in a closer relationship with nature. Others almost unavoidably find themselves reinventing archaic international socialist tropes in the name of sustainability.

Neither posture offers much succor to the global poor. While our inclination to slap the label “justice” on any problem that affects rich and poor differently offers tempting rhetorical possibilities, it is not clear that transforming issues of equity (defined as a desire to lessen economic and other disparities between rich and poor) into issues of justice (understood as a demand for retribution and reparations) does much for constituencies in desperate need of economic development and affordable energy....

Larson on the UN’s Agenda 21 and ‘reclaiming the Earth from humanity’ [VIDEO]
...Larson is a resident of the Pacific Northwest, where logging has always been a vital part of the local economy. He criticized the implementation of Agenda 21 — the non-binding action plan put together by the United Nations regarding sustainable development.

“Local governments in the Pacific Northwest where I live will say. ‘We need to buy these lands and preserve them.’ In many cases they are telling the public ‘We need hundreds of millions of dollars … to buy land, that is then going to be maintained at your expense, and owned by you, but you won’t be allowed on it, not even to take a walk with your dog or to look at the birds.’ It is literally denied to people. Because ‘we need to follow the UN’s agenda for reclaiming the Earth from humanity.’”...