[Itse]

While I'm theoretically for carefully taking everything into account when building large projects, in practise the process of claims and counterclaims have made many types of investments virtually impossible (due to all the added expenses)... at least impossible if done in a completely transparent and legal way.

There are a whole bunch of people who will always complain about any project on some grounds. They are very good at finding some legitimate sounding grounds to do that, because, well, no project is perfect and you can always find something that sounds like a reasonable thing to study and analyze. But of course mostly it's just a lot of hot air.

It's a typical case where a good idea (the public complaints process) has been turned into a mockery of it's original intent (common good), to the point that limiting people's possibilities (to file claims) is I think an inevitable outcome. At which point of course completely valid (environmental) concerns will be more ignored more often, not less.

If this was a single incident, I would be more inclined to take these people at their word that hey, maybe there is a concern. But I've just heard too many of these stories.

The other side of the matter is, yeah, very propably a large project in the middle of desert will affect some desert wildlife in a negative way. Can't be helped. Build anything anywhere, stuff like that will happen.

Also, you can't study everything. If there are legitimate concerns, they should do their own studies and then argue their case. But the catch is, that's a much faster process. Very typically the aim isn't really to raise concern and have additional info taken into account, the aim is (in basicly every case I've run into) to do anything to stop the project, regardless of possible court rulings, democratic decision processes, administrative processes and basicly any method of decision making that are legitimate parts of a democratic society.

(EDIT: I hope this made sense, it's kind of hard to discuss stuff like this in a foreign language and trying to use words that make sense in a foreign country.)