Global NIMBYism

I have a post up on Worldchanging about the opportunity posed by the otherwise silly U.S. debate about offshore drilling. The post was inspired by a random experience in Malaysia a few years ago.

An excerpt:

For years, far too much of environmentalism has been rooted in old-fashioned "not in my backyard" arguments known as NIMBY-ism. It worked when the issues were simply protecting a local park from a new roadway. In a globalized world, with raw resources, goods and services openly traded from Anchorage, Alaska to Zanzibar; from Addis Ababa to Zephyr, North Carolina—with resource extraction and pollution causing global environmental crises (from climate change to transboundary air pollution to global fisheries depletion), we need to think beyond our backyards, and beyond our coasts.