Raised Voices

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We don't have a say in how they exploit the planet, we don't have say in how it's done. And if we did I think things would happen in a very different way. But there is this attitude that basically we've got to find a way to make these corporate entities nice. Some of these people that are running these companies are probably very nice people. But it's not because they are nasty that they do these horrific things to the environment, it's because it is highly profitable. And they get subsidised by you and I to actually make that profit. It's called development. That's what the name of the game is. I think we have to be really hard to say look let's look at why this is happening and it's happening because it is a profitable enterprise for people to exploit natural resources. I think a good example of the kind of contradictions people get into is this whole debate about carbon trading. It's absurd. Imagine if you said well okay this year New York only had X number of murders and in Nairobi they had Y number of murders. So Nairobi has under-killed this year so it can sell off how many people can be killed somewhere else. I mean it's absurd. It's not a system we can accept and I think some really hard talking needs to be done about this.

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Hi I am Les. I live nearby the Grangemouth refinery so I live close to the petro-chemical industry. I've been an environmentalist for a few years now. And although I can say that yes I am genuinely concerned about the climate change issue, I'm even more concerned by the way that environmental groups and non -governmental organisations have become focused on it to such an extent that they don't really talk about anything else. I've noticed that if there's ever a problem it immediately becomes associated with climate change. As a sign of climate change. For instance if there's a flooding, that's put down to climate change resulting in extra rain. It's not attributed to bad flood management practices. I find it's difficult to have any decent debate on general environmental problems like habitat destruction, because there's so much focus put on climate change issues. Saying that “we've got to get climate change under control otherwise habitat conservation is a useless exercise