You don’t want to walk, youwant to drive, you still want to have your Mobile devices, Computers, watch yoursmart TV, use your tablets, and every other electronic device and appliance knownto man. Each andeveryone of these devices you own, or use, contains a chip made from rare earthelements, the same ingredients you are irrationally protesting about? Not to mention, wind turbines, and Solarpanels.
Some People call you Environmentalactivists, others call you nuts. You are filled with a deep-rooted desire to dogood, to save the world from imminent destruction, and to preach the ecological gospel to anybody (un)willing to hear it, you wield a surprising amount of influence — in the media if not in the halls of power. You get a lot of cred and admiration for your efforts, but perhaps you shouldn’t.
Mostpeople agree with your creed: humans greatly impact our environment, perhaps tothe detriment of fundamental ecological systems, and we ought to reduce that.Few of us accept your unrelenting extremism and unwillingness to accepttrade-offs. What bothers the opponents of environmental activism isnot the environmentally conscious goals or even facts presented, but theactivists’ blatant hypocrisy and aura of sanctimonious religiosity.
Inyour activists’ eyes, every action is classified as “good” or “bad” if it haseasy-to-understand first-order environmental benefits or harms: recyclingplastic is good, littering is bad; planting trees is good, one-use takeawaybags are bad; heating your house with “renewable energy” is good, burning gasoline is bad; etc.
Thetrouble begins when your individually good actions are coupled with bad ones.What if I drove my gasoline-gobbling car to the tree-planting site? What if recycled plastic, as in the U.S., ends up in the same landfill as the other trash, neutralizing my “good” efforts? What if I discard (or lose) my sustainable metal straws before I’ve used them enough times for the CO2 emissions to break even compared to single-use plastic?
The inability to see these chains of decisions is a qualifyingcriterion for becoming an environmental activist. Forthe rest of us, it is too much to stomach a sermon about the essential virtueof reducing one’s climate impact while knowing that you the preacher, in otherdomains of your life, completely negates the minor climate benefit of whateveraction you implore us to take. The hypocrisy is real. Look at our own Schmuck Former Secretary of State John Kerry!!!
Icame across the writings of MikeMunger’s on recycling, it is a splendid example, concluding that for most commodities, recycling is a religious ritual, done forfeel-good reasons rather than actual impact. Stories like these show thecognitive dissonance of do-gooders: what the environment is, and what exactly we’re saving it from), it is the sum of our impacts that matters. If we do enough “bad” in some part of our lives, we shouldn’t applaud ourselves for doing some “good” elsewhere, especially if the impact of the bad completely dwarfs the impact of the good.
Eventhe celebrated wonderchild St. Greta falls prey to this. In pledging not to flybecause of aviation’s outrageously large emissions (per-person emissions, mindyou, not in aggregate, where aviation only accounts for 3 percent of globalemissions), she famously took a high-tech wind-powered sailing boat across the Atlantic to speak before the UN. The only trouble was that she outsourced the flying emissions to the boat’s crew, several of whom flew back across theAtlantic after delivering St. Greta to the UN’s doorsteps, where she continued to lambast the world’s emitters of climate gases. The totalemissions of Greta’s highly politicized non-carbon journey were, in otherwords, much higher than had she simply bought a standard plane ticket.Let’sface it people, St. Greta is a nut.
Internationaltravel, too, is cherished by the very people whose ideals should preclude themfrom visiting places much further away than their neighboring villages. In awholly representative picture of the righteous environmentalist traveler, Irecently met a vegan girl who carried her own non-plastic straw, tablet-formattoothpaste, and wooden toothbrush so that she could avoid the horrors of plastic. The irony had not dawned on her that hermicroscopic climate impact from these efforts was completely swamped by theemissions needed to make possible her five-week vacation across the Atlantic.figure bymore than one-third — or an entire year’s worth of CO2 emissions for the averageperson in Botswana. In comparison, eating a plant-based diet saves about 0.8tons of carbon-equivalent emissions a year according to the Guardian’s rundown. carbonlife-cycle-analysis figure for plastic, and presuming that mytravel companion’s toys used no resources, her annual climate savings likelyamounted to about 800 grams (minus the energy andresource cost going into her toys). Had she stayed home; she could have safelyconsumed plastic as usual for something like 4,000 years before reaching heremissions from this one round-trip flight. Put differently, it takes about4,000 years for her reduced plastic use to pay off the climate damage of herfive-week Caribbean adventure (or much more if we take into account the energyuse and resources going into producing new toothbrushes and straws when theywear out and/or need cleaning).
Inanother instance of this extraordinary doublethink, I had a neighbor thatdefended her twice-a-year trip across the Atlantic, Los Angeles to London, withsome serious mental accounting. Sinceshe would have studied abroad in this phase of her life regardless, theemissions were a sunk cost, as if the environmental damage caused by herbehavior were somehow mitigated by her rationalization. Like the vegan travelerabove, the meager attempts of biking, reducing plastic use, and eatingplant-based foods were entirely swamped by her frequent air travels.
Withenvironmental activists, we can do this all day. A German friend of mineworking for DHL, a partly government-owned postal and delivery service, frequently observes criticism about the company’s CO2 footprint — ignoring, of course, that had their customers individually driven to brick-and-mortar stores instead of making their purchases online, the amount of emissions would most likely have been much higher.
Duringturtle hatching season, volunteers with the ASVO marine preservation organization in Montezuma, Costa Rica, eagerly helped 50 or so newborn turtles into the Pacific. Almost literally rolling out a red carpet — raking the sand to even it out — for these apparently endangered turtles, a handful of mostly European volunteers (who traveled by emissionproducing airplanes) and a few dozen foreign spectatorsenjoyed the wonders of seeing these adorable creatures crawl toward their firstswim.
Themoment the first turtle reached the alluring waters of the sunset-coloredwaves, a bird of prey swooped down and ate it. So muchfor a helping human hand: evolution 1; environmentalist do-gooder 0. Theartificial concentration of turtles had created a feeding frenzy for predators.The first of many, it seems, as something like only one in every thousandturtles will avoid predators and reach adulthood.
Aninfo brochure from Tambor Bay Turtles proudly states that they have released over 15,000 turtle hatchlings over the last three years. Countless human work hours, eagerly provided by Western environmentalist activists, were spent in ensuring — at best — a permanent increase of the world’s adult turtle population by around 15 animals. Allthat, purchased with some exorbitant number of flights across the Gulf of Mexicoand Atlantic Ocean.
I don’t know what the biodiversity benefit is from 15 extraadult turtles, but I imagine that it’s less than the damage from even a singleflight across the Atlantic. Safe to say, if these activists truly cared aboutthe environment as they claim, they would refrain from these sorts ofsanctimonious activities. But they don’t. And they feel good about themselvesand require praise from their peers.
Whatangers most people about you so called climate activists is not your goals, but your elaborate system of doublethink, your profound cognitive dissonance, and the truly fascinating ability to rationalize your own behavior; you ignore your own seriously harmful actions while praising yourselves for the meager and largely inconsequential benefits of your climate activism.
You view yourselves as part of the solution. Perhaps you should reconsider.
GGG ML will be granted! IMO
Stay Strong,
In REE VERITAS
