And, every time, the objections drive up costs and delay results.

and many people are realizing that the environment should be considered over costs and deadlines

Until the frivolous complaints get them an image of obstructionism and people start to ignore them. Boy who cried wolf, after all.

sure it's possible both the public and the government officials making the decisions might get alarm fatigue but from what we are seeing, more and more people are caring about environmental impact (even when it comes to electric cars) and think that we aren't doing enough to prevent it. The scrutiny of all major construction projects will probably only continue to increase as public perception continues to shift.

> more and more people are caring about environmental impact

1) It's hard to avoid the suspicion that ever more of those people are only performatively "caring" about environmental impacts; and

2) I'm getting ever more certain that quite a lot of those people who "are caring" lack enough information to care about environmental impact in a sensible way. If you're ill-informed enough, you will naively advocate "solutions" that are worse for the environment than what you're protesting against.

Are we considering the environment when we delay the mass production of environmentally friendlier electric cars?

I don't think it's fair to compare the specific, fairly measurable consequences of not fully considering how to "prevent highly poisonous gas from escaping from the factory" vs. the more vague and complex environmental impact of a delay in car production.

But lets put that aside and let me ask you this:

What amount of delay would you be ok with in addressing environmental concerns?

As little delay as reasonably possible.

"reasonable" is pretty much meaningless. How do you determine what is "reasonable"? Who determines that?

So does not destroying the environment.

Sometimes, we do not want to keep costs and delays down.

"The boy who cried wolf." They need to be more selective if they want to be taken seriously. Maybe this one is serious, but how are we to know if they fight everything?

We are not the ones reading these petitions, so it’s arguably irrelevant what we think about them. I suspect many environmental groups do limit themselves to reasonable exceptions, but when any group can do something some will object to everything.

As such it’s not about environmental groups doing this but rather specific groups.

> As such it’s not about environmental groups doing this but rather specific groups.

After a while, you get to the point where it's up to the "environmental groups" to police themselves: If The Reasonably Lush Greens don't want all environmental concerns to be written off as Luddite obscurantism, then The Reasonably Lush Greens should regularly put out press releases like "One-in-a-trillion Risk Of Poison Gas Discharge, While Technically Existant, Is Negligible -- The Fanatical Neon Greens Are Spreading BS".

Really, honestly. Until they can do that, I'm not going to take either seriously. Why should anyone? Isn't that like accepting some rather-ultra-right movement because "But hey, they're not actually advocating gassing all the Jews... They just refuse to condemn the ones who DO advocate it." ?

Except these aren’t meaningless issues, any construction has negative environmental impacts they just not have negative impacts in everything.

Group A wants to protect wetlands, group B wants to protect deserts. Collectively their going to object to more projects than they do individually. It’s not group A’s job to police group B, and they are definitely not talking to you.

> Except these aren’t meaningless issues

Has anyone said they are, or are you just tilting at windmills?

> It’s not group A’s job to police group B

At the moment, that is (obviously, judging from your comment) how most people see it. What I'm saying is it should be their job.

> and they are definitely not talking to you.

Oh? Funny, here I thought groups with a political agenda are actually talking to everybody, in an effort to get wide-spread support for their agenda (environmental or whatever it may be). And if they're not talking to me, then whom are they talking to? If not me, as one of the general electorate, then apparently not to anybody else in that general group either, but only to some rarefied few? The particular "stakeholders" in each particular issue, perhaps? Then WTF is the use of making their letter to those administrators an "open" letter, for everyone else to see?

But OK, great, if they're not talking to us, the great unwashed public, then we are of course free to ignore whatever they have to say. It's not us they're talking to, after all. (Are you quite sure you had thought that through all the way to its logical conclusion, and that you're speaking for them all in this?)

It’s not that they are ignoring you because they don’t care. Talking to the general public is expensive, only some groups have funding for meaningful outreach.

Filling out some paperwork is dramatically less expensive, thus individual groups allocate their funds based on their objectives. And of course anyone can call themselves an environmental group, many of them care more about NIMBY than the environment.

Honestly, I simply view this as a free speech issue. Anyone can object to anything for any reason and that’s OK. It’s only going to be obstructionist when they have a point.

> I simply view this as a free speech issue. Anyone can object to anything for any reason and that’s OK.

As long as they do so by just generally exercising their free speech, sure. I got the impression the problem with the German Greens is that they go beyond this.

> It’s only going to be obstructionist when they have a point.

No, it's far more obstructionist when they don't have a point, and still protest not only in a general participating-in-the-debate fashion but by lodging formal complaints in various municipal and regional environmental-protection processes, over shit they know (or should have known) is irrelevant / insignificant / impossible. "Gumming up the works" for no real reason. And that's the impression I got from comments up-threads of what (at least many of) the German Greens are doing.