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There are also environmentalists who, though well meaning, waste their time on, and divert public concern to, trivial 'problems'. They could be more productive by looking elsewhere.
You might think that any environmentalism has to be a good thing, but the problem is that money spent on the environment must be spent wisely, not frivolously. Tax payer's money wasted on poorly conceived 'environmental' projects will, in the end, be detrimental to the whole environmental movement.
I suspect that there is a feeling among environmentalists that we should not criticise anything environmental because it is better to present a united front. I would hold, however, that we should criticize false, hypocritical, 'red herring' environmentalists, and that we have a responsibility to make sure that time, effort and money dedicated to the environment is wisely and carefully used.
Protecting the whales:
Japan is pressing for sustainable whaling while the
Rudd Australian government has been
vocal in its criticism.
Both countries are pressuring small states, such as
the Solomon Islands, to vote on their side on the whaling issue.
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So long as both use material that would otherwise be wasted, they are probably 'a good thing', however, if and when it comes to dedicating crop land to bio-fuel crops there is a big problem. That land that is brought into production for fuel is land that no longer produces food crops. The question arises, should land be used to run cars or to feed hungry people?
George Monbiot has an excellent article on
this subject
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The proposed dump site has been carefully chosen and once buried the waste will be unlikely to cause any significant radiation risk to anyone or anything. There is, of course, some slight risk of spillage when the waste is transported, but we should remember that much of the radioactive material is being transported around Australia before it becomes waste, and problems have been very few.
Any additional radiation that anyone receives due to this dump will be, I would think, less than that they would get from moving house to a place with an altitude a couple of hundred of metres higher, and that would apply only to those very few people who live close to the dump.
(The cosmic ray component of natural background radiation increases with altitude.) Who worries about the greater level of radiation that they will receive if they move to a place with a slightly higher altitude? The same applies to granitic areas; who worries about radiation if they move to an area where there are granitic rocks?
Update 2019/11/17; I have written a page dedicated to this subject.
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The two most recent South Australian Governments have refused to take the obvious action and cull the koalas; it's not politically desirable. A relatively large sum of money has been spent on capturing and sterilizing a number of the female koalas. Not surprisingly it has failed to decrease koala numbers on Kangaroo Island; money down the drain.
Sometimes it is necessary to take the hard, but right, decision.
The Government has placed solar panels on the state museum and art gallery, Parliament House in Adelaide and is well into a Solar Schools project in which schools get a photovoltaic system of 1 to 1.5 kW. (They have also given a million dollars of tax payers' money for solar panels on Adelaide Airport.)
Considering the very large capital cost of solar photovoltaic panels, and the fact that Adelaide has more cloud cover than most other parts of South Australia, can this really be justified? Couldn't the money be spent on the environment, but spent better?
Changing the laws to encourage the construction of wind farms or building much needed electricity transmission lines to areas with good wind resources could result in adding anything up to 2000MW to the sustainable electricity capacity of the state; this is thousands of times the amount of electricity that will be generated by Rann's photovoltaic panels on public buildings. I would think that increasing the grant for installation of solar water heaters would also be a more productive way of spending the same money. Solar water heaters are very cost-effective. Investment in a solar water heater in South Australia will certainly pay off in the long term, the economics of solar photovoltaic systems are much more questionable.
Peacock notes that capital costs per installed kilowatt of the Museum and Art Gallery 'power stations' was $10 000 compared to around $1500/kW for wind power. No doubt Premier Rann has publicity in mind, but is it justifiable publicity for sustainable power, or unjustifiable publicity for the Rann Government?
Premier Rann has also added mini wind turbines to public building to try and improve his government's greenhouse image at minimal cost. I have written about this at greater length in Failings of SA governments.
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I suspect that uranium is an emotive issue at any time, and 'pumping acid into the ground', to a layman, seems risky. I have no doubt that environmentalists could use their time more productively elsewhere.
This is one example of a worrying trend. It is cheaper to commission a study than to attack the problem.