"smelly hippies" and their evil plot's to remove toxic chemicals from the environment... and they would have got away with it to... if not for all witty name calling on the inq comments thread.

p.s. greenpeace is not chasing the whalers around this year, only sea shepherd are.

"Greenpeace is a large corporate-style lobby group - because in today's world, that's the only way to promote an agenda."

Greenpeace was quickly taken over by rentseekers and liars. Greenpeace doesn't care about the environment.

If Greenpeace cared the least bit about the environment they would advocate nuclear energy, at least to phase out coal.

What they instead advocate is a combination of near-useless wind-turbines and solar panels in conjunction with burning enormous quantities of natural gas in a mix of OCGTs and CCGTs. This policy will delay the coal-phase out almost indefinately and it has the potential to destroy society when the gas runs out and renewables still cannot stand on their own(gas is as scarce as oil).

Greenpeace doesn't care about the enormous quantity of natural resources required for renewables. They do not care about the monstrous land areas involved.

"Government legislation is the only way to enforce environmental standards."

The track record on government legislation is an utter, unmitigated disaster.

The governments all around the world are both massively subsidizing overfishing and claiming to work towards preventing it.

The US government mandates and subsidizes environmental catastrophies like corn-ethanol to reduce gasoline use by a fraction of a percent.

The Kyoto protocol has been a miserable failure.

Cap and trade would reward polluters, contain thousands of pages of loop-holes, exemptions and pork(this is after all the only sane reason for legislation that is thousands of pages long rather than fitting on the back of a napkin). It would delay substantive action(e.g. carbon tax+dividend).

The minimum wage does not raise wages to meet the new, higher level, it causes everyone who is under the minimum wage to become unemployed. The real reason for the minimum wage was to protect high-skilled workers from competition from low-skilled, low paid workers.

The government provides vast subsidizes for meat production. This wastes a huge amount of farm-land, contributes to ill health(people in the west would naturally eat less meat if it wasn't subsidized) and is a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect.

Most so called environmental protection or consumer protection laws do no such thing. They have ulterior motives like stealth protectionism, imposing large fixed costs that do not significantly hurt entrenched companies but strangles small companies in the crib and legitimizing oligopolies(why can't an oil refinery be built in the US? it has nothing to do with the environment, no less oil is consumed it is just refined elsewhere.)

You have a property right in your own body and your own things; you have a right to not have your property significantly polluted. Politicians have abridged this right and prevented legal action for the sake of "progression" and "modernity". It is only recently they have done anything at all to reverse some of the damage they've done.

The US government keeps subsidizing the cancer of suburban sprawl in a myriad of different ways. There are tax deductions, artificially depressed interest rates(easier to borrow), inflation(less worthwile to save unless you save in real things, e.g. a house), countless billions spent on government roads that would otherwise be paid for by their users(making suburban sprawl much less practical), highly restrictive zoning laws in cities that prevent re-development. This is an environmental and humanitarian disaster. If you look at suburbs that have grown up under relatively free market conditions, they are walkable, bicyclable, contain stores, schools and businesses; they are real livable town-like places. Modern US suburbs are desolate hellholes which require a long, painful drive in a car to do anything at all.

"And it's precisely *because* we all have to do this together that Greenpeace is lobbying for legislation."

Legislation that will harm the environment, legislation that will have the government trying(and failing) to pick winners and losers.

Green-piss are evil fucks.

Unleaded fuel has nothing to do with unleaded solder for electronics, you nut job. Making products ROHS compliant, has not only raised the prices of these products higher than what they should be selling for, it HAS made them less reliable. You would know that if you actually had to deal with this crap on a daily basis.
Also, a couple of notes on your LED LCDs.
1) The only good ones are RGB LED direct-lit backlight panels. But these panels start at $1500 ea. just for 24in.
2) Most of your garden variety THIN versions have poor luminance uniformity because they are EDGE lit, which can give them a dark center.
3) LED backlight panels are for the most part 68% gamut panels, not even sRGB 72% of some of your poor quality CCFL panels. This will hold up things a bit in the corporate world adoption of them.
4) Not all LED backlight solutions are as power efficient as their CCFL counterparts as there a lot of factors that play into it. A LOT of marketing fluff there.
5) We are seeing Aging problems with the LED backlights which screw up luminance output along with color temp..
So current products may not look so pretty for as long...just so you know.
All this was done in such a rush to be Green, not everything was thought out. hahaha!
Everything I'm working on and everything I'm seeing is being pushed out based on price. Very little has to do with Quality. Monitor and TVs will spend 2x time and money on ID plastics and how it looks than on how it works or the quality of the components that go into them.
Samsung may be the exception, but just remember, with displays in general...you get what you pay for, period.

Greenpeace is a large corporate-style lobby group - because in today's world, that's the only way to promote an agenda.

Government legislation is the only way to enforce environmental standards.

And it's precisely *because* we all have to do this together that Greenpeace is lobbying for legislation. So if environmentally conscientious people (only an arrogant self-centred prat would call them "eco-loons") have non-best-environmental-practice products in their homes, it merely *strengthens* our right to lobby for broadscale improvement of such products to meet civilised environmentally harmonious standards.

Especially as we see that large corporations *are* able to innovate in this direction. For example, newer LED backed LCD monitors are improving all the time and going to equal and supercede CCFL backed LCD's and plasmas for quality and features very soon - all while consuming less energy during use and fewer hazardous processes during manufacture *and* offering increased resource-recovery during disposal.

Likewise, I think we've all benefited from newer mobile phones which offer reduced power consumption yet greater computational power - it makes the batteries last longer in your pocket or at your ear.

In Japan, they found they have gold in their sewage from discarded electronics - what's the point of losing that?- when they could be recovering and re-using it (after thorough washing, I'm sure).

As for reduced reliability of products - well, I don't find this to be true at ALL. My newer car running unleaded fuel has been a lot better than our old family car which ran on leaced petrol.

And my newer electronics products are sturdier and more reliable too. Maybe budget-priced products have shoddier construction at the entry level, but that's more about driving price down (and obsolesence up) to generate more revenue.

Clean technology is possible, we just need to discover and innovate to find out how - and corporate bosses in their boardrooms in pinstriped suits making massive profits don't have enough connection to the sunshine outside to care about changing the way they do things unless the members of their market come together as a community to make them do it, i.e. by representational government.

And ... that's where the corporations realised they could lobby governments themselves instead of trying to bend to the will of masses of little people. Hence the need for large organised lobby groups like Greenpeace to exist and to act - at every opportunity.

Free licenses to hunt tree huggers.
Hunt a tree hugger save humanity.
Damn stinky ass hippies.

These people have ruined electronics with the RHOS. It saves a little lead, but makes are stuff way less reliable. This way there is way more electronic waste. Dumb.

... that most these eco-loons are not as careful about their own habits and gadgets.

Fiver says .. raid a dozen Eco homes and I bet they have more eco-unfriendly stuff than the rest of us ... they hide a dark n dirty secret (like a vicar and local choir boys) - £5 at 10/1 odds i give.

Ahhhh...you have to love them tree huggers.....