ABSTRACT
In autumn 2006, the national power company of Iceland blocked two glacial rivers near the mountain of Kárahnjúkar in order to ood a wilderness area of 22 square miles and create a reservoir that would supply power for a new aluminum smelting facility built by the American company, Alcoa. The hydroelectric dam, the tallest of its kind in Europe, was expected to generate 4600 GWh of electricity each year, and the smelter had the capacity to process 344,000 metric tons of aluminum annually. In addition to the 400 jobs the project was expected to provide, Alcoa also claimed that theirs would be the safest, most environment-friendly smelter on Earth. Some Icelanders contested this assertion, however, by pointing out the 45 miles of tunnels, 31 miles of high-tension power lines, and the sulfur dioxide fumes associated with
5.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 105 5.2 Development of Modern Environmentalism ................................................ 107 5.3 Green Chemistry as an Ethic ........................................................................ 108
5.3.1 Normative Nature of Green Chemistry ............................................ 108 5.3.2 Ethical Assumptions of Green Chemistry ........................................ 109 5.3.3 Potential Objections to the Ethics of Green Chemistry.................... 112
5.4 Thrifty Chemistry ......................................................................................... 115 5.4.1 Green Chemistry as the Application of Thrift ................................. 115 5.4.2 Characteristics Green Chemistry and Thrift have in Common ....... 116 5.4.3 An Illustrative Case Study ................................................................ 119
5.5 Green Chemistry and Our Moral Obligations .............................................. 120 5.5.1 Moral Obligations to Our Successors in Future Generations ........... 120 5.5.2 Moral Obligations to Our Less Af uent Contemporaries ................ 121 5.5.3 Moral Obligations to Ourselves ........................................................ 122 5.5.4 Moral Obligations to Our Predecessors ............................................ 123
5.6 Conclusions ...................................................................................................124 References ..............................................................................................................124
the smelter. To the protestors, the present-day costs to the environment were not worth the uncertain promise of future prosperity (del Guidice, 2007). In other words, this debate in Iceland was largely cast as an either-or con ict between the economy and the environment, which follows the same template that many debates about public policy on environmental issues follow.
