Setting Environment Variables in Mountain Lion

Putting this here mostly so I can find it in the future. 

I had to set some environment variables so that I could use my development environment on my MacBook Air to upload files to my Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) account via the paperclip gem. 

Most of the directions I found said that I needed to set the variables by adding "export VARIABLE=value" or "setenv VARIABLE value" to the .bash_profile. These suggestions didn't work for me of course. 

Finally found the answer on Stack Exchange thanks to help from Scott. I had to edit the /etc/launchd.conf file to add "setenv VARIABLE value".